(Inter)National Football League

Hot off the three-peat that wasn’t, the NFL is letting the rest of the world know it’s coming for it. In recent weeks, Ireland, Spain, and Australia have agreed to host future games, which adds to the 4 international games hosted by the UK and Germany (3 & 1) each season. Commissioner Roger Goodell has said his goal is 16 international games every year, while also dreaming of international franchises and a Super Bowl abroad not out of the question. So, what’s going on here? Is America’s favorite sport really putting down roots outside its borders? Does the gameplay suggest a mismatch beyond novelty?

The NFL is a finely tuned machine, dominating live entertainment with its carefully designed gameplay and earned status. Its down-by-down format and rule evolution maximize excitement, making it compelling whether casually in the background or intensely analyzed for hours. With an average of 17.5 million viewers per game and $16 billion in annual broadcast revenue from virtually every major network and streamer in 2024, it commands primetime slots and weekend days for a third of the year. Often described as both Shakespearean and gladiatorial, the NFL stands unrivaled—not just in live sports, but in live U.S. broadcasts of any kind.

When you own your foundational market - and growth being ever-expected to track up and to the right - it stands to simple reason that you go looking outside of it to greener pastures for new audiences, fans, users. Look no further than the New and Upcoming original content lists from Netflix, Amazon, or HBO Max, its mostly foreign-language series and movies for markets with many more yet-subscribed potential viewers. For the NFL, new growth may only seem viable beyond U.S. borders.

But does it really translate? The NFL boasts sell-out crowds and rave reviews at international games, suggesting untapped markets worldwide. However, packed stadiums mask a key issue: these games are the least watched of the season, likely dragging 2024’s average viewership into an uncharacteristic dip. The game itself doesn’t change abroad—airtime does. The oceans flanking the U.S. add 8-9 hours of separation and multiple time zones (except for games in Central and South America), making a 9:30 AM Sunday kickoff in the UK far less appealing than a familiar afternoon slot. While full stadiums contribute to the NFL’s spectacle, ticket sales account for just 15% of league revenue—the bulk comes from massive broadcast deals. Experiments are fine when they’re purely additive, but speculative expansion that undercuts a dominant, proven model feels both risky and self-defeating.

Also buried beneath strong international turnout is the question of whether it stems from the novelty of a one-off event or signals a sustainable foreign fanbase. A cynic might argue that fans attend simply because they rarely get the chance, not because they’re future season ticket holders for an 18-game schedule. The telling fact that U.K. crowds go wild for kickoffs, field goals, and extra points—while often wearing random jerseys, regardless of the teams playing—suggests novelty plays a major role. There’s a loose but insightful parallel with U.S. soccer: American fans pack stadiums for Premier League exhibition matches here but show far less enthusiasm for midseason MLS games:

While much of the data challenges the financial case for a permanent slate of international NFL games, it also makes Roger Goodell’s long-standing push for overseas franchises even harder to justify. Talent is non-negotiable in pro sports, and football’s brutal physical toll demands recovery time—something extensive travel only worsens. Betting lines already favor home teams when opponents cross U.S. time zones; an intercontinental schedule could cripple international franchises. The NFL has floated the idea of European teams composed of U.S. players relocating for the season, but the logistical hurdles are massive. How would in-season trades, cuts, and free agency work? What about taxes, visas, families, and schooling? I’m sure sharper minds are tackling these complexities, but one reality remains: NFL players hate international games:

As entertainment, a pro sports league succeeds as a product of scarcity of talent and competition built up from broad, local familiarity with the sport. Wtf does that mean?

Scarcity of talent is what allows the NFL to credibly deliver the most elite players in the sport. Roster spots are reserved for the best of the best, with an exceptionally high bar for entry. This monopoly on an extremely limited resource has enabled the NFL to dominate while every attempt at a rival pro football league—from the AFL to the XFL and NFL Europe—has failed. It’s also why MLS, despite modest growth, still lags far behind the powerhouse soccer leagues of Europe and South America; they lack top-tier talent and struggle to attract it, especially in its prime.

