Alexander Smith is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital based in London.
LONDON — He’s never played a minute of football. But Louis Rees-Zammit, one of the world’s top young rugby stars, is walking away from his sport and homeland for a long-shot gamble at making it in the NFL. His announcement this week dropped like a bombshell in Britain — and now he’s intent on becoming a household name in the United States, too. He knows just how slim his chances are, but that didn’t stop the 22-year-old Welshman and lifelong NFL fan.
Sky Sports, which is owned by NBCUniversal’s parent company, Comcast, has British broadcast rights to the NFL and created the sport’s own dedicated channel in 2020. The league says that it now has 14 million fans in the U.K., with 4 million of these considered “avid” fans. But although both brutal and complex, rugby is not football. Rees-Zammit’s main challenge, commentators say, will be mastering the complex web of Xs and Os behind the hundreds of plays that NFL players must learn by rote.
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