PARIS — Elio Amazouz doesn’t think European fans of American football get enough credit.
The Paris resident runs @FranceTerps on X and is a co-host of The Trick Play, a French-language college football podcast with over 5,000 followers on X. He’s willing to bet not many other Maryland football fans had to stay up until 4 a.m. to watch the Terps take on No. 1 Oregon last November.
“When you live in a country in Europe, and you’re watching games at [4 a.m.], it means you’re a diehard fan,” Amazouz said.
“Sometimes some American people are challenging us, like, ‘Oh, you don’t know football, blah, blah, blah, you’re European’ … you don’t know how much we’re committed.”
Sports streaming platform DAZN started providing streams of NFL games in 2023 when it acquired the rights to NFL Game Pass International, and has a deal with ESPN to stream some college football starting in 2025. But before that expansion — and still today, albeit to a lesser extent — it’s not easy to access American football across Europe.
NFL games other than the Super Bowl are rarely shown on network television in most countries, much less college games. Virtually every American streaming service that features football does not operate in Europe.
That’s left fans like Amazouz with two options: use a VPN to access those streaming sites, or in big cities, find a bar that shows American sports. His best option for the latter is The Moose, a Canadian-themed pub in Paris’ 6th arrondissement. The pub’s walls are donned with American and Canadian sports team memorabilia — including, at one point, a Maryland pennant Amazouz put up.
At The Moose, Amazouz has seen a community of football fans come together and grow.
“I have some friends who are huge fans of [former] Pac-12 teams like Oregon and Berkeley, and they are watching games until 7 or 8 a.m.,” he said.
Amazouz, 30, was a football fan before he was a Maryland fan. He fell in love with the sport in his early teenage years and immediately found himself drawn to the New Orleans Saints, a team fresh off winning Super Bowl XLIV in a city with deep French cultural roots.
It was around that time that YouTube became the go-to source for football highlights. Until then, outside of occasional television, Europeans didn’t have an easy and centralized way to watch the sport. Now they had a repository.
“In high school, I started looking for full football games on YouTube. And I found some Texas A&M games,” Amazouz said. “It was Johnny Manziel. It was the big type of football, crazy college football. And so I started watching college football.”
The Manziel-led Aggies played a big role in getting Amazouz enamored with college football, but it wasn’t until 2018 that he settled on Maryland as his team. That’s when he met his now-wife, Grace, a then-Maryland student studying abroad in Rome.
The two started dating, and Amazouz — a flight attendant at the time — now had a good reason to visit an American college.
“With my previous work it was pretty easy for me to go to UMD for two or three months in a row,” Amazouz said. “So I was basically living the college life without studying.”
The first Maryland game he ever attended is one most Terps’ fans would like to forget about: a 59-0 home loss to Penn State in 2019, tied for the most-lopsided defeat of the Michael Locksley era. Penn State had 612 total yards to Maryland’s 128 — quarterback Josh Jackson only got his offense into Penn State territory twice all game.
It didn’t matter. Amazouz was hooked. His football fandom has only grown since meeting his wife; sometimes to her chagrin.
“The [2019 NFC Championship game against the Rams] with the famous no-flag, I was watching it on TV in the back [of The Moose] with some other Saints fans,” Amazouz said. “Grace was there, and she was like, ‘Fuck, why did I pick the only French guy who loves American football this much?”
The era of social media has ushered in a new way for football fans across the world to connect. He started @FranceTerps and the Trick Play Podcast in 2019 and 2020, respectively, as an effort to help bolster a French football community.
“I [post] in French because it’s what this account is for,” Amazouz said. “For French-speaking people, just to help developing football across the country.”
That effort is working. A Belgian man who follows Amazouz’ account was so inspired by his fandom that he bought his brother — also a Belgium native — a Terps hoodie.
Amazouz is optimistic about Maryland’s future. He’s a fan of the job head coach Michael Locksley has done rebuilding the team in the post-Taulia Tagovailoa era, and like any other Maryland football fan, he’s excited to see who starts at quarterback against Florida Atlantic.
“Malik Washington is the face of this new generation,” Amazouz said. “Locks has always been a good recruiter. People have to trust him.”
He’s got a better reason than most to hope for Maryland to be a good on-field product, though. It’s a lot easier to stay up until 4 a.m. to watch good football than bad football.
