Hundreds of thousands of people will watch American football in Germany this year. But not the two games of the National Football League (NFL), the American professional league, which will take place in Frankfurt in November, but those of the European league, the European League of Football (ELF). Stuttgart Surge, Rhein Fire, Hamburg Sea Devils or Frankfurt Galaxy are the names of the teams and not Kansas City Chiefs or New England Patriots, and yet these teams are attracting more and more German football fans into the stadiums and in front of the TV screens.

Jan Ehrhardt

Sports editor.

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This weekend, the fledgling league, which was founded only about two and a half years ago by TV pundit Patrick Esume and business partner Zeljko Karajica, is now facing a daring experiment: it will host a season game in Hamburg's 57,000-seat Volksparkstadion. Where the second division football club Hamburger SV usually plays its home games. Normally, between 3000,6000 and 1000,<> people come to the Sea Devils' games at the Hoheluft stadium in Hamburg's Eppendorf district, but now there are expected to be significantly more. The creators of the ELF want to bring American football back to the big stage in Germany. And boss Karajica says in an interview with the F.A.Z.: "I am <> percent convinced that this will not be a financial fiasco."

"These are really good numbers"

To understand the full implications of this bold plan, it helps to look back at the early days of the league. Its creators, especially the former football coach Esume, were dissatisfied with the public image of football in Germany. Together with Karajica, who was once Managing Director of German Sport Television (DSF) and Sport1, headed the German business of the ProSiebenSat.1 Group and now acts on a large scale as an investor in the sports sector (he owns the football clubs Austria Klagenfurt and Viktoria Berlin, among others), he created the vision of a kind of Europe-wide football super league – which presents and markets itself better than the various national leagues and thus for TV stations, sponsors, but also the many fans in Germany and elsewhere, will become much more attractive.

The ELF started with eight teams in the summer of 2021, in the middle of the Corona pandemic. After a season of sporting highs and lows and economic teething problems – also due to pandemic-related requirements such as the reduction of stadium capacities – the league has already grown to twelve teams from five countries in year two. Before their third season, which has just started, the ELF expanded further to 17 teams from nine nations, in the coming year there should be "at least" 20, as a goal Esume and Karajica set 24 teams from 15 European countries. That sounds ambitious, and it is, but the development so far lends weight to what has been said.

Interest, at least in the ELF heartland of Germany, has grown continuously since the league was founded. Rhein Fire, for example, regularly played in front of more than 10,000 spectators in the stadium in Duisburg, last Sunday there were almost 13,000 at the season opener against Frankfurt Galaxy, the market share of the transmitting station ProSieben Maxx was 3.2 percent in the group of 14- to 49-year-olds, which is about 50 percent more than the station achieves on average.

At its peak, 330,000 people watched on TV, plus several thousand via various streaming services such as the league's own "Game Pass", which allows all ELF games to be watched via its own digital platform, and 1.5 million interactions on social media channels. "These are really good numbers considering how young we are as a league," says Karajica. The ELF now employs more than 30 people on a permanent basis, and several hundred freelance staff are added during the peak phases of the season. American football has stepped out of its niche in Germany – but the makers of the ELF want more.

So now the Volksparkstadion, which fits perfectly into this strategy of "bigger and bigger, always further", as the home ground of an ELF team. One-off for the time being, but further dates in the major football stadiums, also in other cities, could follow, according to Karajica. "If you want to achieve something, you have to set an example," says the 52-year-old.

More than 25,000 tickets have already been sold for the game between the Hamburg Sea Devils and Rhein Fire this Sunday (16:25 p.m. on ProSieben Maxx), and Karajica expects "over 30,000 people" at the football party. According to the ELF founder and current CEO, this should also have a long-term effect on sales at the remaining games in the smaller stadiums. And the big league final, which will be played in September in the football stadium of MSV Duisburg, is already almost sold out, although it is not yet clear who will play there.

Karajica knows that the ELF has by no means mastered all the challenges. The franchise from Istanbul, for example, had to give up after only one season and withdrew from playing, some other locations, where 1000 to 2000 spectators come to the games rather than 10,000 and more, live financially, so it can be heard behind the scenes, rather from hand to mouth. Karajica, he admits in an interview with the F.A.Z., has not yet earned any money with his football investment. Not yet, however, as he points out.

"Of course, there are many topics that we can still improve. But we've already achieved something that other leagues haven't been able to do in 60 years: to create a product that can be watched worldwide on television, laptops or mobile phones. High-class sport that captivates people at the screens and fascinates them in the stadiums. This is where we are laying the foundation for the ELF to be successful in the long term." Will it succeed? At the weekend in Hamburg you can get an idea of this.