PHOENIX, Arizona - The National Football League is working on staging its first regular-season game outside the United States in Mexico City on October 2.
The American football league would shift a home game of the Arizona Cardinals against the San Francisco 49ers to Mexico City's 100,000-seat Aztec Stadium under a proposal in the works.
"We think playing a game in Mexico City would be a great opportunity for us to continue to cultivate our Hispanic fan base as well as develop new fans," said Michael Bidwill, the Cardinals vice president and general counsel.
NFL officials also said London was considered as a regular-season NFL host.
The league will stage another pre-season exhibition game outside the United States on August 6 when Atlanta and Indianapolis meet at Tokyo.
The thinking behind moving an early season game was that Arizona, which barely fills half a stadium for most games, would be less likely to mind missing a game in the desert heat.
The Cardinals and 49ers attracted only 35,000 spectators last December to Sun Devil Stadium. Exhibitions in Mexico City have averaged crowds of about 100,000.
"The idea would be if we take away an early game, one of the hotter games, that it would be an ideal situation," Bidwell said.
The NFL schedule is typically released in early April. The Cardinals are two months late in releasing ticket information for next season, a hint the package might be shy by a game.
While the move is not final, it would allow the NFL to take advantage of global interest in an American-based sport. Other US sports leagues have already blazed the trail by staging regular-season games in other nations.
The National Basketball Association began in 1990 with Utah and Phoenix playing two games in Japan and the league has returned several times since.
The National Hockey League followed in 1997 when Vancouver and Anaheim began the season with two games in Japan, an appetizer before the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics featured NHL "Dream Teams" for the first time.
Major League Baseball played a three-game series between the San Diego Padres and New York Mets in August, 1996, at Monterrey, Mexico, and the Montreal Expos played some home games the past two years in Puerto Rico.
Mexico City has hosted six NFL pre-season games and figures to be a prime candidate should the NFL ever decide to locate teams internationally.
The league has pushed for global growth of the sport with NFL Europe, a six-team development circuit with five German-based clubs and Amsterdam. NFL Europe has dropped teams in recent years in London, Scotland and Barcelona.
03/15/2005 20:12 GMT