Fútbol Americano

"Fútbol Americano" was the marketing name used for the first-ever National Football League regular season game ever held outside the United States. Played on October 2, 2005 at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, the Arizona Cardinals defeated the San Francisco 49ers, 31–14. The game drew an NFL regular season record of 103,467 paid fans.

The name "Fútbol Americano" is Spanish for "American football," a term used to distinguish it from fútbol, which is Spanish for association football (soccer in American English). Fútbol is an approximation of the English word "football" to the Spanish phonology; a more literal translation of "foot ball" is balompié, a calque term that is not used nowadays in Spanish-speaking countries other than for stylistic purposes in media.

Background

Beginning in 1986, the league held a series of annual pre-season exhibition games, called American Bowls, that were held at international sites outside the United States. Several years later in his annual news conference prior to Super Bowl XXXIX in February 2005, NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue announced that the league was considering holding regular season games outside the United States, with Toronto and Mexico City as the primary candidates.

El Chavo del Ocho

El Chavo del Ocho (often shortened to El Chavo) is a Mexican television sitcom that gained enormous popularity in Hispanic America as well as in Brazil, Spain, United States, Venezuela, and other countries. It centers on the adventures and tribulations of the title character—a poor orphan nicknamed "El Chavo" (which means "The Lad"), played by the show's creator, Roberto Gómez Bolaños "Chespirito"—and other inhabitants of a fictional low income housing complex, or, as called in Spanish, vecindad. The show's theme song is "The Elephant Never Forgets" by Jean-Jacques Perrey based on Beethoven's "Turkish March" Op. 113.

El Chavo first appeared in 1971 as a sketch in the Chespirito show, which was produced by Televisión Independiente de México (TIM). In 1973, following the merger of TIM and Telesistema Mexicano, El Chavo was transmitted by Televisa and became a weekly half-hour series, which ran until 1980. After that year, shorts continued to be shown in Chespirito until 1992. At its peak of popularity during the mid-1970s, El Chavo was the most watched show in Mexican television and had a Latin American audience of 350 million viewers per episode.