Over the past few years, British audiences have begun to hear more and more about American football.

From Sky Sports, Channel 4 and the BBC showing live games to a UK audience, to the hosting of NFL games at Wembley stadium, the UK is undergoing a charm offensive from US sport.

But a combination of factors have meant that the NFL is finding it hard to penetrate into the midst of its new target audience. British audiences have to contend with time differences to watch it live; they have to make an effort to understand the tactics and rules of a new sport; they have to get into a sport that has an entirely different culture to the sports they’re used to.

And so on top of the NFL’s current strategy of bringing live action to a UK audience, they have now started to recruit UK social media influencers to try and spread the word about the game.

According to The Drum, the NFL have teamed up with sport and entertainment agency Clifford French to recruit social media influencers with a large following in the UK to engage audiences for the NFL.

“It’s unique and fantastic sport so we’re looking to partner with different influencers from various sectors like sports, music and gaming to take them on the journey of an emerging fan. This will happen over the course of the season and we want to provide them with unique access and content opportunities that will really help them get under the skin of the game.” said James Clifford, co-founder of Clifford French.

The influencers are there, essentially, to ask the stupid questions the general public will want to ask upon watching the sport for the first time. They are there to be relatable, to share the same experiences as everyone else.

It marks a shift in strategy from the NFL. No longer does it seem like just bringing the sport to the UK will be enough, even though there has been significant interest – enough to fill up Wembley and enough that the NFL will host games at Tottenham Hotspur’s new stadium at White Hart Lane when it opens.

It’s an interesting idea for growing a sport. Sports don’t just suddenly catch on, there needs to be some sort of social buzz around it. After all, the majority of people don’t simply watch sport for the self-contained pleasure of 90 minutes of footballing action, for example. They watch it for the social interaction with their friends, too. They watch it for the narrative and the outcomes, the ‘storylines’. First and foremost, sport is entertainment for most people.

But what’s entertaining for one person may not be entertaining to the next.

Last week, Bayern Munich’s CEO Karl-Heinz Rummenigge spoke up about the German football club’s desire to expand to US audiences. He told CNBC about the importance of being culturally sensitive, about understanding the differences between how US and European audiences consume sport.

There are different behavioural patterns, which makes sense because we’re talking about different sporting and entertainment cultures.

British audiences are used to watching sports like football and rugby which are faster paced, or at least more fluid than American football. Football and rugby don’t stop as often, they aren’t generally thought of as being as stat-based as American sports.

That’s how American sports are perceived through a British lens. But it doesn’t mean that the perception is true, however. And that’s what the NFL and Clifford French are betting on.

Influencers charting the journey of becoming hooked on a particular sport are valuable to the sport because they reach large audiences, but what the NFL are likely to find is that authenticity goes a long way.

If the influencers they choose genuinely become interested in the sport, then it will surely create the sort of social buzz around the sport in the UK that it seems to have been missing so far.

The problem, as always when it comes to influencers, is authenticity. When you pay someone to literally turn their life, their pastime and their entertainment into one big advertisement for a huge corporation like the NFL, you’re always going to have that problem.

Whatever happens, this will be an interesting experiment not only in growing a sport in a new country, but also in influencer marketing. And it looks like the NFL are trying everything they can to grow in the UK.