Matt Nagy slipped into his first-class sleeper seat with a scowl on his face, a grim outing at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on his mind and a long, transcontinental flight in his immediate future. A few seconds later Nagy, the Chicago Bears’ second-year head coach, surveyed the layout of the Airbus A350-1000, realized what was staring him in the face — and felt as if veins were popping out of his neck.
The previous night, on the first Sunday of October 2019, the Bears had suffered a 24-21 defeat to the Oakland Raiders. Nagy, normally upbeat and composed, had gone on an all-time tirade. His team trailing 17-0 at halftime, Nagy became unhinged in the locker room, directing his ire at his offensive linemen and loudly questioning their manhood. “You’re playing like a bunch of (wimps),” Nagy screamed, vaulting over a previously uncrossed line.
Not surprisingly, the linemen didn’t take it well. “I was one more insult away from pushing past our head of security and walking the streets of London, in uniform, trying to find the best pub possible to watch the second half,” recalls Kyle Long, then a Bears starting guard. “I don’t use the ‘Q’ word (quit) lightly, but I was close.”
Long was still upset the next morning when he took his first-class seat in the vicinity of his fellow linemen. So was Nagy, whose wife, Stacey, had accompanied him on the trip. It was then that all parties were confronted with an awkward realization: The Nagys were sitting directly across from the aggrieved linemen, as they had been on the outbound flight from Chicago.
“On the flight out,” Long says, “we were taking pictures like kids on Snapchat. On the way back, we were going to a wake. For nine hours, I challenge you not to make eye contact with the person across from you. I had to stare at my knees. It was torture.”
Remembers Nagy: “They had those seats that go in opposite directions. Nine hours of staring at each other. Nine hours of me glaring at them. We didn’t talk. I was pissed and they were pissed. That was just a weird moment. London’s dreary. The food stunk. You’re hangry. And (at halftime) I just lost my f—— mind.”
Nagy, now the Kansas City Chiefs’ offensive coordinator, may not have fond memories of that trip across the pond, but his uncharacteristic tantrum, which he and Long both laugh about now, was emblematic of an NFL voyage that has left more than a few franchises knackered and worse for the wear. At times, what’s gone down in the UK has been pretty far from OK. Since 2007, when the league began staging regular season games in London, many other Americans have lost their minds — and, in the games’ immediate aftermath, their jobs.
Last year, the New York Jets fired Robert Saleh after a loss to the Minnesota Vikings, which made Saleh the latest member of the Done After London club, but hardly the most scandalous. The previous year, two Buffalo Bills executives got the axe shortly after returning from England because they were engaged in a professionally unethical romantic relationship in conspicuous fashion.
With the Broncos and Jets set to meet Sunday at Tottenham Hotspur, the second of three London games on this season’s schedule, there should be at least a tiny bit of trepidation that someone will slip into the snake pit and become the latest NFL personality to make a forgettable Brexit.
“I’m excited to go back there,” says Broncos coach Sean Payton. “But let’s just say I’ve had some interesting experiences in London over the years. There are a lot of things that can throw you for a loop.”
On many levels, the NFL’s foray into the UK — part of an international strategy that this year includes games in Brazil, Ireland, Germany and Spain — has been a smashing success. The Jacksonville Jaguars have made London their European hideaway; their Oct. 19 showdown with the Los Angeles Rams will be the franchise’s 11th “home game” at Wembley Stadium (and 14th in the city) since 2013. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell recently told CNBC that ultimately basing a franchise in London is “possible.” Either way, the league’s foothold there will remain for the long haul.
The idea of staging the Ultimate Game in The Big Smoke has been smoldering for nearly two decades, and a London Super Bowl now seems somewhat inevitable. Last October, at an annual NFL fan forum in London, Goodell was asked about the possibility of deciding a championship on foreign soil. “We’ve always traditionally tried to play a Super Bowl in an NFL city — that was always sort of a reward for the cities that have NFL franchises,” Goodell answered. “But things change. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if that happens one day.”
However, plenty of things have happened on these London trips that are pretty far from Super, mishaps that extend far beyond the “they don’t have the right kind of ketchup” kind of crises. Other entanglements have been far more amusing: The Tennessee Titans conducting a walk-through at Syon Park, replete with long grass and holes, overlooking the home of the Duke of Northumberland beside the Thames River; the New Orleans Saints working out prospective punters on the unmarked front lawn of their hotel’s grounds.
In the immediate aftermath of a lopsided road defeat to the Carolina Panthers in October 2008, Payton, then the Saints’ third-year coach, decided to cut punter Steve Weatherford. With the team scheduled to fly directly from Charlotte to London — in advance of the following Sunday’s game against the San Diego Chargers at Wembley — Payton informed Weatherford of his decision in the locker room, and other New Orleans players watched as the punter’s belongings were located and removed from a team bus as it prepared to leave the stadium. During the flight to London, Saints front-office officials scrambled to find prospective replacements, with the caveat that they had to be in possession of up-to-date passports. Four punters were subsequently flown to London, leading to the unusual tryout scene.
