English rugby goes stateside with New York fixture

The rising profile of rugby in the United States will be given another jolt on Saturday when the English Premiership stages its first ever overseas fixture as league leaders Saracens and London Irish face off in New York.

Organizers are hoping to draw a large crowd to the 25,000-seater Red Bull Arena -- home of the Major League Soccer side the New York Red Bulls -- as the match coincides with St Patrick's Day weekend.

London Irish chief executive Bob Casey believes the fixture will prove a hit in the Big Apple, capitalizing on increasing popularity of the sport.

"There?s been a big appetite in New York for this," Casey told rugbyworld.com

"There is obviously the rugby community and the Irish community but there is also the American public and they love their sport.

"We know that rugby is a fantastic spectator sport and then there's the game in terms of the contact, the physicality and some of the tries, I think they will really enjoy it."

The fixture is just one example of rugby's increasingly solid foothold in the American sporting landscape.

The United States seven-a-side team has become a respected force on the international circuit, winning last year's London Sevens at Twickenham and carrying genuine medal hopes into August's Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

A one-off Test match between the United States and New Zealand at Chicago's Soldier Field in 2014 was a 61,500 sell-out.

The All Blacks will return in November to face Ireland in another Test match.

Meanwhile, a first ever professional rugby union league is due to kick off this year, with five teams playing in San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento, Denver and Ohio.

Saturday's game in New York will be televised live on NBC Sports Network, a foretaste of a three-year deal agreed this month to air English Premiership games on a regular basis in the United States.

Starting from the 2016-2017 season, Premiership matches will be available each week, and up to 50 games each season made available through the network's live-streaming platform.

English Premiership chief executive Mark McCafferty said the television deal represented a "historic milestone", giving the league access "to a bigger audience than we have ever had in the US."

Premiership commercial director Dominic Hayes compares the fixture to similar moves by the National Football League and National Basketball Association, which have both staged regular season fixtures in different corners of the globe for several years.

"This isn't a brand new concept," Hayes told the BBC.

"It's something NFL and NBA have been doing the opposite way round for a few years now."

But he admits that "breaking the States" is a tall order.

"The Beatles managed it, One Direction got there, I think -- and now it's Premiership Rugby's turn," he said.