The National Football League has toyed with the idea of expanding overseas several times during the past decade. During the dead months of the offseason between the Super Bowl and the NFL Combine or the NFL Draft and the beginning of training camps, the discussion is sure to come up at some point as the owners meet to vote on rule changes or speak with the press to generate some buzz.
It sounds like a nightmare from a logistical standpoint, especially when one considers the grind of intercontinental travel, but the NFL seems pretty determined to make it happen someday… or at least to keep people talking about it. Here’s a look at what would need to happen for the NFL to go international, and what we could expect in such a scenario.
Travel Grind
To date, most of the rumors around international expansion have centered on teams in Europe: the NFL does the bulk of their international outreach in Europe—barring the occasional game in Canada or Mexico—playing games in London and Germany just about every season.
The Jacksonville Jaguars, who have long struggled with attendance issues at their home stadium, were rumored to be thinking about spending part of their season in London a few years back, as owner Shahid Khan already owns a Premier League club in the UK and the team has played a game across the pond a record nine times, the most of any NFL team.
In spite of all that, the difficulty of traveling between continents makes a permanent team in another country difficult to comprehend. Right now, NFL teams that play in another country always get their bye week immediately thereafter, giving players and coaches time to unwind after playing a football game while jet lagged.
Home teams win roughly 60 percent of the time in the NFL, and having a team with a 5,000 mile home advantage likely wouldn’t sit well with many other clubs: for the current international games, at least both teams have to travel.
Intercontinental playoff games would create another massive hurdle for the road team, which is something to think about in the midst of the postseason with 2024’s Super Bowl fast approaching. It’s difficult to imagine players or coaches liking the idea of a seven (or more) hour flight before a do-or-die game.
Cultivating New Fanbases
Another potential roadblock for the NFL is creating new fanbases. Expansion teams have struggled to generate fans organically, whether it’s the aforementioned Jaguars or, going back farther, teams like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and New Orleans Saints, who were historically terrible for decades following their inception.
Going overseas to a country where American Football isn’t a normal part of the cultural lexicon would make that hurdle even higher. Current international games sell tickets well, sure, but that’s also because of the novelty: would fans in Frankfurt want to stick around with their team amidst a 2-15 season, or would the venture be doomed for failure when considered with other expenses like travel?
The NFL isn’t going to want to sink money into something that has little chance of succeeding, and it already isn’t easy to win as an expansion team. Doing so overseas just seems destined for failure.
Room For Hope
Traveling back and forth between continents regularly (as each NFL team plays eight or nine games apiece at home and on the road each season) would make the schedule even harder to figure out, but there is a potential fix. The league could tailor the schedule so that a team based in London would play four weeks in the UK before heading to the states for four weeks, setting up shop in a place like Orlando as a de facto second home city to practice before the games they play. The league has toyed with the idea of adding an extra bye week since they expanded the season to 17 games in 2021, and that’s another change they could implement to streamline the process.
Another thing the NFL could do is take baby steps toward their ultimate goal of international play. While they’ve shopped the idea of creating an entire overseas division, establishing four brand new teams overnight might be biting off more than they could chew. Expanding slowly and testing the waters by establishing teams in Mexico City, Toronto or Vancouver could help them gauge the international market, rather than going for broke with a European division.
At the end of the day, the NFL is the most popular sports league in the United States for a reason, and it’s hard to see that changing any time soon, given how well they manage to navigate any controversy against them. If the league continues to succeed—and continues to keep their eye on the possibility of expansion—one should take them seriously that it might happen some day, whether in Mexico or Monaco.
