Mark Waller has a passion for football. Tottenham Hotspur is his team.
As for that other kind of football, he is trying to work up a similar fervor for the US game around the world as the NFL’s executive vice president of international.
Waller is back in his native England this week for the first of three league games at Wembley Stadium, Miami against Oakland. If he were to sneak off to see Spurs take on Arsenal at the Emirates yesterday, it would be understandable.
“I do fundamentally believe the deep-rooted divisive passion of UK soccer is unlike almost any other sports passion I’ve seen,” Waller says. “It’s a very different passion in the UK; passion for soccer is actually passion for a team. I love Tottenham and I hate Arsenal.”
“That’s not really nearly as much the case in the US,” he says. “Sport generally in the US is unified. It’s a binding power. It’s different, for me, the passion I feel is very different [from soccer].”
Waller, who recently returned to his role as director of the league’s international interests, came to the US in 1996 with less than a working knowledge of the NFL game. He knew almost immediately he needed to master American football to have something to discuss with his co-workers.
“I think the hardest thing is if you’ve never played it, you have no concept of the level of specialty and expertise required to play it,” Waller says. “Again, if you look at soccer, there’s only one specialist role and that’s the goalkeeper. The others are variations on a theme, but most people could play reasonably well in most positions. A slight overstatement, but generally true. In football, if you took one of those quarterbacks and asked them to play wide receiver, it would be a train wreck.”
Waller also was fascinated early on — and still is — by the way American football is relatively scripted.
“Plays are written, right? So there’s a playbook,” he says. “If you’re educated in the game, you know what to look for. So the running play sets up the pass. If you don’t know the game, you have no idea what to look for. So actually the biggest issue for me the first year was I did not know where to look for the ball.”
He must have learned well enough, because a decade later, he was working for the NFL.
By 2009, Waller was chief marketing officer. And now, as the NFL adds to its plate internationally, Waller is its overseer.
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