NFL sells 40,000 Wembley tickets in 90 minutes
NEW YORK (TICKER) —The NFL regular-season game scheduled for Wembley Stadium is one of the hottest tickets in UK sport after the first 40,000 tickets for the event sold out in 90 minutes.
The Miami Dolphins will be the host team against the New York Giants in the first NFL game outside of North America at Wembley Stadium on October 28.
The league on Wednesday put the first batch of tickets on sale to fans randomly selected from an overwhelming number of registered ticket requests. More than a million requests were received within 72 hours of the NFL’s announcement of the game.
“Today’s first sale was exclusively to fans in the UK and Europe,” managing director of NFL UK Alistair Kirkwood said. “The speed in which such a large number of tickets were snapped up through our partners at Ticketmaster demonstrates the great excitement and appetite for the game in this country. We know that the last few tickets available in this first batch will be gone very soon.”
Sales in the United States to the Dolphins and Giants fans are expected to begin within a week, with more tickets being released to fans in the UK next month.
“Those who missed out this time around have the opportunity to be selected to participate in the next sale, so people should not despair, although this experience proves to us that fans will have to be quick off the mark to secure the remaining seats,” Kirkwood said.”
Mayor of London Ken Livingstone also spoke on Wednesday at a news conference in New York.
“What this clearly shows is that there is huge potential in Britain and wider in Europe for American football to have a huge impact,” Livingstone said. “We want to see the NFL coming back to London again and again.”
NFL owners voted last October to play up to two games outside the United States every year for the next five years, with just one game to be played in 2007.
The NFL staged its first regular-season game outside the United States in 2005 when 103,467 people saw the Arizona Cardinals play the San Francisco 49ers in Mexico City - the largest crowd for a regular-season game in NFL history.
