Mark Woods: Biggest difference between our football and theirs? English teams don't move.

With stadium negotiations looming here in Jacksonville and the Jaguars playing back-to-back games in London — last weekend a “home” game at Wembley and this weekend a road game at Tottenham — some undoubtedly will predict this is a glimpse into the future. The Jaguars will move to England.

I don’t see that ever happening. Not with the Jaguars. Not with any NFL team.

But even that some speculate this will happen is telling. In England, the mere idea — a team leaving its city? — feels incredibly foreign.

English fans don't think much about their team leaving town, because it doesn't happen. They worry about other changes. Their team losing, going down a division, going into oblivion. They worry about stadiums, traditions and ticket prices.

We tend to think of all the other differences between our football and theirs. Hands or feet. The clock counting down or up. The scoring and slang. The worst team in the league getting a top draft pick or getting relegated.

But the biggest difference might be this: English football teams don’t pack up and leave their city.

Even when they say they need a shiny new stadium, there typically isn’t the staple of American sports: the threat (sometimes said, sometimes unsaid) of loading up the Mayflower vans, a la the Colts departing Baltimore.

The very idea is almost unfathomable. I would say it never happens, but there is the rare exception. In 2004, Wimbledon’s team moved about 80 miles away to Milton Keynes. But that’s about it.

Shad Khan’s other team, Fulham, has been playing at Craven Cottage, the oldest football stadium in London, since 1896. The stadium, also owned by Khan, has been undergoing renovations, which the team says were necessary to stay competitive. Not that there really was any question whether Fulham Football Club would continue to play in the Fulham neighborhood.

When Khan bought Fulham FC in 2013 — the same year the Jaguars began a decade of playing games in London — he said: “I want to be clear, I do not view myself so much as the owner of Fulham, but a custodian of the club on behalf of its fans.”

This wasn’t just the right thing to say. It was a reflection of the club and country's sports. In English football, the owners come and go. The clubs do not.

Welcome to Barnoldswick

I think I first became aware of this difference the summer after I graduated from high school. My dad did a “pulpit swap” with the pastor of a church in Barnoldswick, England. Our family moved into the British pastor’s house in the small Lancashire town — small enough that front-page headlines declared the Yanks had arrived — and their family moved into our house in a small Wisconsin town.

Some of the English teenagers welcomed me by taking me to a cricket match. They tried to explain cricket to me. I tried to explain baseball to them. I don’t think either of us made much headway. But for them, what was even more head-scratching than the infield fly rule was that a team might fly away from a city — that the Los Angeles Dodgers had been the Brooklyn Dodgers before moving across the country, and that this was hardly uncommon in American sports.

Just over 10 miles down the road from Barnoldswick is the somewhat larger city of Burnley. It’s home to a football club that was founded in 1882 and now is back in the Premier League, England’s top soccer division, with former NFL star J.J. Watt as a part owner. Burnley plays at Turf Moor, a stadium with a capacity of 21,944 — a third of what some Premier League teams can put in their stadiums.

It’s hard to predict whether Burnley will win enough this season to stay in England’s top division.

It’s easy to make a prediction for many future seasons: Burnley FC will stay in Burnley.

A few years after that summer in Barnoldswick, I spent a semester of college in Cambridge and went to some Cambridge United FC matches. That club has been around since 1912, playing at Abbey Stadium since 1932. The club is a part of the city, like the River Cam running through it.

We made a family trip to England a few years ago, before the pandemic. One day while everyone else was sightseeing in London, I took the train to Cambridge and found my way back to some of the familiar spots, including The Grapes, a neighborhood pub where I spent many a night playing darts. Picture the Crown & Anchor in “Ted Lasso,” only a bit rougher around the edges.

It had been four decades since I had been there. I sat down, ordered a pint, and talked with some of the pub regulars. And I realized that while so much had changed in the world — including, with piles of television money, English soccer — some things remain very unchanged. While nearly every top English team had been through some ups and downs, almost none had up and moved.

