NFL International Games: Why the League Plays Abroad
How NFL international games work: why the league plays regular-season games in London, Germany and beyond, who gives up a home date and how many it may stage.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NFL Season & Playoffs25 min read
- First regular-season game abroad
- 2005
- First London game
- 2007
- First game in Germany
- 2022
- League-run games allowed per season from 2025
- 8
NFL international games are regular-season games played abroad by two teams, one of which gives up a date in its own stadium to be the designated home side. They count in the standings like any other game. The first was played at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City on October 2, 2005, when the Arizona Cardinals, officially the home team, beat the San Francisco 49ers 31-14 in front of 103,467, more people than had then ever watched an NFL regular-season game. San Francisco scored two touchdowns on fumble returns in the first quarter and lost anyway.
The league plays these games for a reason it has never hidden: its domestic market is close to full, and the growth it wants in audience, sponsorship and media rights has to come from other countries. Owners have raised the number the league office may stage from four a season to eight, and in 2026 approved ten from 2027, with the Jacksonville Jaguars' own London game counted separately. London has hosted since 2007, Germany since 2022, and the list now reaches Brazil, Spain, Ireland, France and Australia.
What the NFL International Games are: real games that count
- 2005First regular-season game abroad, Mexico City
- 2007First game in London
- 2022First game in Germany
- 2024First game in South America
Years of the first regular-season games in each market. Preseason exhibitions were played overseas from 1976 and are not counted here.
The phrase covers a specific thing. An international game is one of the 272 on the regular-season schedule, between two teams that would have met anyway under the scheduling formula, moved from the home team's stadium to a venue in another country. The result is entered in both teams' records. It counts toward division and conference standings, toward strength of schedule, toward every tiebreaker.
One club is named the home team. That label decides who wears the home uniform and whose sideline is whose, and it settles the bookkeeping, because the standings track home and road records and some tiebreakers do too. In every practical sense the site is neutral. Neither team's fans make up most of the crowd. At a London game a visitor sees jerseys from all 32 clubs in the stands, most of them worn by people who live within a train ride of the stadium.
These are not exhibitions, and that distinction is what separates the current program from everything the league tried before 2005. For two decades the NFL sent teams abroad in August to play games that did not matter, with starters on the field for a series or two. Crowds came, but the league concluded that a fan base cannot be built on preseason football. The regular-season games were the answer: fewer events, with real stakes.
The league office runs them. It contracts the stadium, sells the tickets, manages the broadcast and builds the fan events in the host city during the week. The designated home club brings its team and gives up its gate. That division of labor explains much of what follows on this page, including who is asked to go.
A note on names. The league called the program the International Series when it began in London and still uses that term loosely. The games are now marketed by city, and the umbrella label is the International Games.
Who gives up the home game: the nine-home-game conference and the eight-year promise
The hard part of playing abroad was always finding the home team. A visiting club loses nothing by going to London in place of, say, Cleveland. A home club loses a date in its own building, with all the revenue and the advantage that come with it. For the first fourteen years the league relied on volunteers and on a small number of clubs with a reason to say yes.
The 17-game season changed the arithmetic. Since 2021 every team plays an odd number of games, so in any season half the league has nine home games and half has eight. The league alternates by conference: all sixteen teams in one conference get the ninth home game one year, and the other conference gets it the next. Our guide to how the season grew to 17 games covers how that extra game is assigned, and the piece on the AFC, the NFC and their divisions sets out which teams sit in which conference.
When the owners approved the 17th game they attached an international resolution to it. From 2022 the league could designate up to four games a season as international, with the home teams drawn from the conference that had nine home games that year. A club sent abroad would still play eight games in its own stadium, the same number as every team in the other conference. Nobody would fall below eight.
The resolution also contained a promise in the other direction. Every team would play an international game as the home side at least once in eight years. With four games a season and sixteen eligible teams every second year, the numbers work out exactly: each conference needs four of its turns, spread across eight seasons, to get through all its clubs.
