I know that they call it ‘football’ even though the game involves very little kicking. I know that two men thumping each other in full padding and helmets seems soft compared to rugby. I know that I could watch two English football matches in the time taken to watch one American game, even though it is only composed of 15 minute quarters.

Yet the prospect of an NFL team coming to London on a permanent basis still excites me. The NFL has it all: hard hits and nifty technique, collective teamwork and individual brilliance, acute strategy and unpredictable action. One friend described the game as being “like chess with really athletic, really big guys.” It may not seem immediately obvious, but it’s hard to argue that any sport is more tactical than (American) football. And what other sport can boast its final to be ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’?

There are also a few myths that should be dispelled. Football is not just a bunch of fat guys doggy-piling on each other. The truth is that these ‘fat guys’ are in fact supreme athletic specimens. Let’s take our own Lawrence Okoye, a former British Olympic discus thrower, who now plays for the San Francisco 49ers (he’s actually only on their practice squad, which demonstrates how supremely talented the other ‘fat guys’ are). While he’s an absolute monster at 6ft 5in and 304lb, he can cover 40 metres in 4.78 seconds and jump 36 inches high in the vertical jump. And he doesn’t even make the squad.

The second myth stems from a comparison to rugby: that having only one role in a team (for example the kicker exclusively kicks, or the players on offence don’t play defence and vice versa) means that players are less talented overall. Wrong. Such specialisation means that the players in those positions are better at what they do. As Plato says, experts are better than non-experts. In football, therefore, the quality of each aspect of the game is higher; a kicker may not know how to tackle, but he sure can kick!

It is not simply out of a romantic love for the game (and my own desire for season tickets) that I believe in having a permanent franchise in London. The sporting culture of this country would be enriched for having our own NFL team. It’s not as if rugby ‘competes’ with soccer (I use this Americanism purely to avoid confusion, forgive me) for fans. Rugby fans are rugby fans, and the same goes for soccer. The same can be said about an NFL team coming to London – it wouldn’t steal fans away from other sports, nor indeed other NFL teams in America. As Alistair Gempf of the Cambridge University Pythons says: “Whenever a franchise has relocated in the US, the place they’ve moved to will have fans of another team there and that’s not been a problem.”

I myself am a die-hard Arsenal supporter as well as a passionate New York Giants fan. There is not a finite amount of sporting enthusiasm in this world. And those who say there is no ‘room’ for another sport only have to look at the attendance figures for the International Series at Wembley from 2007. One game out of ten has not sold out, with an average attendance easily above 80,000. This year they added two more games in London than they had when the International Series started. The popularity of the sport is rising in the UK and a permanent franchise would stimulate the rest of the sporting world. Added onto the fact that, according to a recent study by Deloitte, a London NFL franchise could be worth £100 million a year to the UK economy. Who can say no to that?

If anything, it makes sense for certain NFL teams to move out. As a sports fan, there is nothing worse than seeing empty seats. So for a team like the Jacksonville Jaguars or St Luis Rams, which frankly never fill to anywhere near capacity, a move to London makes sense. There is already a European Football League, but the best players only want the NFL. Nobody cares about the London Olympians. The NFL is like Real Madrid and the EFL is like… maybe Cambridge United – and that’s being generous. The London Rams on the other hand: now that has a ring to it. The logistics or bringing NFL to London may be complicated, but in principal it is undoubtedly a good idea. The time has come for ‘America’s Game’ to let some British in.