The World View

In Germany, home to three of the six NFL Europe teams, American football has long been more popular than elsewhere on the Continent, probably because of the post-World War II occupation that kept hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and their traditions mingling among the Teutons. Until the early 1990s, Armed Forces TV and radio beamed sports-heavy U.S. programming to the troops based in Berlin, Frankfurt and along the Rhine River--coincidentally the three venues of the NFL Europe teams.

Several sports bars in the German capital, Berlin, that are usually hangouts for soccer fans, organized Super Bowl Sunday parties to allow patrons to watch the game live. Despite kickoff coming at an inconvenient 12:15 a.m. ahead of the Monday workday, the 65-mark ($33) tickets offered by the Pickers Sportsbar near the Tiergarten park sold out the first day they were offered two weeks ahead of the game.

This year’s game probably holds special interest for Europeans as Ram quarterback Kurt Warner played the 1998 season for NFL Europe’s Amsterdam Admirals, and TV channel SAT-1 has been making much of the Atlanta game’s first-ever inclusion of a fluent German speaker--St. Louis guard Tom Nutten--in a Super Bowl. Nutten, another NFL Europe crossover and former Admiral teammate of Warner’s, grew up in the Rhine River region until moving to Canada at age 16, according to the German network.