LONDON — The National Football League played its first game of Britain’s autumn this morning at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, where the Washington Commanders met the Indianapolis Colts at 9:30 a.m. local kickoff, and the British attended the way the British attend everything that happens before noon: with snacks, suspicion, and eventual enthusiasm.

The stadium, which was built for soccer and has now agreed to pretend otherwise one Sunday a year, was packed. Fans wore jerseys purchased that morning without knowing the players’ names, which is the same way the British have supported every foreign invasion since 1066.

The game itself was fine. What made it historic was the behavior around it. British fans, who are legally required to describe American football as “weird” at least once before kickoff, spent four hours doing something no American has ever done at an NFL game: sitting down, eating a full meal, and watching the whole thing without once checking a phone for a trade rumor.

"It's like rugby that stopped for a meeting every seven seconds," said one Tottenham fan outside the stadium, holding a pie, delivering the required weirdness line on schedule. "I don't know why they keep stopping. Nobody told me. I thought it was part of the performance."

The NFL has been exporting games to London since 2007, and the experiment has quietly become the most successful cultural exchange in modern history, because the British have accepted American football on the only terms that make it acceptable to them: as a costume party with a scoreboard. The Colts are now regulars in Europe, playing on the continent for the third time in four seasons, which makes them the first NFL franchise to achieve what the British Empire could not: becoming a fixture at a British event.

THE LONDON GAME: A FIELD GUIDE

  • Venue: Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, a soccer stadium that hosts football the way a library hosts a rock concert — with visible effort.
  • Kickoff: 9:30 a.m. ET, the only NFL start time at which the national anthem is sung by people already three pints deep.
  • Crowd: 60,000, most wearing jerseys bought within the last 24 hours.
  • Next week: Eagles-Jaguars, same stadium, same arrangement, same pie.

Some say the London games prove football is going global. Others say they prove the British will watch anything if it’s on a Sunday. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in a third position I just invented: the NFL has discovered that the secret to international expansion is not marketing. It is scheduling the game early enough that the foreign crowd can still make dinner reservations.

At press time, the NFL announced it would add a fourth London game next season, after internal research found that British fans would attend anything advertised as “a very strange morning.”