NFL's plan

America’s most popular sport has sets its sights on the world’s most populous nation. The NFL is trying to expand its game outside its borders and is even starting up an indoor football league here next year. That is just one aspect of the league’s plan to bring the gridiron game to China. Also on that agenda is bringing in football stars past and present to help locals learn the game, and the latest big name NFL player to visit is Jerry Rice, who also made a trip to China’s famed great wall.

The former San Francisco 49ers wide receiver who has scored the most career touchdowns in league history, visited the Badaling part of the Great Wall during his promotional tour here which also included holding a football clinic to teach youth the finer points of the game.

Jerry Rice, recently ranked as the ­greatest player of all time by NFL Films, is currently on a tour of China to promote the sport, following in a line of big names who have made the trip east, including Barry Sanders, LaDainian Tomlinson, Reggie Bush and Joe Montana, to meet a small, but growing, fanbase who appreciate the effort involved in a 11-day promotional tour.

Other sports obsess with unearthing the next Yao Ming or Li Na, but the NFL’s ­ultimate goal is developing that fanbase, ­according to NFL China Managing Director Richard Young. The key, Young says, is to communicate with the fans directly, rather than approach the market from a business point of view. He also says it’s essential to account for the uniqueness of the Chinese market – something that other sports seem to have ignored.

The Arena Football League (the highest level of professional indoor American football in the US), for example, has repeatedly announced plans for a league in China that would appear to be widely overambitious even to the casual observer. Marty Judge, one of the businessmen behind the venture, claimed this summer that indoor football would take China by storm, despite being a niche sport in the US.

Judge is not the first westerner to have been blinded by the potential size of the Chinese market – and he won’t be the last – but Young, in contrast, has spent more than two decades in Asia and knows that imposing the American model on the Chinese simply won’t work.

The NFL learned that the hard way, rushing into the market in 2007, before having to drastically downsize its plans for China. But in the four years since Young has taken control, the number of those considered to be fans in China has grown from 1 million to more than 14 million, while new media has seen 1,000 percent growth over the same period.

While the NFL would of course embrace a Chinese player, it isn’t trying to develop one.