- The formula sets the opponentsEach team's eight or nine home opponents are fixed when the previous regular season ends.
- The conference with nine home games is identifiedIts sixteen clubs are the pool from which designated home teams are normally drawn.
- Markets and rights are matchedThe league looks at which clubs hold marketing rights in a host country and which have asked to play there.
- A home team is namedDesignated teams are usually announced in the winter, months before the full schedule.
- An opponent is chosenThe league selects one of that team's home opponents to make the trip, weighing the matchup and its appeal abroad.
- The date is setThe game is placed on the schedule in the spring, with the bye and the travel on either side taken into account.
The process as described in the league's scheduling resolutions and announcements. The league does not publish the weighting it gives each consideration.
Two refinements matter. Raising the ceiling to eight games halved the interval, so a club can now expect to give up a home date roughly once in four years. And until 2026 a club could shield two of its home games from being chosen, which in practice meant a team kept its biggest rivalry and its best draw at home. The owners removed that protection in May 2026, which gives the schedule makers a freer hand in choosing which games to send abroad.
How many games the league may stage, and the Jaguars' separate deal
The number is set by a vote of the owners, and it has gone up each time they have been asked.
| Decided | Limit on league-run games | Applies from |
|---|---|---|
| October 2006 | Up to two a season | 2007 |
| March 2021, with the 17-game season | Up to four a season | 2022 |
| December 2023 | Up to eight a season | 2025 |
| May 2026 | Up to ten a season | 2027 |
Those are ceilings. The league does not have to reach them, and between 2007 and 2021 the actual count rose unevenly, from one game a year in London to four or five across two countries, with nothing at all in 2020 when the pandemic canceled the program.
The vote in December 2023 doubled the limit from four to eight and passed 31-1. The vote in May 2026 took it to ten. The commissioner has spoken of sixteen as an eventual goal, which would mean every team playing one game abroad every season. That would be a different kind of change, and because it touches working conditions the collective bargaining agreement governs, the NFL Players Association would expect a say in it.
Jacksonville's arrangement
One club sits outside the count. The Jacksonville Jaguars have played a home game in London in nearly every season since 2013 under an agreement of their own, originally with Wembley Stadium. It is the team's choice. The Jaguars' owner also owns a London soccer club, the franchise plays in one of the league's smallest markets, and a game in London each year has been a deliberate way of adding revenue and a second fan base.
Because the Jaguars' game is theirs, it does not come out of the league's allocation. That is why the 2026 schedule could carry nine games abroad when the league's own limit was eight. In some seasons Jacksonville has stayed in London for two weeks and played twice, once as the home team under its own deal and once in a league-run game.
London: why the NFL plays there, from Wembley to Tottenham
London came first among the overseas cities for reasons that had been accumulating for 25 years. British television began showing weekly NFL highlights in 1982 and found an audience far larger than anyone expected. The league brought its first preseason game to Wembley in 1986. A London team played in the league's European developmental competition in the 1990s. By 2007 there were hundreds of thousands of British fans who had followed the sport for most of their adult lives and had never seen a game that mattered.
On October 28, 2007, the Giants beat the Dolphins 13-10 at Wembley in front of 81,176. It rained, the grass came apart, and the football was poor. The tickets had sold out long before. The Giants won the Super Bowl that season, which did the game's reputation no harm.
Three stadiums have been used.
Wembley hosted every London game from 2007 through 2015 and still hosts today. It is the English national soccer stadium, it holds more than 80,000 for football, and it was the Jaguars' London home from the start of their arrangement.
Twickenham, the home of English rugby, took three games across 2016 and 2017 when the league wanted more dates than Wembley could offer.
Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is the unusual one. When the soccer club Tottenham Hotspur built a new ground in north London, the NFL became a partner in the design. The grass soccer field is built in three sections that slide out under a stand, and beneath it lies a permanent artificial surface marked for football. The stadium has locker rooms sized for NFL rosters, which are twice the size of a soccer squad. It opened in 2019, the Raiders beat the Bears there that October in its first NFL game, and the league holds a ten-year agreement to play at least two games a season in the building.
