It will be like a home from home, with jazz bands playing and the smell of Cajun cooking wafting between the queues of fans as they wait for the big game to start. Except home for the New Orleans Saints is actually more than 4,500 miles away from the lush, green turf of Wembley, where they will play the San Diego Chargers on Sunday evening.

Thousands of Saints fans will be forced either to miss one of only eight regular-season home games they get each year, stump up hundreds of dollars to travel to London, or watch at home on television. Welcome to the NFL's “international game”, a cross-border money-spinner that English football's Premier League yearns for yet may never be able to stage.

When Richard Scudamore, the Premier League chief executive, disclosed his ambition to stage top-flight fixtures in ten locations around the globe, the football world exploded with derision at what was rapidly vilified as “the 39th game”. Resistance from fans was huge, the Government was chary and Sepp Blatter, president of Fifa, football's world governing body, was outraged.

Yet the NFL has overcome the same objections from fans in the United States and, for the second year running, is staging a match an ocean from its homeland that will spin a profit for each of the 32 NFL franchises, even though it is costing almost £5million to put on.

Unlike the Premier League's rapacious every-man-for-himself attitude to cash, though, the proceeds are shared in a league in which the biggest teams are only as strong as the weakest. The contrast is forbidding and timely as the navel-gazing over the future of English football starts in earnest.

Eighty per cent of the revenues from Sunday - income from the live BBC transmission, sponsorship for pitchside advertising and sales of almost 90,000 tickets - go into the pot shared by each NFL team, although New Orleans will be specially compensated because the Sunday evening date is their home game.

In a nation where you might expect the strongest always to conquer, the NFL season is open because of a structure that means every team have a financial chance. Unlike the Premier League, in which huge television revenues of £900million a year are divided on a merit basis, with the champions earning about twice as much as the bottom club, basic income in the NFL is the same for each team.

There is a salary cap and, intriguingly given the state of affairs in England, prospective buyers of teams need approval from two thirds of the NFL franchise-holders before they can complete a sale. Thaksin Shinawatra, the former Prime Minister of Thailand, who was sentenced on Tuesday to two years in jail for fraud, would have had a lot of people to convince in the US had he tried to buy into the NFL instead of snapping up Manchester City.

“It is not exactly the same situation as the Premier League,” Alistair Kirkwood, managing director of NFL UK, said. “But there is a level of co-operation between teams to ensure their own survival and a healthy league.”

Premier League fans worried about the domination by a handful of clubs should consider this: in the past ten years, there have been only three different Premier League champions - Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal; over the same period, eight clubs have won the Super Bowl and this season is similarly unpredictable.

The Wembley fixture is designed to spread the gospel of American football and rake in yet more profit as a reward. “It is a strategic decision that was asked,” Kirkwood said. “Do we want to have a fanbase of 400million in the USA, or four billion around the globe? The NFL has gone for expansion.”

Which is what Scudamore will push for again in February when he attempts to revive plans for an international round of Premier League fixtures. For Cajun cooking in North West London, imagine pies from Bolton in Beijing or beyond.

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