Because the word’s highest cancer rates aren’t killing citizens at a fast-enough pace, China may be in the midst of importing American football. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has at least 99 problems–many of them-concussion-related–but he gets breathless over the thought of cracking the world’s biggest market. The opening of “Hard Knocks: Shanghai,” Hua Hsu’s new Grantland article:

“The National Football League currently maintains four offices around the world. There is an office in Mexico City. The NFL has been popular in Mexico since at least the 1970s, and some of the largest-ever crowds to watch preseason and regular-season games were recorded in the nation’s capital, where the league has staged games since 1994. There’s another office in Toronto, where the league claims a fan base of nearly 1 million, the most die-hard among them along the border. NFL Europa shut down operations in 2007 but an office continues to thrive in London, where an annual regular-season game is played at Wembley Stadium. Commissioner Roger Goodell has even mused, carefully and obliquely, about one day placing a franchise there.

The last office is in Shanghai.

How does one begin to explain how unlikely NFL China is? Anything you want to assume about a nation that constitutes nearly 20 percent of the world’s population is probably true. China is whatever you want it to be: Massive and diverse and black-hair sameness, ancient and postmodern and blink-of-an-eye changing, it requires a different scale of description. But it’s probably not the riskiest generalization to suggest that China does not conform to anyone’s vision of a hotbed for American football. When I arrived in Shanghai, I was offered a litany of reasons, ranging from the cultural to the genetic, for why the sport would never catch on among locals. For example: There isn’t a deeply ingrained sports culture in China, and what little energies were devoted to following such things usually involved international competition. Team sports aren’t big in China, either, and the one-child policy has made parents more averse than ever to subjecting their kids to potential harm. And beyond all this, there’s football itself, which has never been an intuitive product for American export. Even nations with an appetite for American things have traditionally found football exotic and inscrutable, one of those aspects of the culture that simply doesn’t translate well.

But something unusual is happening throughout China’s major cities, where football is one of the fastest-growing sports. ocal Chinese kids are buying cleats and pads and starting teams and football clubs.”