That stadium is the strongest evidence of how the league thinks about London. Nobody pays for a second playing surface under a soccer field for an occasional visit.
By 2022 all 32 teams had played a regular-season game in London. The last to do so was Green Bay, a club with a season-ticket waiting list decades long and little wish to give up a home date at Lambeau Field.
Mexico City: the 2005 game, a crowd past 100,000 and the 2018 game that moved
Mexico was the league's first foreign market and remains, by the league's own counts of fans, one of its largest. The sport has been on Mexican television for decades, and the Cowboys, Steelers, Raiders and 49ers have followings there that go back generations.
The 2005 game was a single experiment. The Cardinals, who drew poorly at home in those years, agreed to move a game against the 49ers to Estadio Azteca, and the attendance of 103,467 stood as the regular-season record until Dallas opened its new stadium in 2009. A preseason game in the same building in 1994 had drawn more than 112,000, still the largest crowd for an NFL game of any kind.
The altitude is part of the test. At that height the ball carries farther on kicks, and players unused to the thin air tire sooner.
Then nothing, for eleven years. The league's attention went to London. It came back to Mexico City in 2016, when Oakland beat Houston on a Monday night, and returned in 2017, 2019 and 2022.
The missing year is the instructive one. In November 2018 the Chiefs and the Rams, both 9-1, were due to play at Azteca on a Monday night. The stadium's field had been damaged by a run of concerts and soccer matches and a wet autumn. Six days before kickoff, after inspections and objections from players, the league moved the game to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The Rams won 54-51, the first NFL game in which both teams scored 50 points.
The episode showed the weak point of the whole program. A league that controls every detail of its own stadiums has to depend, abroad, on a venue it does not own and a surface maintained for another sport. The response since has been to prefer stadiums where the league has a long-term agreement and some say over the field.
Estadio Azteca closed for reconstruction ahead of the 2026 soccer World Cup, and the league put Mexico City back on its schedule for 2026 once the work was done.
NFL games in Germany: Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin
The first regular-season game in Germany was played on November 13, 2022, at the Allianz Arena in Munich. Tampa Bay beat Seattle 21-16. What people remember is the crowd, which sang "Take Me Home, Country Roads" in the fourth quarter. By the league's account, ticket requests ran to many times the stadium's capacity.
Germany has hosted every year since, and Frankfurt staged two games on consecutive Sundays in 2023.
| Season | City | Stadium | Game |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Munich | Allianz Arena | Buccaneers 21, Seahawks 16 |
| 2023 | Frankfurt | Deutsche Bank Park | Chiefs 21, Dolphins 14 |
| 2023 | Frankfurt | Deutsche Bank Park | Colts 10, Patriots 6 |
| 2024 | Munich | Allianz Arena | Panthers 20, Giants 17, overtime |
| 2025 | Berlin | Olympiastadion | Colts 31, Falcons 25, overtime |
League executives describe Germany as their strongest market in continental Europe, and the history supports them. When the NFL ran a spring developmental league in Europe from the early 1990s to 2007, the teams outside Germany folded one by one for lack of support and the German ones drew well. In the league's last season five of its six clubs were German. An audience was built in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne that never went away, and German free-to-air television has carried live NFL games on Sunday evenings for years.
The league has moved the game among cities on purpose. Munich and Frankfurt bid against Düsseldorf for the first contract. Berlin was added for 2025. Each city has a soccer stadium of the right size and a regional fan base that had waited a long time.
One pattern in the table is worth pointing out. The designated home teams in the first four German games were Tampa Bay, Kansas City, New England and Carolina. Those were the first four clubs awarded marketing rights in Germany, under a program described further down this page.
