photo credit: Mackenna Miller
Fans of historic German Soccer Club Eintracht Frankfurt, will see a different version of football than they are accustomed to this November, as Duetsche Bank Park transforms its pitch into a field. Starting in 2007 the NFL hosted its first regular season game in Europe with the New York Giants facing off against the Miami Dolphins at Wembley Stadium in London, England.
Now, 16 years later, the NFL will be playing in its second German venue, after Tom Brady beat the Seattle Seahawks in Munich last season at FC Bayern Munich’s Allianz arena.
The NFL has hinted for years of an expansion team coming to London for a 33rd NFL team. Even recently in the past year, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said that the city could hold two expansion teams due to the growth of the sport in England from a commercial and media standpoint, according to Sky Sports. However, the NFL might have to take a double take due to Germany’s newfound obsession with American football.
In a 2022 marketing conference in Düsseldorf, Head of NFL U.K. Brett Gosper, announced that Germany had passed England as the NFLs largest European market. Gosper said that game pass had more subscribers, consumer products sold better and the Madden video game sold better in Germany, according to AP News.
While the expanding development of an American sport abroad is great commercially for business in the NFL, I don’t see the league rushing to add a team in the European continent any time soon.
For one thing the majority of NFL players hate playing overseas. Players have to reroute their practice schedule while in Europe due to the six-hour time difference in England and Germany and as a result they must overhaul their weekly routine, according to Bleacher Report.
Unfair advantages have also emerged from playing in Europe. This season the Jacksonville Jaguars played two regular season NFL games in England and therefore had two weeks of practice in the country. Having an entire extra week to accustom to the time zone and new playing conditions is unfair to the Buffalo Bills, who had only one week to acclimate playing a game in London. It could be argued that this factored into the Jaguars 25-20 victory over the Bills.
If I was Commissioner Roger Goodell, I would look into a Canadian based NFL team first before a European expansion. According to Statista almost nine million Canadians watched last year’s Super Bowl, and it would be interesting to see a game played in Vancouver or Toronto as a testing site. BC Place Stadium, home of the Vancouver Whitecaps is fully capable of sizing an NFL team with its 54,000 seat capacity. Time would also not be an issue for the players travel wise, as Canada falls into the same time zones as America does.
American pro sports leagues have already been successful in Canada with the massive popularity of the Toronto Raptors NBA team, along with the Toronto Blue Jays MLB team
The NFL is already at a perfect thirty two even league number with sixteen in the AFC division and sixteen in the NFC division. If a European team were to be added not only would they disrupt the balance in each division, but they wouldn’t even make sense to play in the AFC which literally stands for American Football Conference.
So while I think the NFL playing abroad is a cool opportunity to connect with fans who get to watch a game for the first time, I think these games should stay strictly as special event games rather than viewed as possibilities of expansion.
