While David Beckham continues to cool his expensive heels on the subs’ bench in Los Angeles, the game that Americans call football is crossing the Atlantic in the opposite direction. On Sunday, Wembley will host the first regular season professional American football game (a real contest, as opposed to a friendly) to be held outside the United States.

The New York Giants will play the Miami Dolphins in front of a sellout crowd of 80,000 at the launch of an ambitious global strategy by the National Football League (NFL), America’s most commercially successful professional sports operation.

The aim is to export professional football to the world – starting in London.

The man behind the business plan is Roger Goodell, the Commissioner of the NFL. American professional sports are highly centralised and regulated businesses and Mr Goodell is akin to a Field Marshal of Football. He has been in the business for all his adult life and took over the baton last year at the age of 46.

The “aggressive and ambitious new strategy”, as Mr Goodell describes it, got off to an encouraging start when tickets for the Wembley game sold out within 48 hours in the summer.

“Whenever you do something like this, you don’t know what the reaction will be,” he says in his seventeenth-floor executive suite at the NFL’s headquarters on Park Avenue in Manhattan, “but it’s exceeded our expectations.”

In addition to the game itself, with all the accompanying brouhaha that is so familiar in American sports (cheerleaders for the Miami Dolphins will be braving late October London weather at events throughout the week), the NFL will be using the opportunity to explore further international business opportunities. Mr Goodell will speak on Thursday at a conference that he is co-hosting with The Economist on the global business of sport.

The NFL has enjoyed almost unimaginable commercial success in recent years. The value of its television contracts in the US over the next eight years is almost $18 billion (£8.7 billion). Its marketing is tightly controlled and staggeringly lucrative. Now it wants to export that success overseas.

Will people around the world really want to become consumers of American sport, the way that they consume American music, electronics and fast food? Big professional team sports in the US have been almost perfect examples of American exclusivity. Only basketball is played with any seriousness outside the continent.

Yet in the past few years all have made a push into the global market. The National Basketball Association is focusing on Asia, especially China. This month ice hockey played its first regular season games outside North America – in London – and last year baseball hosted its first world cup, the World Baseball Classic, which was won by Japan.

Mr Goodell says that America’s version of football is focusing on Europe, especially the UK. It has tried before, enjoying a sizeable following in Britain in the 1980s, especially for the Super Bowl, the season-ending winter extravaganza that is a cross between the FA Cup Final, a rock concert and the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. But interest waned in the 1990s and this year the NFL wrapped up its dwindling European league, NFL Europa.

The new goal is to rebuild interest with real, competitive games. The NFL plans to play two games a year outside the US from next season for four years.

After that, the long-term aim is to expand further and perhaps even to put NFL teams in big cities all around the world – with London at the top of the list – competing in the same leagues as its 32 professional teams. “I could certainly envisage an NFL franchise in London,” Mr Goodell says. “I don’t know that’s necessarily our end-game or whether that’s in a ten or a fifteen-year target range, but we continue to evaluate the possibilities.”

The Commissioner also made the headlines last week (not all favourable in the US, where the game is a national cultural treasure as well as extremely lucrative for host cities) when he floated the idea of a Super Bowl in London.

Although interest in American football in Britain seems to be reviving, with last year’s Super Bowl recording the highest ratings in several years, there are obstacles to a real breakthrough. Perhaps the biggest is what is viewed as the overcommercialisation of American sport. Purists in Britain and Europe object to what they see as sport as a television-driven spectacle. In an NFL game you are rarely more than a few minutes from a commercial break.

Mr Goodell emphatically denies that the game is dictated by television’s demands. The long stoppages during which commercials are aired occur at natural breaks in the action, he points out, whereas soccer does not have such breaks in its 45-minute halves. “If we wanted to make a lot more money from a business standpoint we could take all our games and put them on pay television,” he says. As has happened with many European soccer competitions, including the Premier League.

Instead, almost all of the regular season and play-off games are shown in the United States on free-to-air broadcast channels, or on widely carried cable.

The Commissioner also notes that in some respects American football is less dominated by commercial considerations than English football. In the US, stadiums do not post advertising around the pitch and it would be considered sacrilegious for teams to wear sponsors’ logos on their uniforms.

There seems to be a growing cross-fertilisation of business strategies in sport across the Atlantic. A couple of English football teams are owned by NFL teams; Manchester United has pursued global marketing arrangements with the New York Yankees, just as Chelsea is planning with the New York Giants.

And English football could clearly learn a lesson or two from American football. As Mr Goodell notes, what marks the NFL out from the Premier League, where a small handful of teams dominate, is its extraordinary competitiveness, which over relatively short periods ensures near-parity among almost all of the 32 professional teams.

This is achieved in large part through a rigidly socialist programme of revenue-sharing among the teams, so that the wealthiest subsidise the poorest teams.

“We try to make our season as competitive as possible or give teams every ability to become competitive,” Mr Goodell says.

It works. In the past ten years, seven different teams have won the Super Bowl. The effect is to maintain fans’ interest and television companies’ eagerness to pay.

For Mr Goodell, the trip to London will also provide a welcome break from a busy and controversial few months at the top of American sport. He has established a reputation in his first year in the job as a disciplinarian, clamping down hard on a perennial problem for football’s image: the off-the-field criminal activities of some of the sport’s most famous names. This summer he ordered the indefinite suspension of Michael Vick, the star quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, after he pleaded guilty to organising dog fights for gaming purposes.

Nevertheless, despite his tough reputation, the Commissioner is anxious to defend the players. “These are isolated cases,” he says. In pro football you have 2,000 young men. Some will make mistakes.”

Mr Goodell refuses to be drawn on whether soccer has a better chance of success in the United States than American football has of making inroads into the UK, but it cannot be a bad sign for him and his ambitions that while Beckham remains sidelined in LA, Wembley will resonate next weekend to the pulsating rhythms of a real, live NFL game.

Hitting the big league

If you could change one thing in the financial and commercial environment, what would it be?
To make it even easier for more people around the world to enjoy NFL football

Who is or was your mentor?
No one achieves success alone and I was fortunate to have many great influences in my life. Pete Rozelle and Paul Tagliabue are the two greatest commissioners in the history of sports and I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to work for both of them and to learn a great deal

Does money motivate you?
No. I have never been concerned with money or titles. What motivates me is being challenged and working in an environment that offers an opportunity to make a difference, both professionally and personally

What is the most important event, good or bad, to happen in your working life?
My dream was to work for the NFL. The most important event was when Don Weiss, the executive director of the NFL in the early 1980s, read and responded to my unsolicited letter in which I sought to fulfill my dream. Being given an opportunity to achieve that dream would have to top the list

What gadget must you have?
Being able to communicate instantly has certainly changed the way business is conducted. That makes my BlackBerry a key item

What does leadership mean to you?
Pure and simple, I believe that leadership is the ability to inspire others to achieve a common objective. For us, the focus is quite simple: do everything possible to strengthen the game and our 32 franchises and continue to emphasise innovation. That type of focus helped make the NFL successful and will keep us going in the right direction

Which person do you most admire?
The lessons I learnt from my father (the former US senator Charles Goodell) are with me always. He made some very difficult decisions based on principle and what he felt was right. Those decisions may have cost him his political career, but he never regretted doing what he did and having the courage to stand up for his principles at an enormous personal cost

How do you relax?
There is nothing I enjoy more than spending time with my family and my girls. Fortunately, they love football about as much as I do