The FIFO Rams may have lost the battle for hearts and minds

The NFL has long been a pioneer in blending the barrier between entertainment and legitimate sporting competition. 

Today's clash at the MCG between the San Francisco 49ers and the LA Rams is a historic moment for the league — after all, playing a regular-season game on the other side of the world is pretty outlandish.

But, as close to 100,000 people cram into the Melbourne Cricket Club's hallowed halls and stare into the far distance at the gridiron imprinted upon its hallowed turf, the question has to be raised as to why it's happening, who is benefiting most, and why the two teams are taking such wildly contrasting approaches to the contest ahead of a busy season.

First things first. Why is this happening?

Modern Australian sports fans are far too educated to be left staring in wonder at the strange code of football being played in front of them when they turn up.

Most, if not all, of the people in the stands later today will not only know the rules, but have their favourite players and likely even have a team they can claim to support year in, year out.

More than a handful of Australia-based supporters would likely confess to spending Monday mornings with one eye on a pop-out window on their computer screen — or at their phone — to keep up with Sunday Night Football as it plays out Stateside.

In short, people already have their favourites.

Anecdotally, when attending previous international matches as a supporter in London over the years, you are far more likely to see fans wearing unrelated jerseys to those teams actually playing — especially in the nascent years of the NFL's English experiment. 

So those people heading to the MCG today will, by the law of averages, be watching two teams that they are not supporters of.

This should clearly be a detrimental situation to the nominal home team, the Los Angeles Rams.

However, the Rams' pitiful backing from locals at SoFi Stadium, which results in more away-team invasions than anywhere else in the NFL, especially against San Francisco, suggests that playing in front of a hostile crowd at home probably isn't anything they're not used to.

"It's cool for us to always have an advantage of having, what I see, as one home game a year in LA," coach Kyle Shanahan told reporters earlier this week.

"Just the way our fans take over that stadium … [but] I have a feeling they won't be much different here. I expect to have a good showing."

Shanahan was talking in Melbourne on Monday when he made those comments.

The Rams didn't even arrive until Thursday morning, about 24 hours before kick-off, in a bold fly-in fly-out plan to avoid the jet lag that comes from a 12,748-kilometre, 16-hour trans-Pacific flight.

How effective this plan will be on the field will come in time — and not just in the aftermath of the MCG contest, but in the next couple of games they play and throughout the year.

But off the field, it's hard not to think that the Rams have fumbled the ball in their own end zone and given a free pass to San Francisco to take over the running of the narrative, which gets us onto the question as to who is benefiting.

The 49ers are, according to an investigation by The Athletic, the most popular team in Australia.

NFL games were first being shown on Australian TV during the 1980s, first by Channel 9, Channel 10 and then the ABC, with effervescent host Don Lane bringing a new audience to professional American Football.

Given that the 1980s were the 49ers' greatest era, with the side winning four of their five Super Bowls that decade thanks to Bill Walsh's famed West Coast Offence and the talents of quarterback Joe Montana, the Niners' enduring appeal makes sense.

Australians love a winner.

So having the 49ers play the first game on Australian soil makes perfect sense.

But there is a complication.

Starting in January 2022, the NFL launched its Global Markets Program, a formalised approach that gives NFL clubs access to international territories to utilise for their own for marketing and fan engagement purposes.

All 32 teams now have an overseas presence via this program, with 22 different countries targeted, including Australia.

These markets are not exclusive. Germany is the most popular market, with 11 NFL teams snapping up their options there, while some areas, including Colombia, Japan, Greece, Ghana and Nigeria, have been taken by just one team each.

But Australia is proving to be of interest too, with four teams nominating this great southern land as their territory to harvest in the NFL's own brand of sporting and commercial imperialism.

Those four teams that picked Australia are the Las Vegas Raiders, Philadelphia Eagles, Seattle Seahawks and the Los Angeles Rams.

So, if the Rams have commercial rights in Australia, how come they only flew in the day before the game and aren't spending time winning over hearts and minds among supporters in the build-up?

Have they missed a trick by failing to turn up to their own party?

It's almost as if the Rams are turning up to their holiday home, only to find that the 49ers have already unpacked the suitcase in the master bedroom and are sitting on the couch with their feet on the coffee table.

For a start, Australia is not the Rams' only overseas operation; they also have the rights in China, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates, with Japan, South Korea and China exclusively theirs.

It would be wrong to say that the Rams organisation has not done anything in Melbourne.

The cheerleaders have been out and about all week, and the team has collaborated with Melbourne fashion label-turned-homeless charity HoMie and various events at "Rams House" on the Crown Riverwalk.

But San Francisco has done all that too, and then some. 

The 49ers' stated aim is to paint Melbourne red, and it seems, externally at least, to be doing a great job; hosting open training sessions in front of 2,000 local children at AAMI Park, watching the Geelong-Carlton game at the MCG on Friday night, a training run with Special Olympics athletes, setting a cheerleading record at Federation Square, visiting the local children's hospital, partaking in a Bunnings sausage sizzle … This is hearts and minds 101 from the 49ers team.

Shanahan and the 49ers' decision to give the players a week to adjust to the time zone and the rigours of international travel seems to make sense to anyone who has travelled across the world and then had to work.

"It took a couple days to adjust," he said on Monday.

"But [I'm] feeling real good today."

The biggest interest for sports science types will be how two sets of experts came to such wildly different conclusions about how to approach the longest road trip in NFL history.

The Rams felt that the team would be far better served doing all their prep at home and keeping the players' body clocks on US Pacific Coast time.

They did similar last year when playing the Jaguars in London, a 10-and-a-half hour, 8,780km journey from LA, a game they won comprehensively.

The 49ers have decided getting themselves into the Melbourne time zone would serve them best, training in the late morning to adapt to the earlier than usual kick-off time.

Which perhaps leads to the crux of the issue and the question as to the purpose of these international games.

Are they to spread the gospel of the NFL into new markets, or just building commercial relationships as a primary focus?

"For us, this is a year-round effort," Kevin Demoff, president of the Rams, told CNB.

"I would much rather win the game and grow the market the other 51 weeks a year than focus on having our players here for that week."

That being said, the questions around the approach has clearly struck a nerve, as Demoff's response to San Francisco Standard reporter David Lombardi's tweet criticising the strategy.

Lombardi wrote on X: "An actual 'business trip' would involve the Rams taking the time to actually grow their brand. There's a reason the Rams don't even own LA. It's related to their current mentality. Moving to Anaheim and then St. Louis severely hurt the cultivation of a fan base. 49ers benefit."

Demoff accused the writer of being "obsessed with the Rams brand" in a startlingly thin-skinned response.

As much razzamatazz as the NFL collects around itself, this is also a serious sports league where, with just 17 regular-season games to establish your case for sporting immortality, teams simply cannot afford to throw away a single chance for a win.

The conflict between the front-of-house commercial imperatives and the back-end business of winning football games is being thrown into stark relief this week.

The 49ers have embraced Australia and been embraced in turn.

The Rams, from a sporting operation, are treating this like a business trip, with the focus on the business of getting a W to start their season, commercial considerations be damned.

And who knows, should the Rams' smash-and-grab approach work out and they claim the victory, that puts them on the path to Super Bowl LXI — which is taking place at their actual home, SoFi Stadium, next February — then it might not matter how many proverbial babies they kissed or hands they shook.

That would give the Rams the unique status of being able to say they have won a Super Bowl on home turf, having started the season by laying down roots at a distant home away from home.

Such a victory would forever tie Australia to a team of winners.