The decline of American football as a spectator and participation sport in the US can open the door for rugby to become a major pastime across the pond.

That was the view of a number of speakers during the first day of the Rugby Expo conference in Coventry (3 November), including Saracens Rugby chief executive Heath Harvey and Premiership Rugby CEO Mark McCafferty.

The latter emphasised the US the Premiership’s “number one target” for international growth which is “prime for development”, while Harvey highlighted the “hard time” being had by NFL in terms of viewing figures, as well as participation rates for other sports, as an opportunity for the game to capitalise on.

“If you look at participation sports in the US it’s all about lacrosse and rugby,” he told delegates at Wasps’ Ricoh Arena. “Everything else is struggling from a viewing perspective and participation perspective.

“NFL is having a hard time of it at the moment, and that creates a vacuum which we would all like to see rugby union step into.”

The Saracen’s chief revealed that when he went to visit Microsoft in Seattle when Saracens played London Irish in New York earlier this year, company executives were “blown away” by the “grassroots nature” of the sport which encouraged participation from “five and six year-olds, all the way through to vets”.

“They contrast that with NFL, which is a very elitist sport where 160 guys go into a college football programme and 0.5 per cent of those athletes will leave college and work in the professional game and the others will get jettisoned to work in Starbucks or Costco,” he said.

When challenged that soccer took 40 years to find a place in American society and that rugby should look to that rate of growth before putting all its eggs in the US basket, Harvey replied that the changing nature of technology made it easier to engage people with something new.

His fellow panellist Nathan Bombrys, the American chief executive of Glasgow Warriors, also suggested that people in the US would prefer rugby over soccer due to the “high scoring nature” of the game, while Wasps CEO David Armstrong added that the major growth in Major League Soccer (MLS) had occurred over the last four or five-year period.

McCafferty observed that success in the US would allow Premiership rugby clubs to grow their brands, and hinted that other regular season games would be played in the US to boost the competition’s overall international exposure.