We gave them the Los Angeles David Beckham Academy and, in return, here come the “jocks”. The NFL aims to grow a future British star by introducing American-style education — collegiate sportsmen in the US are described as “jocks” — to the United Kingdom. The league is in advanced talks with several universities about setting up an academy for promising American football players that would emulate the Stateside college system.

The plan is to offer scholarships to 18-year-olds who would enrol on a four-year course. On top of academic work, they would be trained intensively by coaches imported from America. The hope is that, on graduation, they would be picked up by NFL teams. The scheme will initially be available at a single institution.

“We don’t have an iconic British player,” David Tossell, NFL International’s director of public affairs, said. “There are two ways you can do it — a short-term fix, importing someone like a Jonny Wilkinson, or a long-term plan, developing players. The NFL is not indigenous to anywhere apart from America, so we don’t have a supply of international players going into the league.”

Last week, soon after the Hamburg Sea Devils became World Bowl champions in front of a crowd of almost 50,000, the NFL announced that it was shutting NFL Europa, after 16 years, to concentrate “strategies and resources” on developing its main brand around the world.

“NFL Europa built up a passionate fan base in key European markets that encourages us to believe, when we bring the NFL in its highest form to Europe, it will be a success,” Mike Signora, an NFL spokesman, said.

Average attendances in NFL Europa were reasonable at a shade more than 20,000. However, it was thought to lose about £15 million annually. Only a couple of its alumni went on to enjoy success in the US and, in recent years, NFL teams rarely sent top prospects for seasoning in Europe. Five of the six teams were based in Germany, the other in Amsterdam.

It began in 1991 as the World League of American Football and was reinvented as a six-team European division in the mid-1990s. The London Monarchs, who sometimes struggled to attract crowds above 5,000, shut down after the 1998 season and the Scottish Claymores folded in 2004.

Yet the appeal of the high-grade game remains strong in the UK, where two million viewers watched the 2007 Super Bowl in February. The Miami Dolphins take on the New York Giants at Wembley on October 28, in the first regular-season game outside of North America. About 160,000 fans requested 500,000 tickets in three days. With a ballot continuing and allocations for US-based followers of the teams yet to be finalised, 46,000 tickets have been sold within hours of going on the market.

“We hope Wembley will be a springboard to greater things,” Signora said. “I think there’s huge potential as the world gets smaller every day.”

The league intends to play two regular-season games abroad each year and has identified the UK, Germany, Canada and Mexico as target markets. Wembley has been pencilled in for games in 2009 and 2011. If the experiment proves successful, the NFL will consider adding an extra fixture to each club’s schedule. That would result in London hosting four matches every season, paving the way for a Europe-based team to join the NFL. The NFL is also targeting China, but the time-difference precludes the staging of a regular-season game because it could not be shown live on prime-time television in the US.