College Football at Wembley: 46,523 Fans and a Market Still to Be Built
Updated: Oct 31
London. Kansas and Arizona State made history on Saturday, playing the first college football game between two FBS programmes ever staged in the United Kingdom, at Wembley. The Sun Devils won 24-17, but it was the attendance figure that got people talking.
46,523 fans, short of the target
The announced attendance for this first edition of the Union Jack Classic was 46,523, below the roughly 60,000 organisers had hoped for.
The shortfall was plain to see. The entire upper tier of Wembley was left empty, a reflection of how hard the UK's largest venue is to fill. Some British supporters had in fact been told by email two weeks before the game that they would be moved down into the lower bowl. "They're struggling to sell up top, so they've moved people down," said Paul Goldsack, who came with his teenage son. With a capacity of 86,000 in American football configuration, the stadium was therefore only about 54 per cent full.
15,000 supporters from the United States
Around 15,000 supporters travelled from the United States, according to the BBC: 9,000 behind Arizona State and 6,000 for Kansas. That amounted to close to a third of the 46,523 spectators at Wembley.
The American contingent, in other words, turned up. Arizona State had sold through its initial 6,000-ticket allocation before securing an increase that took the total to 9,000. Against an original target of around 60,000, the gap with the final attendance therefore appears to stem more from sales in the United Kingdom than from the fans who crossed the Atlantic.
The game: Arizona State win without the ball
Statistically, it was the Jayhawks who dominated: 414 total yards to 228, 22 first downs to 13, and an average of 5.6 yards per play against 3.5. But Kansas gave the ball away three times (two fumbles, one interception) while Arizona State committed no turnovers at all.
Special teams proved decisive. The two most spectacular touchdowns both came on returns: a 72-yard punt return by Tate Nagy for Kansas in the second quarter, then a 100-yard kickoff return by Jaren Hamilton on the restart that swung the game. Sun Devils quarterback C. Boley added a 25-yard touchdown pass to R. Harris and a one-yard rushing touchdown. Kansas closed to 24-17 through a 38-yard pass from Isaiah Marshall to Nagy and a 46-yard field goal, but could not level.
Two European fixtures in one season: a windfall for local fans
This is the upside, and it is not a small one. European followers of college football had two fixtures on their own continent this season. First in Dublin on August 29, where TCU faced North Carolina at the Aviva Stadium to open the season, with the added attraction of Bill Belichick beginning his second season as a college head coach.
Then London, three weeks later. For a fan based in Paris, Berlin or Madrid, that means a one-hour flight and a weekend rather than a transatlantic ticket, an ESTA authorisation and a week of annual leave: access to an experience previously reserved for those who could afford the trip to the United States.
That audience does exist, incidentally: supporters from 35 countries bought tickets for Saturday's game. And Dublin shows the model can take root. The 2025 meeting between Kansas State and Iowa State sold out, generating an estimated €132 million in economic impact, and the series has just been extended through 2028, with Pittsburgh against Wisconsin already scheduled for 2027.
The real debate: exportable, really?
That leaves the underlying question, the one those 46,523 spectators pose by implication. The NFL has been exporting itself to London for nearly twenty years with an armada of globally recognisable stars and a standardised product.
College football sells precisely the opposite. Its fuel is century-old rivalries, campuses, towns that live to the rhythm of one team — in short, everything that by definition does not fit in an aircraft hold. The Kansas and Arizona State marching bands made the trip and kept the atmosphere going all afternoon, but a Saturday at Wembley, without tailgates in the car parks of Lawrence or students massed since dawn, cannot reproduce the experience of an autumn Saturday in the Midwest.
And the cost is real. The game counted as a home date for Kansas, which therefore gave one up, compensated by $2.7 million and fully covered travel expenses. The Jayhawks chose 2026 precisely because capacity at their David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium is reduced by construction work, which made the sacrifice easier to accept this particular year. The real question is whether a programme with a full stadium will ever accept the same deal, and whether a British public that knows the Chiefs or the Eagles but not the Sun Devils will come without the promise of a superstar on the field.
A long-term strategy
The project itself is built to last. Brett Yormark, the Big 12 commissioner, wants to continue the experiment, and the Union Jack Classic organisers have signed a multi-year agreement with Wembley. Other programmes in the conference are said to be interested already, and an announcement on the 2027 edition is expected in the coming months.
Wembley, then, did not prove that college football can reproduce its American model in Europe. It did show that an audience exists. What remains to be seen is whether that audience is large enough to make London something other than an occasional destination.