The newer stops: Brazil, Spain, Ireland, France and Australia
Since 2024 the league has added a new country nearly every year. Each was chosen to answer a question.
| Country | First game | Stadium | Matchup |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mexico | 2005 | Estadio Azteca, Mexico City | 49ers at Cardinals |
| United Kingdom | 2007 | Wembley Stadium, London | Giants at Dolphins |
| Canada | 2008 | Rogers Centre, Toronto | Dolphins at Bills |
| Germany | 2022 | Allianz Arena, Munich | Seahawks at Buccaneers |
| Brazil | 2024 | Corinthians' stadium, São Paulo | Packers at Eagles |
| Ireland | 2025 | Croke Park, Dublin | Vikings at Steelers |
| Spain | 2025 | Bernabéu, Madrid | Commanders at Dolphins |
| Australia | 2026 | Melbourne Cricket Ground | 49ers at Rams |
Brazil tested a continent and a day of the week. Philadelphia beat Green Bay 34-29 in São Paulo on September 6, 2024, the first regular-season game in South America, and it was played on a Friday night in the opening week. The league normally stays off Fridays in the fall because of a federal law protecting high school football, but the restriction does not begin until the second Friday of September. An opening-week Friday in another country gave the league a new standalone window. It went back to São Paulo the following year and moved to Rio de Janeiro in 2026.
Ireland tested a club's own heritage as a selling point. The Steelers, whose founding family has deep Irish ties and who had played a preseason game at Croke Park in 1997, were the home team in Dublin on September 28, 2025, and beat Minnesota 24-21. The Vikings then stayed in Europe and played in London the next week, which was a test of a different kind: whether a team could play two games abroad on consecutive weekends in two countries.
Spain tested a stadium and a language. The rebuilt Bernabéu in Madrid, home of Real Madrid, has a retractable field of its own, and a game there reaches a Spanish-speaking audience that extends well beyond Spain. Miami beat Washington 16-13 in overtime on November 16, 2025.
Australia tests distance. Melbourne is more than fifteen hours by air from Los Angeles, far beyond any trip the league had asked a team to make for a game that counts. The Rams, who hold marketing rights there, were the designated home team at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in the opening week of the 2026 season.
France was added to the 2026 schedule as well, at the national stadium outside Paris, with New Orleans as the home team. A club from a city with French roots playing in France is not a coincidence.
Canada belongs in the table and is a special case, covered in the section on what came before.
The Global Markets Program: how clubs are given countries
For most of its history the league kept international marketing to itself. A club could sell sponsorships and run fan events only inside its home territory, and everything abroad belonged to the league office. In December 2021 the league changed that, under a program first called International Home Marketing Areas.
Under the Global Markets Program a club can apply for marketing rights in a specific foreign country. If the league's international committee approves, the club may treat that country much as it treats its home market: sign local sponsors, sell merchandise, run youth and flag football programs, hold watch parties, open a local-language social media operation. Rights are granted for a term of years (the first awards ran five) and more than one club can hold the same country.
The program began with 18 clubs holding 26 sets of rights across eight countries. By 2025 all 32 clubs held rights somewhere, across 21 markets. The rights are commercial only: they give a club no claim on players from that country and no guarantee of a game there.
The connection to the games is direct, and it is the least understood part of how international games are chosen. A club that has spent three years building a following in a country is the obvious home team when the league plays there. It has sponsors to entertain, a local fan base to reward and a commercial reason to give up a home date that a club with no presence in the market lacks. The German table above shows the pattern. So do the Steelers in Dublin, the Rams in Melbourne and the Saints in Paris.
It runs the other way too. A club that wants to be sent to a particular country has an incentive to apply for rights there first. The program has turned what used to be a burden the league imposed into something a number of clubs compete for, which solved the old problem of finding a home team more thoroughly than the eight-year rotation did. The money involved is commercial income the club earns for itself, which is a different thing from the national revenue described in our explainer on how the NFL shares its revenue.
