NFL ACADEMY
Providing a pathway from the student union to the Super Bowl, the NFL Academy is the place to be for aspiring UK-based American footballer players. Sam Rider pads up to find out more
Inch by inch, play by play, American football is taking over. With the Jacksonville Jaguars running out in London for the 10th consecutive year and flag football set to debut at the 2028 Olympics, popularity in the UK is soaring. On the field, however, it’s a different story. Just five Brits have ever won a Super Bowl. But now, via the 2019-formed NFL Academy, there’s a clear pathway from these shores to the gridiron across the Pond. Sam Rider spent a day in the life of an Academy athlete at their new base at Loughborough University, to see what it takes to make it in the US.
Building blocks
“We’re here to eliminate average,” head coach Steve Hagen tells MF, while overseeing the Academy’s bleary-eyed 6am weights session. With more than 38 years of American football experience, including 11 as assistant coach for the New York Jets and Cleveland Browns, the man known simply as Coach has been drafted in by the NFL to orchestrate proceedings alongside Lamonte Winston, head of NFL Academy UK.
“We’re trying to give these guys a real chance to play football in America,” the 62-year-old continues. “Before, they were training three times a week. But Americans practise five times a week. If we continued like that, we’d never catch them. So I came over to install what American football really looks like and feels like.”
The unifying aim of the NFL Academy is a worthy one. Led by the National Football League, it’s designed to use American football as a means to carve out life-changing opportunities for young people around the world. Each September, the Academy welcomes students aged 16 to 19, cherry picked for their athletic potential, to undergo three years of intensive training alongside their education – in the gym, on the field and in the classroom.
On Hagen’s cue, we’re told to fall in with the players as they’re led through a dynamic warm-up of walkouts, press-ups, ‘world’s greatest stretches’ and prisoner squats by director of performance, Chris Bear. Supposedly said players are still just teenagers, but the hulking, supersized men setting themselves about the weights room floor would fool most club doormen in the local student bars.
The setting is suitably impressive, too, relocated from its original home in Southgate College to the high performance setup at Loughborough University: a sporting centre of excellence that has honed the craft of Olympic greats Seb Coe and Steve Backley, along with Paula Radcliffe and Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson.
Mind the gap
“To put it simply, we’re in the business of closing gaps,” Bear explains, while stalking the room, cajoling his charges to keep their standa
