LONDON
The last time a college football team played a competitive game in London, the Berlin Wall was still standing. It was October 16, 1988, at the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre, and Richmond beat Boston University 20–17 in something called the Imperial Bowl. Roughly nobody remembers it. The sport went home, and for thirty-eight years it stayed there.
On Saturday at six in the evening, that ends in the least subtle way imaginable. The Kansas Jayhawks and the Arizona State Sun Devils will emerge from the Wembley tunnel — the same arch that has carried a World Cup final, Live Aid, Olympic football and a decade of NFL fixtures — to play the first game in the history of the Football Bowl Subdivision contested on British soil.
It is called the Union Jack Classic. It is a real Big 12 conference game with real standings implications, and Kansas is the designated home team. The Jayhawks' 2026 home schedule includes a stadium in northwest London.
What London is actually being sold
American football is not new to Wembley — the NFL has been coming for years. But the NFL is a closed shop of thirty-two franchises. College football is stranger and, to British eyes, harder to parse: marching bands, 100,000-seat campus stadiums in towns of 30,000 people, rivalries that predate the Premier League. That is the pitch. The Big 12 is not exporting a game so much as an atmosphere, and it is betting the atmosphere is the product.
Commissioner Brett Yormark has been explicit about the ambition. "I've often said my goal is for the Big 12 to be the most globally relevant conference in college athletics," he said when the game was confirmed, adding that expanding the league's international presence would "open the door to meaningful commercial growth." The agreement behind Saturday's fixture is multi-year, with further matchups under discussion. This is not a novelty. It is a beachhead.
Two teams, one very long flight
The teams arrive in different moods. Kansas comes in at 1–1, having dismantled Long Island University 51–6 before losing 38–21 to Missouri, and is averaging 36.0 points and 434.0 yards a game. Quarterback Isaiah Marshall leads them with 414 passing yards and four touchdown throws. History is not kind to the Jayhawks in openers of this type — they are 9–21 all time in Big 12 conference openers — though under Lance Leipold the program is 3–2 and has won three of its last four, including a program-record 31-point win over West Virginia last season.
Arizona State arrives having done something no FBS team has done in thirty years. Last Saturday the Sun Devils played a true road game at Texas A&M in front of more than 107,000 people. Seven days later they are playing an international game. The last program to attempt that sequence was Navy in 1996.
The Phoenix-to-London leg alone is roughly 5,200 miles, the second-longest trip in Arizona State history behind only the 1990 Coca-Cola Classic in Tokyo. Across the season the Sun Devils will log more than 17,000 round-trip air miles, against about 9,000 in 2025. The two schools have met once before: Arizona State won 35–31 in Tempe in October 2024, on a Jordyn Tyson catch with sixteen seconds left.
What the coaches are actually worried about
The pre-game conversation in London has been dominated by an unglamorous question: who handles the jet lag better. Leipold, who becomes the first college head coach to lead a team out at Wembley, declined to claim any edge. "I think they got the advantage maybe to come here and get acclimated, I don't know," he said.
He was more interested in what the trip means to the people making it. "This is for our players and our university and our fans as much as anything," Leipold said. "I'm just the one that's fortunate to lead them out of the tunnel." He was generous about the opposite bench too: "Kenny Dillingham is one of the best coaches in the country," he said, noting Dillingham inherited a team picked to finish last and took it to a championship and the College Football Playoff.
Dillingham's approach has been to get the tourism out of the way fast, then slam the door. "I don't want it on your mind of, 'When am I going to get the opportunity to go do something?'" he told reporters. "I want you guys to be able to go do it right when we land, go experience it, and then let's lock back in to, you know, we gotta go win a football game."
Arizona State's numbers suggest a team built for this sort of high-variance afternoon. The Sun Devils are 10–2 over the last two seasons in games decided by seven points or fewer — the second-highest total in the FBS. They lead the nation in yards after contact, and have surrendered just three plays of twenty-plus yards all season.
What this means if you're watching
For American viewers, this is a football game at breakfast: kickoff is noon Eastern, 9 a.m. in Arizona, carried nationally on FOX, with Connor Onion and Robert Griffin III calling the action and Alexa Landestoy on the sideline. The network is shipping its entire Saturday-morning pre-game apparatus across the Atlantic to set up in the shadow of the arch. For British viewers, it is a novel evening out at a venue most Londoners can reach on the Metropolitan line, watching a sport that rewards a first-timer with a dozen distinct moments of drama per quarter.
For everyone else, the question is what Saturday proves. College football's economics have been upended in five years by realignment, television money and direct athlete compensation. Programs need revenue and relevance, and both are increasingly found outside the traditional map. If 80,000 people turn up at Wembley, the conference has an answer worth several hundred million dollars in future negotiations. If they don't, it becomes a very expensive field trip.
Either way, something irreversible happens on Saturday. A sport that has spent 150 years insisting it belongs to a particular set of American towns will have planted a flag in a stadium that belongs to everybody. The Jayhawks and the Sun Devils will play a game that counts, in front of a crowd that mostly cannot name a single player on either roster, and the result will go into the Big 12 standings as though it happened in Lawrence. Whether the experiment takes root is a question for the next decade. For three hours on Saturday, it is enough that it happened at all.
