Found this on CNN....
LONDON (CNN) -- It's a historic time for football -- American football, that is -- and not only because some top players have been turned into robots.
A nine meter animatronic model of Miami Dolphins star Jason Taylor has been installed in Trafalgar Square.
For the first time ever, the National Football League will play a regular season game outside of North America.
The Miami Dolphins meet the New York Giants in front of an expected sell out 90,000 crowd at London's Wembley stadium on Sunday.
Giant robot replicas of the top stars have invaded the London streets to promote the game, which the NFL hopes will herald a new era for the United States' biggest sport.
The game is part of moves to take the sport to a global audience, with the NFL planning to increase teams' schedules from 16 games per season to 17.
The extra games would be played overseas, meaning each team would have to play one competitive match outside the United States each year.
So far, the sport's ambitions to raise its profile overseas appear to be paying off -- Sunday's match already is a sellout.
"We had requests for a million tickets," London Mayor Ken Livingston told CNN. "We could fill Wembley 11 times over this game. And that's what the American football league want. They want to build a fan base here."
The encounter has grabbed the attention of native Brits, as well as U.S. ex-pats homesick for a fix of their top sport, according to Alistair Kirkwood, the managing director of the British branch of the NFL.
"You're going to find on Sunday 90 000 people with a lot of different accents. Around 85 percent will be British," he said.
Demand has been helped by an energetic publicity campaign, with the Dolphins' cheerleaders making a series of publicity appearances alongside an 8-foot tall robotic version of Jason Taylor, the Dolphins' star defensive end.
Taylor will be hoping the trip across the Atlantic can help revive his team's fortunes and bring to an end a seven-game losing streak.
The Dolphins' disastrous start to the season makes the Giants, who have won five successive games after losing their first two, favorites for Sunday's encounter.
The two teams were expected to fly into London on Friday for the game, which is being broadcast live in 215 countries with commentary in 21 languages, making its reach statistically as wide as the Super Bowl.
Even so, experts say the NFL may struggle in the long term to supplant more established sports such as rugby, cricket and, of course, the national obsession of soccer, known outside North America as football.
Nick Szczepanik, a sports writer at British daily paper The Times, said NFL stars may have to overcome a perception among some British sports fans as overly pampered compared to their British counterparts.
"There are people who say the NFL, they're all sissies who wear padding, not like rugby players who are happy to go out and break their collar bones and not even talk about it," he said.
So the Bills playing in Toronto... So what! Means nothing.
Brox