The reports of a full, vocal and excited house for New England’s blowout of Tampa Bay in London’s Wembley Stadium on Sunday should be greeted with some gratification because the NFL has finally done something to export the game abroad and found success. After playing preseason games around the world, launching the World League of American Football (later renamed NFL Europe and finally renamed NFL Europa, just to give it a bit more continental flair to hide the fact it had shrunk to being a league of five teams based in Germany and one in Amsterdam), the NFL has finally hit on something which has achieved enough initial interest to keep doing.

Two years of playing real games in London has demonstrated that there’s an audience for American football abroad, even if the games are still not much more than a novelty. But the stakes are high for the NFL, a league that is very late to the game of internationalization.

Why does it matter? Well, for one thing, we live in a shrinking and flattening world. While Tom Friedman may have told us about it, not even he can tell us how that shrinking and flattening is going to turn out. It could be that a sport like ice hockey, mired in fourth place in the United States, might have new future in a world where seven or eight nations play it at a competitive level (U.S., Canada, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Czech Republic, Germany, Slovakia). Or the simplest sport -- think running -- with a global star like Usain Bolt might have a second chance.

The point is that no one knows what the future holds, but the signs seem to indicate that in a world of converging culture and sport, it won’t be enough to simply be America’s best-loved sport and economic colossus. So the NFL can’t just wait and hope. In his Sunday at the Post column, Michael Lombardi gave us an extremely appropriate Winston Churchill quote that perfectly sums up the NFL’s challenge to be competitive in the future on the global stage: The NFL must “depend on its brains for survival, on skilled minds that are at least proportionate” to those found in soccer and basketball. Translating the NFL to cultures where it’s not rooted is tremendously difficult. It loses something when removed from the weeklong buildup, cheerleaders, tailgating and office pools. It lacks the numbers of participants or the simplicity of other sports. So it must depend on skilled minds to translate and position it for survival on a global stage.

In a period where domestic revenues figure to be off and the cost of creating new fans and new consumers of licensed products is high, exporting the game to new money may help carry it through tough times. Yet the success of two regular-season games in London does not equate to a strategy for long-term success, and the NFL needs just that to make the sport much more than a vanity abroad.

The NFP’s Andrew Brandt strongly detailed all the competitive issues that make taking regular-season games abroad difficult. Eventually, the novelty will wear off and games need to go places other than London. But the NFL can’t be deterred. It needs to plot a course and stick to it, even though it will face adversity in globalizing the game. Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber spoke recently at NYU about merely keeping his league in business long enough to take root and have demographic changes carry soccer to the first tier of American sports. Garber talked about a 50-year-long view, and that’s exactly the kind of patience the NFL must have abroad if it’s to be relevant globally in a flat world. It can’t have 50 different starts and stops.

A stadium filled with 85,000 fans is a great start. Now a plan must be developed, and the proportionate NFL brainpower must ensure its survival. What would that plan look like? It might include a 17-game schedule expressly for playing in uniquely global places. It might include a global Super Bowl. Before scoffing, just consider that with ticket packages starting at about $5,000 a person, the pricing has already made this a once-in-a-lifetime luxury or a corporate expense, so it doesn’t particularly matter if it’s played in Wembley or Land Shark Stadium. The chance to go to London or Rome might just get more people to go rather than fewer.

But to really internationalize the sport, any plan must include coaching and equipment support for American football clubs playing outside the U.S. Actually, the NFL would do well to do a little more of that here at home, too. Finally, it must include a partnership to get foreign-born players to the U.S. for college. It’s too late to “discover” a player in his early 20s and hope he can measure up to NFL standards, but if foreign players came earlier and an American college scholarship (something still highly valued around the world) was the carrot, the future of the game on a global scale would look better and better.