Aesop's well-known fable about the tortoise and the hare sees the tortoise coming out on top, due to the hare's arrogance.

The moral is clear: Slow and steady wins the race.

The NFL will certainly be hoping that is the case, because that is the model they have adopted in trying to gain a foothold in the Chinese market, and, so far, it seems to be working.

Jerry Rice, recently ranked as the ­greatest player of all time by NFL Films, is currently on a tour of China to promote the sport, following in a line of big names who have made the trip east, including Barry Sanders, LaDainian Tomlinson, Reggie Bush and Joe Montana, to meet a small, but growing, fanbase who appreciate the effort involved in a 11-day promotional tour.

Other sports obsess with unearthing the next Yao Ming or Li Na, but the NFL's ­ultimate goal is developing that fanbase, ­according to NFL China Managing Director Richard Young. The key, Young says, is to communicate with the fans directly, rather than approach the market from a business point of view. He also says it's essential to account for the uniqueness of the Chinese market - something that other sports seem to have ignored.

The Arena Football League (the highest level of professional indoor American football in the US), for example, has repeatedly announced plans for a league in China that would appear to be widely overambitious even to the casual observer. Marty Judge, one of the businessmen behind the venture, claimed this summer that indoor football would take China by storm, despite being a niche sport in the US.

Judge is not the first westerner to have been blinded by the potential size of the Chinese market - and he won't be the last - but Young, in contrast, has spent more than two decades in Asia and knows that imposing the American model on the Chinese simply won't work.

The NFL learned that the hard way, rushing into the market in 2007, before having to drastically downsize its plans for China. But in the four years since Young has taken control, the number of those considered to be fans in China has grown from 1 million to more than 14 million, while new media has seen 1,000 percent growth over the same period.

While the NFL would of course embrace a Chinese player, it isn't trying to develop one. The hare would no doubt argue against that plan, but the NFL is happy backing the tortoise.

The author is a Beijing-based freelance writer. dreyermark@gmail.com