Travel, time zones and the bye week after a game abroad
A game in Europe kicks off in the middle of the local afternoon, and that puts it in the American morning.
| Host city | Usual local kickoff | In U.S. Eastern time |
|---|---|---|
| London | 2:30 p.m. Sunday | 9:30 a.m. Sunday |
| Dublin | 2:30 p.m. Sunday | 9:30 a.m. Sunday |
| Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin | 3:30 p.m. Sunday | 9:30 a.m. Sunday |
| Madrid | 3:30 p.m. Sunday | 9:30 a.m. Sunday |
| São Paulo | About 9 p.m. Friday | About 8 p.m. Friday |
| Melbourne | Late morning Friday | Thursday night |
The 9:30 a.m. Eastern kickoff was first used in 2014 and has become standard for Europe. It is 6:30 on the West Coast, which is early for football. From the league's side it is one of the main attractions. A morning game does not compete with the 1:00 p.m. kickoffs, so it creates a fourth exclusive Sunday window that can be sold to a broadcaster as a package of its own. The games reach new viewers abroad, and they give the league one more national game to sell at home. They also sit outside the late-season system described in our guide to which games the league can move.
Teams handle the trip in one of two ways. Some leave on Monday and spend the whole week abroad, practicing at a local facility and adjusting gradually. Others practice at home through Thursday, fly overnight, land on Friday and play on Sunday before their bodies have worked out what time it is. Coaches who have tried both disagree about which is better, and the choice often comes down to how far west the team is based. For a club from the Pacific time zone, London is eight hours ahead.
Whatever the method, the freight goes first. Nonperishable supplies and equipment are shipped weeks ahead, and clubs bring their own medical, nutrition and video operations with them.
The bye afterward
From 2007 through 2015 every team that played in London was given its bye the following week. In 2016 the Indianapolis Colts asked to play straight through, reasoning that an early October week off was too early to be useful, and since then the league has let clubs choose. Most still take the week. Our guide to how the NFL bye week works explains why the timing matters so much to coaches.
The return trip is easier than the outbound one. A team leaving London on Sunday evening flies west with the clock and is home in the early hours of Monday, Eastern time, having lost very little of its week.
What a home fan base loses, and how the club is made whole
Someone pays for each of these games, and it is the season-ticket holder in the designated home team's city. A game they would have attended is played four thousand miles away at an hour when they are eating breakfast.
The league has tried to limit the damage in three ways.
The first is the nine-home-game rule already described. A club sent abroad from the conference with nine home games still plays eight at home, so its season-ticket package holds the same number of regular-season games as it does in the alternate years. The fan loses the ninth game, the one that would have been a bonus, not one of the standard eight. This is tidy. It is less than fully fair, since the other clubs in that conference, the ones not sent abroad, keep all nine.
The second is the season-ticket package itself. A fan is not charged for a game that is not played in the building, and clubs commonly offer their season-ticket holders early access to buy seats for the game abroad.
The third is compensation to the club. The league office keeps the gate from an international game, because it runs the event, and pays the designated home team for the home date it has given up. The amounts are not published. For a club with a large stadium that sells out every week the payment is unlikely to match a real home game once parking, concessions and suites are counted. For a club with a smaller gate it may come close. That difference is a quiet reason some teams have gone abroad far more often than others.
Two groups are harder to compensate. Stadium workers, nearby businesses and the local authority that often owns the building all lose a game day. Many stadium leases require the team to play its home games in the building, and newer leases tend to spell out how many games, if any, may be moved abroad. A club cannot always say yes even if it wants to.
The other loss is competitive. Home-field advantage in the NFL is real if smaller than it once was, and a team that plays a divisional opponent in São Paulo, as the Chargers did against Kansas City in 2025, has given up a home game that could decide a division title. The end of the two-game protection in 2026 makes this more likely to happen, not less.
Before the regular-season games: the American Bowl and the Bills in Toronto
The NFL had been sending teams abroad since a 1976 preseason game in Tokyo, nearly thirty years before the Cardinals went to Mexico City. It just had not been taking games that mattered.
