Friday marked the first of seven international regular season games the NFL will play in 2025, with the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers mixing it up in São Paulo, Brazil. Fans who are more accustomed to world class association football showed plenty of love for the top-tier tackle kind, with 47,000 watching the Chargers take a 27-21 victory at Arena Corinthians.
Other overseas stops this fall/winter include Dublin, Berlin, Madrid and three trips to London.
“The 2025 NFL season will see seven regular season games played outside of the U.S. – the most ever regular season international games to date, including historic first games in iconic venues in Berlin, Dublin and Madrid,” NFL official Peter O’Reilly, who is in charge of international league events, said when the slate was announced. “The 2025 International Games schedule showcases an exciting selection of matchups featuring major NFL stars, bringing our game directly to fans around the world, and underscores our collective commitment to global growth as we continue our journey to becoming a truly global sport.”
Each year, it seems, the NFL expands its reach, and next year it steps into Australia with the Los Angeles Rams serving as the host team for a game in Melbourne.
“Expanding to Melbourne, Australia, a beautiful city with a rich sports history, underlines our ambitions to become a global sport and accelerate international growth,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a prepared statement. “Together with the Victorian State Government, Visit Victoria and the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and with the Los Angeles Rams in 2026, we look forward to making history in what is an important market for the NFL and a significant next step in expanding our international footprint.”
What the NFL is doing right now for foreign relations might well be enough. When the league goes to locales like London it’s always a major event, and being an annual visitor is a great arrangement for both the city and the league.
But remember, talk about putting a franchise (or franchises) across the pond has never gone away and has, in fact, been pushed by Goodell himself.
“I think there’s no question that London could support not just one franchise, but I think two franchises, I really believe that,” Goodell said at a fan gathering hosted by Sky Sports back in 2022. “And that’s from a fan perspective, a commercial standpoint, from a media standpoint, I think you (United Kingdom fans) have undoubtedly proven that, and thank you for that. We’re trying to see could you have multiple locations in Europe where you could have an NFL franchise because it would be easier as a division.”
I’ve pontificated on these matters before, because it costs nothing to do so. My last unsolicited idea – based on Goodell’s musings – was to expand the NFL to 36 franchises with a European Division consisting of two London teams as well as clubs in Frankfurt and Munich. Playing each division foe twice along with the balance of a 17-game schedule, that gives the international wing of the NFL 11 or 12 games on their side of the Atlantic in addition to five or six in the United States.
“The question I think is going to come down to, not so much the logistics about travel, that’s clearly a challenge, it really comes down to whether you can do it competitively,” Goodell said three years ago. “Where the team here or the teams in the States coming over can continue to be competitive and that was the challenge when we did the regular season games.”
OK, so let’s make it less challenging by expanding the NFL to eight European markets – London One, London Two, Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin, Dublin, Glasgow and Paris. (You can plug in your own European cities here … I’m just using these as examples).
One four team division would go the NFC and the other to the AFC, splitting the NFL into two, 20-team conferences with five divisions in each.
To help with scheduling, the European teams would play each other twice during the regular season, accounting for 14 games of the 17-game slate. The remaining three would feature traditional NFL teams coming for a visit.
In other words, in addition to seven home and seven road games against European sides, the London Kings would also host, say, the Green Bay Packers, Chicago Bears and New York Giants while the London Knights might welcome the New York Jets, Las Vegas Raiders and Tennessee Titans.
The winners of each European Division would earn a playoff spot and be guaranteed at least one postseason home game.
This unbalanced, all-European schedule would give the eight international teams a bit of a break in the regular season since they would face only a handful of legacy NFL foes (and avoid overseas travel), but hey – that’s life.
And since the NFL is a global brand, it could continue its international series in places like Brazil and Australia, utilizing franchises that aren’t traveling to play the European squads.
Of course, if something like this ever happens, it will be many years down the road. If and when it does, I’ll have shuffled off this mortal coil or be too old to care – or write about it.
Still, it’s fun to think about, and that’s what I’m thinking about as the National Football League begins a brand new season.
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