“We didn’t have a field available,” Payton recalls, “so we just went out to the front of this very nice hotel (The Grove) and had them booming kicks on the grass. There were English ladies having their crumpets and tea out on the grounds looking on and wondering, ‘What the hell is going on?’”
Sean Payton and the Saints set up shop at The Grove hotel during a 2008 trip to London. (Julian Finney / Getty Images)
As it turned out, the winner of that competition, Ben Graham, would only punt three times, as Drew Brees led the Saints to a 37-32 victory over former teammate Philip Rivers and the Chargers. However, Payton’s game day experience was not totally blissful.
The previous afternoon, during a walk-through at Wembley, security officials had specified the exact path that the Saints’ players and coaches would take from their locker room to the field before the start of the game: Turn left and walk through the tunnel that emptied into a midfield entry point.
When Payton exited the locker room on Sunday, however, things had inexplicably changed: An event security staffer was blocking his passageway and attempted to redirect him to a more convoluted route. Revved up and annoyed, Payton made what he called a “swim move” to brush past the security guard, making slight contact in the process. His players followed.
Shortly after his return to Louisiana, Payton was greeted by NFL officials who’d been dispatched to investigate the incident. He was not disciplined.
In 2010, Goodell came down hard on another head coach after another London-related controversy. The Broncos’ organization and Josh McDaniels, then the team’s second-year coach, were each fined $50,000 after it was discovered that video operations director Steve Scarnecchia filmed six minutes of the San Francisco 49ers’ walk-through the day before the two teams’ October game at Wembley. Scarnecchia, as a New England Patriots’ employee, had also been involved in the “Spygate” scandal (involving the unauthorized videotaping of opposing coaches’ signals) that rocked the league three years earlier.
On Dec. 6, nine days after Goodell announced the penalties, Denver owner Pat Bowlen fired McDaniels.
If McDaniels was the first NFL powerbroker whose dismissal could be traced to a London lapse — well, he certainly would not be the last. In an environment with heightened scrutiny and a lessened ability to impose control, coaches and front-office executives often face challenging circumstances. At times, they can’t help but feel that when they step on foreign soil, they’re also on shaky ground.
Raheem Morris was 33 and staring at an 0-7 record as an NFL head coach, with a mismatch against Tom Brady and the Patriots at Wembley on deck. His team wasn’t due to depart London until the day after the game, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ rookie coach thought that imposing a Sunday night curfew — a decree from the team’s front office — was a dubious idea.
Morris went along with it, but in the wake of the Bucs’ 35-7 defeat in October 2009, some of his players ignored the edict. While socializing at a small party in the hotel lobby (another team official’s brainchild, and another decision that Morris didn’t love), Morris noticed second-year cornerback Aqib Talib walking through the front door of the lobby. It was long after curfew, and Morris called Talib over and tried to defuse the obvious violation, telling him, “Go to bed.” Though Morris had publicly labeled Talib a “wild child” because of his penchant for off-the-field drama, the two had a good relationship, and Talib’s protests (“Come on, Rah, it’s the night after the game. We’re in London. I’m finna take this fine …”) were loud but not hyper-confrontational.
Then Mike Alstott entered the fray. The popular and retired Bucs fullback approached Talib and said, “Why are you yelling at your head coach like that? You should be in bed.” Talib did not take it well.
“M———-, I don’t know you!” he screamed at Alstott, who yelled back at Talib, criticizing him for disrespecting Morris. Things deteriorated as Morris loudly implored Talib to go to his room.
“I was hanging out in the lobby lounge area with our video guys, having some beers and catching up, and all of a sudden there was a bunch of noise by the front doors,” Alstott remembers. “Talib was yelling at Raheem, and I walked over and found out he broke curfew. I think I said, ‘Hey bro, are you really gonna talk to your head coach like that?’ I’m old school.”
Recalls Talib: “It might have been 3 a.m. Alstott came out of the blue. I said, ‘Rah, you better tell him to get out of my face before I knock his big ass out.’ (Morris) said, ‘Qib, go to the room! I got it, bro.’ He (Alstott) was just trippin’. I told Rah, ‘You know me, fam. I’ll knock his ass out. You better tell this … I’ll knock his ass out in the lobby.’
“And the thing is, I played well that game. … I had an interception and I followed Randy Moss and he caught like five balls for (69) yards. I’ve still got that international ball, which I took from Tom Brady.”
