HE'S HELPED his team to the Superbowl, one of the world's great sporting events, but one of American Football's leading off-field lights has revealed that his road to fame started in Blackpool!

Tony Softli is now director of personnel with the NFL's Carolina Panthers, helping the team to its first ever Superbowl earlier this year.

But the Washington State native's career had its pivotal moment during his year with the now defunct Blackpool Falcons, where he took over as head coach and general manager in 1990.

"In England you had guys who had never played the game before," he said: "You were coaching a lot of rugby players who were just learning to play our brand of football.

"Rugby was the main sport over there then, along with soccer - what they call football. Most of those people had never paid much attention to our American football, much less played it. But the NFL and Coca-Cola were paying to start promoting NFL-style games. Their goal was to have us get to the point where we could start selling out games at Wembley Stadium. It was the precursor to what NFL Europe would become later on, no question about it."

But his spell in England wasn't as straightforward as he had hoped: "At first I was asked to go to a team called the Italy Frogs, but I worried about the language barrier.

"I didn't want to go to a player and try to teach him something by telling something to a translator, who then would tell him who knows what.

"I was worried about what would get lost in the translation. I later came to find out that all of those guys learned to speak English from very early on in life. It wouldn't have been an issue.

"So then I go to England, and it took me about two months to understand what those guys who supposedly spoke our language were saying!"

And communications weren't Softli's only problem, as his inexperienced team suffered its worst ever season, with nine defeats and only one victory - that came by default.

It's a long way from New Orleans, where Softli saw his new team narrowly lose last year's Superbowl to the New England Patriots.

But Softli admits the spell on the Fylde helped him decide to pursue his career in the game and return to Washington State University to relaunch his career.

"There is no question that it's helped. I wasn't familiar enough with all the nuances of the game early on to see what I didn't know," Softli said.

"I was very prepared in practice and for the games beforehand. But I was really unprepared for the other stuff. I didn't have the experience I needed to be successful there."