A commissioner who has stopped hedging
Roger Goodell has spent years answering the international expansion question with careful phrasing. He dropped the caution today.
“At some point, there will be NFL teams outside the USA. I have no doubt that this will happen one day,” Goodell told former NFL defensive lineman Markus Kuhn in an interview for German broadcaster RTL/ntv, published earlier today.
The number behind the statement is the part worth sitting with. The NFL will stage nine regular-season games outside the United States this season, an all-time high: three in England, and one each in Australia, Brazil, France, Spain, Germany and Mexico. A decade ago that figure sat at three, all of them in London. The league has tripled its overseas footprint while adding four new host countries in under ten years.
Try it for $0.99.
The gap between nine games and one franchise
Nine games spread across seven countries is a travelling roadshow. A team playing eight or nine home dates in the same foreign city every year is a different proposition entirely, and the arithmetic is where it gets difficult. Divisional opponents would face a transatlantic or transpacific trip on a short week. Free agents would be asked to relocate their families across an ocean. Local broadcast windows would need to accommodate a Sunday kickoff that lands at breakfast time in one market and midnight in another.
Goodell went further and floated the endgame. Asked whether a foreign city could stage a Super Bowl, he said: “There are definitely international cities that could host something like that. But we would like to see an NFL team in such a city first.”
Reading the order of operations
That sequencing tells you how the league is thinking. The Super Bowl is not the lever, it is the reward. A franchise comes first, proves the market sustains a full season of home dates, and only then does the biggest single-day event in American sport get put on a plane.
London remains the obvious candidate, with the most games played and two purpose-built venues. Whether Goodell is still commissioner when any of this lands is another question he did not address.
Discover the rest of our NFL news on MathODDS!
in your pocket.
Real-time notifications & alerts
Leave a Reply