The NFL, by contrast, draws from a massive domestic talent pipeline, with NCAA Division I football serving as a highly competitive, built-in farm system for decades. But with elite players already pushed to their physical limits each season—and, as Pat McAfee suggests, unwilling to buy into international expansion—developing a comparable talent pipeline abroad would be essential. And here lies the problem: American football has little to no foothold internationally. More on that shortly.

Scarcity of competition is a hot-button issue for the NFL, which has steadily added more games to team schedules—a topic that extends beyond international expansion. However, it’s worth considering here, as additional regular-season games may be necessary to make an international schedule feasible. Competition scarcity is driven by simple supply and demand: the NFL has created perpetual, pent-up demand by controlling supply, earning unprecedented compensation for its product. With only 17 regular-season weeks and games once a week (plus one Monday Night Football), the frequency slightly increases at season’s end and during the playoffs when games matter most. The NFL has perfected this balance to date, echoing P.T. Barnum’s wisdom: always leave them wanting more. If international expansion results in more games, the NFL risks disrupting this delicate equilibrium, potentially diluting its once-unassailable product across too many competitions. The struggles of the other big four sports—MLB (162 games), NBA (82), and NHL (82)—highlight the downside of oversupply, which erodes audience demand until the postseason.

Broad, local familiarity with a sport is a consideration for which the NFL, in pursuing a top-down approach to taking the NFL global, is missing the forest for the trees and stepping into a foundational void. As hyperlinked in the paragraph before last, American football participation has no meaningful presence abroad, at any level of competition, from peewee to college. Perhaps unsurprisingly, despite the launch of an international player pathway program in 2023, the NFL is made up almost entirely of U.S.-born athletes:

The degree to a switch is generally recognizable in a given country such that a significant mass of individuals have had first hand experience playing it or watching someone they know play, may be a most viable indicator of its potential to produce a sustainable fanbase of its professional level.

In the U.S., lots of kids grow up in little league, playing pickup basketball, travel hockey, club soccer, or peewee football, and their parents shuttle them to and from games. In high school, young people play and watch these sports, the same goes for college. It’s hardly surprising that baseball, basketball, ice hockey, and football are four of the five most popular sports in America. The enduring presence of a sport across age groups, life experiences, and socioeconomic categories creates a shared base from which the supremely gifted may ascend to professional level and everyone else may become a fan, from casual to diehard.

Football is big business from high school through pros in the states and nearly ubiquitous to American culture. Much like the makeup of its active rosters, NFL fans are primarily U.S.-based, compared to nascent if not de minimis real fanbases outside the U.S., where foreign citizens’ exposure to football, by and large, begins and ends with the elite NFL:

Goodell and the NFL hq may have visions of a gridiron version of the global explosion the NBA experienced in the early 1990s thanks to the star power of one Michael Jordan and the ‘92 Dream Team. That was a moment in time and there aren’t any reasonable 2025 NFL comps. However, the NFL braintrust could take a different page from the NBA’s book as far as bringing their game to a global level.

In 1990, NBA rosters were predominantly mono-national, with 95% of players from the U.S. Around the rise of Air Jordan and the Dream Team, the NBA implemented a long-term strategy to gradually diversify its players and fanbase internationally. Success didn’t rely on establishing new teams in foreign cities or moving chunks of the regular season overseas. The approach was intentionally grassroots, starting with expanding exposure to and engagement with basketball at local levels—from recreational leagues and community pick-up games to developmental programs for foreign athletes. Many of these initiatives are still thriving over 30 years later, including the NBA Academy, Basketball Without Borders, and the use of foreign-born players as global ambassadors. NBA games abroad are treated as exciting, novelty events, with one-off international exhibitions held outside the regular season.

Today, 75% of the NBA’s social media followers are international fans, global viewership has exploded, significantly outpacing the foreign audience growth of the other Big Four U.S. pro leagues, and nearly one in every 4 current NBA players was born abroad:

There are, of course, differences in what’s required to play organized football compared to basketball. Football in its full-contact, padded form requires a specialized field, expensive equipment, and huge rosters of participating players. Two hoops, a ball, a few players and a ref can make a genuine basketball game. However, unless the NFL recognizes that global legitimacy requires more from the bottom-up than just apex pro spectacle, it may well remain just the top tier of American football.