Americans sometimes are surprised that few other people in the world are interested in the NFL. They have heard of something called the Super Bowl, but they overwhelmingly do not follow the game nor know very much about it.

It isn’t as puzzling as it was 20 years ago because the NFL launched the Europe-based World League of American Football and now is sending several real, live regular-season games (three, again this year) to London annually as part of the NFL International Series.

And this year, Mexico City is on the schedule, with a Monday Night Football game to be played there on November 21 — the first MNF on foreign soil.

The thinking in the league office apparently is that the low-hanging fruit, in terms of stateside consumers, was plucked long ago, and to find some new customers the NFL needs to cross some international borders.

NFL fans back in the states seem to regard these London games (starting with Sunday’s game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and Indianapolis Colts) as something of a bother, but the league doesn’t seem concerned.

Kickoff is early at 10:30 EDT on Sunday morning (7:30 a.m., on the West Coast) and, thus, hard to watch in the states — and perhaps leading to fantasy football disaster if an owner fails to lock in their teams before a Greenwich Mean Time kickoff.

But what matters most here is that the NFL’s London games (this will be the 15th since 2007) have averaged 83,061 paid admissions. Which would seem to indicate significant interest in American football by some subset of fans in London. Or England. Or Europe.

(Here in France, the London games are easily the shortest trips to an NFL game. A two-hour flight, at most, though some rail and Tube travel would follow. It would be three or four times as long a trip, and far more expensive, to go to a game in New York or Miami.)

The Jaguars have become serial participants in the London games, which makes plenty of sense, given that Jacksonville is the smallest NFL market and the Jaguars aren’t exactly being overrun by hometown fans demanding season tickets.

The idea seems to be percolating that the Jaguars are the NFL-team-in-waiting to become the first to be based outside the U.S. They even have a fan club in London (the Union Jax Fan Club), which makes sense, because the Jaguars are playing a game in London — Wembley Stadium, to be exact — for the fourth successive season.

Also, the owner of the Jaguars, Shahid Khan, a native of Pakistan but an American citizen, may feel comfortable in London, which has a significant Pakistani community and where Khan also owns the London-based Fulham soccer club.

The Rams have a game in England coming up (presumably scheduled while they were withering on the vine in St. Louis), at the rugby stadium in Twickenham, also in London, on October 23, against the New York Giants.

It is one of the Rams’ “home” games this season, leaving them with only seven in the L.A. Coliseum.

The Rams will play in Detroit the weekend before the game and presumably will fly directly to London, to minimize what could otherwise be time zone and distance disadvantages vis a vis the Giants.

And, in November, the Mexico game features the Houston Texans and Oakland Raiders, the latter of whom were very popular with Latino fans when they were based in Los Angeles, 1982 through 1994.

The NFL is doing the right thing by playing games outside the U.S.  Other countries are where the greatest gains among fans can be made, especially now that the Los Angeles market has a team.

A European-based team makes sense.

Scheduling issues could be minimized by having a London team play, say, consecutive away games while in the states, then consecutive home games in England. Reducing the number of trips over the Atlantic by half.

A more interesting solution would be an international division, perhaps including Mexico City, two other European teams and London.

This is interesting stuff, fun stuff, and I am keen to see where the NFL takes this.