Alstott saw the incident as endemic to settings such as London that take NFL teams out of their comfort zones. “You always have one or two people who are gonna try to push the limits,” he says. “You’ve seen it at every Super Bowl. People just try to push the limits and they think they can get away with it.”
Raheem Morris was the coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers during an unsuccessful 2009 trip to London. (Elsa / Getty Images)
A report by Tampa radio station WDAE depicted the incident as a charged, profanity-laced shouting match between Talib and Morris. It was seized upon by Morris’ critics, cited as proof that he was too young for the role and that he didn’t command the respect of his players. Morris, who coached the Bucs to a 10-6 record in 2010, was fired after his third season and didn’t get a second head-coaching opportunity until the Atlanta Falcons hired him in 2024.
Then again, silence can sometimes be more ominous than shouting — as Dennis Allen, Joe Philbin and others can attest. Some high-profile dismissals have occurred in the wake of struggling teams’ lopsided London defeats that preceded bye weeks, a confluence of circumstances that compelled frustrated owners to act. Such was the case with the firings of Allen (2014 by the Raiders), Philbin (2015 by the Dolphins) and Detroit Lions president Tom Lewand and general manager Martin Mayhew (also in 2015).
In Allen’s case, the flight back to California after a 38-14 defeat to the Dolphins was especially miserable. He remembers seeing owner Mark Davis “sitting in his seat and stewing the whole time. It was a long flight.”
Davis didn’t have anything to say to Allen — and the silent treatment continued after the team landed in the Bay Area and boarded buses to the team’s training facility in Alameda. Allen, who was traveling with his wife, went home and was lying in bed a couple hours later when he got a call from general manager Reggie McKenzie informing him that he’d been fired.
Allen, who’d gone into the 2014 campaign with an 8-24 record, had seen it coming for a while. “I knew going into that season that things had to go well for it to be OK for me,” he says. “I think (Davis) was ready to move on before that season, and if that’s the mindset of the owner, he really should go ahead and do it. If you don’t have faith in the head coach to do his job, what’s the point?”
Other firings have been less telegraphed. Saleh, in his fourth season with the Jets, was coming off a 23-17 defeat to the Vikings in London last October that dropped New York to 2-3. A victory the following Monday night against the Bills could have given the Jets a share of the AFC East lead, yet Woody Johnson, in a surprising move, abruptly fired his coach six days before that game.
Saleh, whose parents were born in Lebanon, had worn a patch featuring that country’s flag in London, something he had done on previous occasions as part of the NFL’s Heritage Program. This time, given the hyper-charged state of the Middle East — including Israel’s bombing of what it said were Hezbollah targets in Beirut — some outsiders viewed it as a political statement.
There was speculation, including from New York sports-radio personality Joe Benigno, that the timing bothered Johnson, a staunch Israel supporter who served as the United States’ ambassador to the UK during the first Trump administration. A prominent member of the organization, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, told The Athletic that Johnson was incensed by his coach’s fashion choice. Saleh, the NFL’s first Muslim head coach, has declined to comment on whether he thinks the flag display could have played a role in his firing. A Jets spokesperson says that Johnson fired Saleh for performance only and that there is no merit to any claim that the flag patch influenced the owner’s decision.
A year earlier, Bills owner Terry Pegula fired chief operating officer/executive vice president John Roth and senior VP/general counsel Kathryn D’Angelo in the immediate aftermath of the team’s 25-20 loss to the Jaguars at Tottenham Hotspur. According to three sources familiar with the decision, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter, word had gotten back to Pegula that the two executives were openly affectionate at various functions, prompting sponsors and other witnesses to voice their concerns about the extramarital affair.
One Bills executive says of Roth’s and D’Angelo’s London misadventure: “It was like a weeklong Coldplay concert.”
Mike Vrabel held up two fingers, signifying a bold decision to decide a hard-fought game on a single play. Standing on the opposite sideline, a group of L.A. Chargers officials felt as if, on some level, they’d already won.
Unbeknownst to Vrabel, then the coach of the Titans, the Chargers had been told that they were operating on a tight travel deadline: If they weren’t able to take off by a specific time that Sunday night, they’d arrive at Los Angeles International Airport past the 2 a.m. cutoff for going through customs. If the game had gone to overtime, they’d have been stuck in London for the night, extending a week-and-a-half-long road trip that had begun in Cleveland. Vrabel’s decision to go for two had a lot of people in the organization celebrating, at least on the inside.
They celebrated harder when, with 31 seconds remaining, Marcus Mariota’s pass on the two-point conversion attempt was broken up, allowing the Chargers to escape with a 20-19 victory. Soon after, the Chargers’ traveling party bolted for the airport and enjoyed another fantastic finish: The plane took off promptly and landed at LAX in time to beat the customs deadline. The Titans, meanwhile, had a long flight back to Nashville.