The American Bowl, 1986 to 2005
On August 3, 1986, the Chicago Bears, Super Bowl champions six months earlier, beat the Dallas Cowboys in a preseason game at Wembley. That was the first American Bowl. Over the next two decades the league sent pairs of teams to London, Tokyo, Berlin, Barcelona, Dublin, Mexico City, Monterrey, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney and Osaka for August exhibitions under that name. The last was played in Tokyo in 2005.
The games drew well at first and less well as the novelty faded. Foreign audiences worked out what American fans already knew about the preseason, which is that the players they came to see leave after a quarter. Our explainer on what NFL preseason games are for covers why that is so. The league also ran a spring league in Europe across the same period, using young players under NFL contracts. It closed in June 2007, four months before the first regular-season game at Wembley. The timing was deliberate. The league had decided to stop sending a substitute product and start sending the real one.
The Bills Toronto Series, 2008 to 2013
Buffalo is under two hours' drive from Toronto, a metropolitan area several times its size. In 2008 the Bills leased one regular-season home game a year to a Toronto media company, to be played indoors at the Rogers Centre. The arrangement was the club's own, a regional strategy to widen a small market, and it ran for six regular-season games.
It went badly. The Bills won one of the six. The stadium was built for baseball and the sight lines for football were poor, tickets were priced well above what the market would pay, and the crowd was frequently neutral or loud for the visitors. Buffalo had traded a December home game in the cold, where it held a real advantage, for an indoor game in front of people who did not much care who won. The series was suspended after 2013 and canceled when the club changed owners.
Toronto is the example usually cited as a warning. It showed that a game abroad needs local demand that already exists, a stadium that suits the sport, and a home club that gains more than it gives up. The Jaguars' London arrangement, which began the year the Toronto series ended, was built with those lessons in view. For the longer story of clubs that left their cities altogether, see our history of NFL relocations.
The standing questions: a team in London and a Super Bowl abroad
Two ideas have followed the international program since it began, and neither has been ruled out by the people who would decide.
A franchise based in London
The commissioner has said more than once that London could support a team, and at times has floated the idea of more than one club in Europe. The attendance figures back the first claim. The obstacles are in the logistics.
A London team would play eight or nine road games a season in North America, each at least a seven-hour flight away and some much farther. Visiting teams would make the reverse trip. The schedule would probably have to be built in blocks, with the London club spending several weeks at a time on each side of the Atlantic, which is not how any team in the league currently lives. Playoff games on short rest would be harder still.
Then there are the players. Free agents would be asked to move their families to another country with a different tax system, a different currency and a different school calendar. The draft would send 22-year-olds abroad without their consent. The collective bargaining agreement was written for a league inside the United States, and much of it would need renegotiating.
None of this is impossible. It is expensive and complicated, and the league has found that a growing schedule of visiting games delivers most of the commercial benefit without the problems. More games in more cities is the strategy. A resident franchise would be a different strategy, and for now the league has chosen the first.
A Super Bowl outside the United States
The commissioner has said publicly that he would not rule out a Super Bowl abroad someday. The practical barriers are high.
The game is awarded to a host city years in advance through a process built around American stadiums and American host committees. It is the largest television event of the American year, with a kickoff timed for the evening on both coasts; an evening kickoff in the Eastern time zone falls close to midnight in London. And the two teams' own fans, who travel in large numbers, would face a far more expensive trip. How the game is staged at present is covered in our guide to the Super Bowl format.
The more plausible steps are smaller ones. A playoff game abroad is harder than a regular-season game because the teams are not known until a week before. A neutral-site conference championship is easier to imagine than either. The league's history since 2005 is a sequence of things that were said to be impractical until they were scheduled, so it would be unwise to treat any of them as permanent impossibilities.
The direction, at least, is not in doubt. The count of games has gone from one in 2005 to nine in 2026, the ceiling has been raised three times, and the protection that let clubs keep their best home games was removed in the same vote that raised it last. More of our coverage of the sport's rules and calendar is collected in the American football section.