An Overseas Super Bowl Makes a Surprising Amount of Sense

What does the future of professional sports look like? Increasingly, the answer to that question involves an international reach. The NHL is reportedly looking into moving some of its regular-season games to European venues. The Chicago Bears are playing at London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. And Major League Baseball has been expanding its global horizons as well.

Still, it’s one thing for a regular season game to move to a different venue, whether or not it’s in the same country. But something on the scale of the Super Bowl? That, apparently, is on the table. As The Guardian reports, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell didn’t rule out the possibility of the league’s championship game moving overseas. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if that happens one day,” he told attendees at an fan-centric event in London.

Goodell also shared the logic behind keeping the Super Bowl at an NFL venue. “[T]hat was always sort of a reward for the cities that have NFL franchises,” he said. But unlike a regular season game, the one advantage to holding the Super Bowl in a non-NFL city would be that it wouldn’t involve cutting a regular-season home game from the schedule. And it’s not hard to see the appeal of a Super Bowl held in, say, London.

That said, there are also some logistical hurdles here — specifically, trying to schedule a kickoff time for a European Super Bowl that would be at a reasonable local hour but would also be convenient for audiences in the U.S. to tune in.

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Goodell’s candor about the possibility of an overseas Super Bowl also seems to be in line with global sports trends. It isn’t hard to imagine a moment in the near future when the Super Bowl takes place in London and the UEFA Champions League Final is held in the U.S. The future of sports looks more and more international — though it remains to be seen whether or not that’s a good thing.