The Titans and Chargers went down to the wire during a 2018 game at Wembley Stadium. (Clive Rose / Getty Images)
“It wasn’t that bad,” says Vrabel, now the Patriots’ head coach. “I felt a little better on the flight back when I saw that on the same day, the Ravens were in a similar situation (against the Saints) and they decided to go for one — and Justin Tucker missed the kick.”
When it comes to unwelcome travel news, it’s tough to top Roy Robertson-Harris’ 2024 London experience. Then with the Jaguars, who were playing back-to-back games in the UK last October, Robertson-Harris was informed the day after the first of those games that he’d been traded — to the Seattle Seahawks. After flying over the Atlantic, and across North America, Robertson-Harris spent less than 72 hours in Seattle before boarding a flight back across the continent (to Atlanta) with the rest of his teammates. That Sunday, he had five tackles in the Seahawks’ 34-14 victory over the Falcons.
This season, Robertson-Harris plays for the New York Giants, whose London experiences have been plainly brilliant. They won the NFL’s first regular season game in the UK, a 13-10 victory over the Dolphins at rainy Wembley in 2007, creating some marquee-game mojo in a season that ended with the Giants’ shocking upset of the previously undefeated Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. They also defeated the Rams at Twickenham Stadium (London’s home of English rugby) in 2016 and, six years later, triumphed over the Green Bay Packers at Tottenham Hotspur — in the first London game between teams with winning records.
If the Giants seemed extra hyped during their 27-22 victory over the Packers in 2022, actor Kit Harington’s presence in a seat directly behind their bench had something to do with that. During one offensive possession a Giants defender on the sideline spotted Harington, who portrayed Jon Snow in the popular HBO fantasy series “Game of Thrones,” and yelled, “The King of the North!” Other Giants players joined in as Harington cheered them on, and the interplay continued as New York shut out Green Bay in the second half.
The game’s, uh, climax featured a moment that would soon go viral on social media. Cornerback Darnay Holmes, suffering from a thigh cramp and desperate to return to the game in the final minutes, pulled down his uniform pants — exposing his backside — while a trainer vigorously massaged the area. A fan (not Harington) shot a video from behind that created the impression that Holmes was enjoying a different type of satisfaction than a hard-fought victory on the football pitch. Within days, Holmes turned the video into an NFT.
There have been other funny moments in London, including Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski’s 2012 touchdown celebration in which he mimicked a marching Buckingham Palace guard — or, in Gronk’s words, “that little nutcracker dude that’s guarding the house” — before spiking the football in the end zone.
Payton, too, became a spectacle while getting caught up in the pageantry of a London game. In the coach’s case, however, this was totally unintentional.
It happened after Hootie and the Blowfish frontman Darius Rucker sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the Saints’ 2017 game against the Dolphins at Wembley. Rucker, a devout Dolphins fan, had met Payton the previous spring while performing at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Shortly thereafter, Payton accompanied Rucker across Louisiana to the singer’s performance at a casino resort sponsored by the Coushatta Tribe.
“We’re sitting there on his tour bus,” Payton recalls, “and he says, ‘Hey, you guys are playing the Dolphins next season in London — you think there’s any way they’d fly me over there to sing the national anthem?’” Payton immediately placed a call to the late Mike Ornstein, a former NFL executive and marketing agent, and within minutes the booking was in motion.
Five months later, the anthem’s backdrop had become especially charged. The Saints-Dolphins game took place nine days after President Trump attacked NFL players for kneeling during the anthem as a protest against social injustice and police brutality, encouraging NFL owners to “get that son of a bitch off the field right now” in response. New Orleans, like most NFL teams, had long discussions about how to respond. In the Saints’ case, players agreed that everyone would kneel before the anthem and then rise in unison for the playing of the song.
It all worked out according to plan until Rucker finished his rendition, soaked up the applause and retreated to the Dolphins’ sideline. A relieved Payton, fired up and eager to dap up his new friend, jogged across the field for a quick pre-kickoff visit.
“I get near midfield,” Payton recalls, “and suddenly, I hear a voice.” It was the voice of Laura Wright, a renowned English mezzo-soprano. Payton froze. “God Save The Queen! I’d totally forgotten.” He stood near the hashmark closest to the Miami sideline as the crowd joined Wright in singing. “Now I’m in no man’s land, like an idiot. Darius is looking over from the sideline, laughing at me. Finally, the song ends and I just walk back to our sideline in shame.”
Payton would walk off the field a winner, as the Saints prevailed 20-0. Eight years later, however, his premature pregame prance remains a source of personal embarrassment.
“When I think about going to London,” he says, laughing, “all I remember is how stupid I felt standing there.”
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