Liverpool was still in Liverpool. Manchester United was still in Manchester. And so on, all the way down to a lower-division Welsh team like Wrexham — a club that now has an international following, largely thanks to American owners/actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney capturing that connection between the town and team in the documentary series, “Welcome to Wrexham.”

The Not Forever League?

In those same four decades in America? Just in the NFL, the Baltimore Colts moved to Indianapolis, the St. Louis Cardinals moved to Phoenix, the Los Angeles Rams moved to St. Louis, the Los Angeles Raiders moved back to Oakland, Cleveland’s team moved to Baltimore (with an agreement to leave behind the Browns name), the Houston Oilers moved to Tennessee, the St. Louis Rams moved back to Los Angeles, the San Diego Chargers moved back to Los Angeles and the Oakland Raiders moved to Las Vegas.

And I don’t have enough space to list all the times an American sports franchise threatened to leave a city if they didn’t get something.

Jaguars President Mark Lamping recently created some headlines with a talk in St. Louis. According to the Sports Business Journal, Lamping told people there: “Look, if Jacksonville loses an NFL team, they’re never going to get another one. And if the Jaguars have to relocate from Jacksonville, those of us who went down there would have failed … and none of us want to face that.”

Lamping pushed back on headlines that said this was a not-so-subtle threat about the team leaving Jacksonville if it doesn’t get nearly $1 billion in public money for a stadium renovation. To a degree, parsing his words or intent is irrelevant. With the NFL, whenever there are stadium talks, there is the threat of a move, whether it’s said or unsaid.

Not that the Premier League isn’t driven by money or that its club owners somehow are dramatically different from NFL owners. Several, like Khan, own teams in both leagues. The difference comes from a combination of factors.

English clubs often have a deeply rooted communal connection, going back many generations to the days when the players were just local workers. As a headline in the Guardian earlier this year said: “Football clubs were born to represent communities and fans, not owners.” Not that, as that story lamented, some owners aren’t willing to break that bond— but their options are much more limited.

There are only 32 NFL teams. There are 20 in the Premier League, but there are 72 teams below them in the English Football League, each with a pathway, at least in theory, to move into the Premier League via play on the field. So when every city already has a team, you don’t see the equivalent of Las Vegas trying to convince owners to pack up and move, promising new stadiums built mostly with public money — another key difference.

A stadium built with NFL in mind

Look at the story of the place where the Jaguars will play this weekend.

Tottenham Hotspur F.C. was founded in 1882 by a group of schoolboys in a cricket club. The first club president was a teacher at All Hallows Church. From 1899 to 2017, Tottenham played matches at White Hart Lane, a stadium with a capacity of 36,310 and, as The Associated Press noted when it was torn down, “claustrophobic corridors, cramped seats and concession choices limited mostly to fish and chips, beer and water.”

Tottenham did talk about moving to the Olympic Stadium in Stratford, a nearby area of London. In the end, though, the club stayed where it has been more than 100 years, building a palatial new stadium that cost more than $1 billion — financed through private funding, bank loans and about $40 million in government grants. (And even that amount of public funding, primarily for the area around the stadium, was controversial.)

The new stadium has a footprint four times the size of the old one. It was built very much with the NFL in mind, not only replicating some of the NFL stadium model (enormous video boards, luxury seating, 60 food and drink outlets) but with a deal to play host to two NFL games a year.

This weekend it’s the Bills playing a “home” game there against the Jaguars. Which leads me to one final subtle but telling difference between English and American football. Nicknames.

This is how we refer to American teams, as much and maybe more than their cities, perhaps because sometimes those cities change. Rams, Chargers, Cardinals, Raiders, Colts …

While English clubs all have nicknames, they usually are quite secondary. Tottenham being known as the Spurs is an exception. Most clubs are typically referred to simply by the name that comes from their city, town or neighborhood. Because that's where they started. And because it's safe to say they're never leaving.

mwoods@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4212

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Unlike America's NFL teams, English clubs almost never leave town