When the Miami Dolphins and New York Giants butt heads in front of 90,000 fans at Wembley Stadium in October, it will not be the first time NFL teams will have graced our shores.

While the Dolphins-Giants clash will undoubtedly be the most important moment in the NFL's activities in the United Kingdom, there have been many great players to have strutted their stuff on Wembley's hallowed turf, including legendary quarterbacks Joe Montana, Steve Young, John Elway and Dan Marino.

The NFL burst onto our screens back in 1982 and provided sports lovers with a welcome escape from The Antiques Roadshow, Harry Secombe's Highway and Songs of Praise. The coverage on Channel 4 – which saw the first Super Bowl screened live in January 1983 as the Washington Redskins recorded a victory over the Miami Dolphins – sparked a boom in interest in the NFL.

The 1980s saw huge television audiences drawn to Channel 4's coverage as Montana, Marino, Walter Payton and William 'The Refrigerator' Perry became household names in the UK. Payton even managed a guest appearance alongside Bill Beaumont and Emlyn Hughes on a Question of Sport.

The sport reached its pinnacle in the UK in January 1986 when four million viewers tuned into Super Bowl XX to watch Perry, quarterback Jim McMahon and the rest of the Chicago Bears record a 46-10 victory over the New England Patriots.

Later that same year, the Bears were the logical choice to grace Wembley Stadium as the first of eight consecutive NFL preseason games was played in London. The Minnesota Vikings and St. Louis Cardinals had played an exhibition game back in 1983 but it was played prior to the Channel 4 boom and was witnessed by 23,000 rather bemused fans.

In pouring rain, more than 86,000 fans saw the Bears defeat the Dallas Cowboys by a 17-6 scoreline. The highlight of a rain-soaked evening was seeing 25-stone defensive tackle Perry force his way into the end zone for a touchdown.

In the seven American Bowls that followed, teams such as the Dolphins, Redskins, San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Raiders graced Wembley Stadium, regularly drawing crowds of 70,000.
Having seen the real deal on their own doorstep, amateur players across the country began forming teams and it was virtually impossible to drive past a park in the late 1980s and early 1990s without seeing a group of men beating seven bells out of each other in rather shabby-looking uniforms. Finals between the likes of the London Olympians and London Ravens would draw in excess of 20,000 fans.

And the amateur game in the UK had some rather famous participants, including Leicester Panthers team-mates Martin Johnson and Sean Payton. Johnson played tight end and defensive end for the Panthers before turning to professional rugby and World Cup glory with England, while Payton played quarterback before going on to become head coach of the New Orleans Saints – via assistant coaching stops in Dallas and New York (Giants).

In terms of television coverage and the amount of action available, NFL fans in the UK have never had it so good. Since the introduction of Sky television, American football fans have been able to catch more live NFL action than ever before.

Channel 4 may have stopped showing NFL action in 1998 but an unprecedented amount of live football can now be seen on Five and Sky Sports, while ITV has covered the last three post-seasons, including Super Bowls in Jacksonville, Detroit and Miami.

In November 2006, the United Kingdom showed it was still an international market to be reckoned with when the NFL's London office inked a four-year television deal with Sky Sports. The deal – which should give fans in the UK 365 days of coverage each year – was the largest for the NFL outside of the United States, confirming the value of America's number one sport.