For London, American football is nothing new. The NFL has been building a base there for years, and on Saturday outside Wembley Stadium, that was obvious in the jerseys drifting down Olympic Way.
Chiefs. Packers.
Jaguars. Eagles.
Cowboys. Patriots.
The league has made itself familiar.
College football, though, was a different kind of arrival.
The first game of its kind at Wembley drew an announced crowd of 46,523 for Kansas against Arizona State, and the reaction around the stadium said plenty about why this felt fresh. It was not just about the result. It was about the whole package - the bands, the chants, the cheerleaders, the bigger sense of belonging that came with it.
Kyle Thornton, a London native who has been to NFL games at Wembley before, came in curious and left with a side. He had no connection to Kansas and no real reason to back the Jayhawks until he looked at the matchup through his own lens.
“Because I’m a Christian man, I looked at the two teams and I saw the Jayhawks and I saw the Devils,” Thornton said. “So obviously I had to go with the Jayhawks based off that.”
He showed up in a blue KU hoodie, handed out business cards for his wholesale company to American fans, and took in a sport he had mostly watched online. What stood out to him was the tone.
“The NFL is more of a corporate setting, where it seems like the college game has more of a culture that pushes it for us UK fans,” Thornton said. “We see it and go, ‘They have more culture, more faith, more belief.’
You can go and speak to the fans and have a nice time. It’s actually quite fantastic.”
That atmosphere was impossible to ignore. The marching bands drew attention.
So did the cheerleaders, the school chants and the packed college sidelines. Kansas and Arizona State brought more than teams to London; they brought the feel of campus football with them.
Oliver Smith, another Londoner at Wembley, came without a rooting interest and wanted to see what the fuss was about. He knew the NFL product from television, but college football required a different kind of adjustment, especially for anyone used to British soccer rhythms.
The stops and starts, the timeouts, the reviews, the breaks between quarters - all of it made the game feel less continuous than what he was used to. But it also helped explain why fans who travel to college stadiums every week seem to be buying into more than the snap count.
“It’s about the game, right? But it’s also not about the game,” Smith said.
“It’s about the music and the chants and the culture. It seemed to be more about the experience than the actual game.
That was really cool.”
Arizona State coach Kenny Dillingham has had a similar reaction from the other side. When he attended the World Cup in the United States this summer, he said he was struck by everything around the action - the traditions, the passion, the shared experience. On Saturday, he wanted London to feel that same pull from college football.
“It’s the pageantry and the passion with the band, the cheerleaders, the fans, the 18-to-22 year olds,” Dillingham said. “I hope they left saying, ‘I can connect to the pageantry of college football. I can connect to that passion of the fan bases that traveled across the world to come watch their teams play.’”
That may be the biggest takeaway from Wembley’s first college football game. The NFL has already shown London there is an appetite for American football. Kansas and Arizona State offered something else: a version of the sport wrapped in school spirit, family ties and tradition.
For Thornton, that shift happened fast. He came in as a neutral. Then he picked Kansas, put on the hoodie and found himself swept into the scene.
“All of a sudden,” Thornton said, “I’m in it with the fans now.”
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