Tottenham Hotspur are now old hands at hosting NFL games and that was clear on Sunday as the Chicago Bears took over in N17 to tame the Jacksonville Jaguars.
American football has found its home in the UK at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium - the first purpose-built stadium for the sport on this side of the Atlantic - for the past half a decade and Sunday's latest offering was as slick as they come.
The touchdowns rained down as the weather thankfully didn't, the Bears' number one draft pick Caleb Williams hitting his groove as the 22-year-old quarterback showed everybody what all the excitement was about in the 35-16 win.
The Jags have long been the London team, having based themselves at Wembley, but in N17 they found themselves booed the Bears were the home side and ruled the roost both on and off the artificial turf, which sits beneath that Premier League pitch seen most weeks with Ange Postecoglou and his side.
The Australian was at the game, a big NFL fan himself although his affections in the sport lie away from the two competing teams on the day. Postecoglou has been at the NFL London Games in both of his seasons at Tottenham and as he stood with his family at pitch side before kick-off on Sunday, you could see the excitement on his face, far from the stresses of Premier League life.
Postecoglou spent time on the pitch with Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy and Jaguars owner and Fulham chairman Shahid Khan. The Spurs boss then exchanged a Spurs shirt for a Bears one pre-match with his compatriot Tory Taylor, a punter for the victorious team.
The 27-year-old comes from the Tottenham head coach's city of Melbourne and is another success story from that part of Australia. He spent four years playing college football at the University of Iowa before the Bears drafted him in the fourth round of this year's NFL draft, the highest selected punter in half a decade.
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Postecoglou has a clear pride in any Australian that makes it big across the world and his grin while chatting with Taylor once again showcased that.
The Bears enjoyed themselves on their visit to Tottenham, pulling out an entertaining afternoon tea celebration when Keenan Allen caught Williams' pass in the end zone. His team-mates all sat in a circle with him, all of them sipping from imaginary tea cups with their little fingers in the air. That's what us English do, right?
The experienced Allen admitted that the noise inside the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and the support of the Bears faithful caught him off guard despite his many years in the game.
"I didn't [expect it to be that good]. D.J. [Moore] was saying 'it's a home game, watch this'. I was like 'all right, I'll see how it looks'. I'm not used to that! That was solid," said the 32-year-old wide receiver in his post-match press conference.
For some Tottenham fans, it will grate that another team calls the huge stadium In N17 their home - technically two teams a season. Those Spurs supporters won't care about the Americans and their sports coming to north London. It's all just a noisy distraction from their one and only love - Tottenham Hotspur. I mean the ball is the wrong shape for a start.
There's no sense though in building a huge £1billion stadium only to purposely have it lie dormant for 345 or so days a year. Tottenham's first step of trying to compete with the big clubs that have huge revenue bases is to create their own major income.
That comes with their stadium. On Sunday, 61,182 people packed into it to watch the NFL extravaganza. The game began at 2.30pm, with fans teeming in and around the arena from hours before, and the game did not end until around 5.30pm.
Many of the crowd remained inside the stadium, eating and drinking - something they're allowed to do in their seats as well during an NFL game - and when this reporter left after the press conferences at just before 7pm there were still fans heading into the club megastore which is transformed and dedicated to NFL stock at this time of year.
Eventually Spurs will build the towering blade-like hotel to come in the south plaza and many of those people will stay on site as well, either the night before or the night after.
So take all of those hours of use and you can start to work out what Tottenham make from their stadium.
So you know, for a Premier League match at White Hart Lane, Spurs used to make just below £1million per game in revenue. At the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, they bring in almost £6million in matchday income each time Postecoglou's side play.
NFL games are slightly different. In essence, Spurs rent out the stadium so they mainly make their money from the original NFL deal, the rental fee paid by the NFL as part of their contract - extended last year until the 2029/30 season - and they also pull in major amounts of money with their portion of those huge sales of food, drink and merchandise from the megastore.
Even on the drink front, for context, back in 2019 after the first NFL game held there, Bottoms Up Beer - who provided the technology that fills up beer glasses quickly from their bottom - tweeted that £1million in sales had been made before the beer ran out in the third quarter of the game. That broke the record then for beer sales at any European venue in history.
That figure will only have risen over the ensuing years with increased prices and beer stock to ensure it never ran dry again.
The retention of the name Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, with the club unable to find a naming rights partner to meet their requirements over the years, has brought unexpected benefits and opened the door to new sponsorship deals.
Even those without a knowledge of the Premier League in America will know of Tottenham Hotspur if they love the NFL, thanks to the two games a year played inside the stadium across the Atlantic. Even in the annually released video game Madden, the NFL version of EA FC (formerly FIFA), the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is a playable ground so it's known throughout the sport.
The dream for Spurs will be one day having an NFL franchise in London call their stadium home, with games every other week to the football, or even double header weekends or potentially days if the pitch technology eventually allows that quick a turnaround.
It's not just the NFL of course either. There's also the boxing, rugby, concerts, conferences, tours and events held there, plus the F1 karting experience, all bringing money in for the football club to invest into the team.
On the subject of money, there was another recognisable face among the crowd inside the stadium. It wasn't Postecoglou, or Spurs players like Timo Werner or Djed Spence who were watching on from the stands, or the various music stars and celebrities in the crowd wanting to be part of the occasion.
It was Amanda Staveley, who was enjoying the game from a box at the stadium. The 51-year-old financier is well known for helping broker Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund's takeover of Newcastle in 2021 with her husband Mehrdad Ghodoussi and became a director there for three years until a public parting of the ways with the club this summer.
Now the pair have been heavily linked in recent months with bringing money from the Middle East to Tottenham, with chairman Daniel Levy having made it clear this year that the north London club are looking for investment.
Combined with the stadium income which helped the club bring in a record £500million revenue in the most recent financial results, Levy believes that investment will make Spurs a powerful entity to be reckoned with in the global game.
"We announced with our last results that we believe this club needs a bigger capital base because we've got a lot of exciting projects on the horizon and we want to make further investment in the teams," he said at the recent fans' forum. "Some form of minority investment is what we're looking for. We've got nothing to announce at the moment but we are in the market."
Tottenham and Levy like to work in the shadows, attempting to do their business quietly and effectively. Staveley seems like a more public presence, giving more interviews in her three years at Newcastle than Levy has done in decades at Spurs, and she has been spotted at a recent Spurs match and now at the club's hosting of the NFL London Games.
If the former Newcastle director were to bring in the finance to carve out a minority stake within Spurs, that dynamic will be fascinating to witness with Levy, who has been a hands-on chairman over the past quarter of a century, down to choosing small details of décor such as door knobs within the stadium let alone negotiating transfer fees.
What the future holds for Spurs will become clear in the months ahead. One thing that is certain for the years to come is that NFL is going to continue to be a slick and successful part of life in N17. It will always be Tottenham Hotspur's home, but there's room in the vast stadium for an enjoyable lodger to stay over from time to time.
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