Revealed: England star considered shocking switch to American Football

England star Tom Burgess has been linked with moves to both Leeds Rhinos and Warrington Wolves lately.

The latter comes after his brother Sam Burgess was appointed as Head Coach.

Burgess however has appeared set to stay with South Sydney Rabbitohs.

But his career could have taken a number of different paths. He turned down Wigan Warriors and also tried his hand at the NFL as he revealed on the Bye Round Podcast.

Burgess said:

“When I went to America for the first time I went to a few games and I got up close with some of the guys and I thought like I could do this.

“It’s a different type of athlete. They are more of a power-based sport. I feel like it does transition over,

“I was looking at like the tight end athlete so they’re on the offense and I was looking at that and they were did they compared me to Rob Gronkowski and he’s a freak.

“I think because we take for granted our ball abilities like being able to catch and track the ball because that’s what they said to me was when I went out trained over there , they were like ‘oh man you’re tracking the ball is so good’ but we just take that for granted because we just always used to running and catching a ball at speed.

“I went to like five different clubs over there because they usually what they do is they get through a workout and all the clubs come to you and you do one workout but because I was like just keen to travel around and they’ve got obviously unlimited money, so they were just flying me around.

“I went down the road of working out with teams, them seeing me, like, doing medicals. I did medicals everywhere.

“So I had an opportunity to go but then Souths came in and that’s when Souths offered me a good deal.

“After going to a few more games, I actually got a bit bored of the game. just sitting and watching it I thought I don’t know if this is actually for me.

“The thought of it was really good but I’m really glad I did go over and have a look at it but after seeing a few games I just saw a lot of like sitting down and a lot of sitting around and not much action.”