International games are becoming more and more important to the NFL, and they may present a key further television opportunity for the league. Last month, Rich Eisen told Pat McAfee “I do believe probably down the road there’s going to be a new TV package based off of that whole business.” And that particular NFL International Series business looks set to expand further, with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell telling Kaylee Hartung on the Peacock broadcast of the Packers-Eagles game in Brazil Friday that he wants to go not just beyond the five games this year, but to double the maximum of eight games a year the owners have already approved:
As Mike Florio noted at Pro Football Talk (where there’s a longer version of that interview embedded), this discussion started with talk on the idea of a European division that Goodell had previously discussed. Goodell then said their focus is on expanding the current international games first, and that makes sense on several levels; having teams permanently based outside the U.S. poses many more challenges than having some international games. And his “I hope to get that to 16 at some point in the future” is certainly a pretty strong comment.
And, as Goodell notes there, going to 16 international games actually poses some competitive fairness advantages over the current five. That (in a 17-game season with 32 teams) would mean each team plays eight home, eight away, and one international game each year. (Of course, the NFL’s plans to go to an 18-game season would then unbalance that again.)
One of the big criticisms of the international games has been the challenges they provide for participating teams, including with adjusting before and after their international trips. If every team does that every year, that gets a bit more even. There could still be issues with what teams go where, with some destinations easier to adjust to than others (both in terms of time zones and other issues), and with before-and-after scheduling (further adding to the already quite complicated scheduling mix ). But having everyone make an international trip would take away some of the complaints from players who feel their team has been singled out.
Massive expansion of the number of international games each year would also help with that media package theory that Eisen floated . To date, the international games have mostly aired on NFL Network, with a few somewhere else (one each on ESPN and ESPN+ in 2022, one on ESPN+ in 2023, one on Peacock this year, some past ones on CBS and Fox as well). Expanding the numbers of international games could make for either a compelling package for all of those, either with a new broadcast partner (Apple, Google?) or an existing one, or it could make for several small packages.
But, either way, international games are usually televised in different windows than the NFL’s traditional Sunday ones. (There are some restrictions on putting those games on Fridays and Saturdays due to the federal Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, but also some ways around that, including with this year’s early game .) And that means they’re an extra source of revenue for the league. Of course, those games have to come from somewhere (usually the CBS and Fox regional afternoon packages), and there are downsides to that for both those broadcasters and Google/YouTube’s NFL Sunday Ticket package, but the NFL’s been able to keep those broadcasters happy enough so far. (And they did get an inventory boost from going from 16 to 17 regular-season games in 2021, and an 18-game season would mean extra inventory still.)
One big challenge of going to 16 international games is where to put them, though. England remains a regular venue for the league, and certainly has plenty of large stadiums, but there may be diminishing returns of boosting the number of games there even further. There have been games in Germany and Mexico with some success to date, but only ever on a once-a-year basis. And this first-ever Brazil game came with plenty of controversy, from the wildfires to the crime reports to the Twitter / X ban to the field conditions; the league certainly sounds like they want to put more games there, but there are hurdles with that.
While there are plenty of other countries that the NFL’s interested in (including Spain, where they’ll debut next year), actually staging a NFL game anywhere is a complicated and difficult process. And that’s one that gets tougher still internationally. That’s why even though the numbers of international games have risen over the last two decades from sometimes-one to generally-five a year, they haven’t yet gone beyond five. But the ownership vote to allow up to eight certainly made further expansion of these seem inevitable. And it’s notable to hear Goodell talking about wanting to boost these games even further.
[ Pro Football Talk ]
The post Roger Goodell wants to more than triple the NFL’s current international games appeared first on Awful Announcing .
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