The National Football League goes international

On a beautifully gray Madrid afternoon, a group of prominent executives and representatives of America’s most popular sports league gathered to discuss how to divide up the world. There were repeated references to shared values, community engagement, cultural appreciation and “cross-border connection through competition.” The many well-dressed attendees nodded along, doubtlessly hearing each of these totemic invocations for what they really mean – money, in unimaginable sums, and the National Football League’s bold plan to take over the planet.

This season the NFL has played seven international games. Madrid, São Paulo, Dublin and Berlin each hosted one fixture. London got three. In the coming year, the league will expand even more, with games in South America and a first-time trip to Australia. The ultimate vision is to export the shield, with each team playing at least one international game a season. This would equate to a level of growth once thought absurd by analysts who saw pro football as an exclusively North American phenomenon and dismissed forays overseas as the stuff of preseason exhibition. The leader of today’s league wants to prove them wrong.

This ambitious project is the dream of the NFL’s divisive and powerful commissioner: Roger Goodell, the 66-year-old quarter-zip aficionado, who started off as an intern at the league’s New York headquarters in 1982 and never looked back. Goodell’s role in America is to be hated. Alone among the league’s executives, he is recognized and routinely booed by fans whose gripes are manifold. After Goodell passed down a heavy penalty for the New England Patriots’ Deflategate scandal, die-hard fan Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports flooded the opening night game with towels and T-shirts emblazoned with a caricature of Goodell bearing a bright red clown nose. But Goodell still got the pleasure of watching Kansas City win.

In Madrid, Goodell is ubiquitous at the league’s events, but you can tell the crowds here are more unfamiliar with his reputation. As he rounded the field at the massive and impressive Bernabéu Stadium, home to Real Madrid, the boos from the crowd were smattering and outnumbered by respectable applause. He is a stern corporate face on a mission. A vast American flag is spread across the field, followed by a bellowing rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” It is a brazen demonstration of soft power. We will come into your city and in the space of a week take over everything, everywhere. You won’t just like it. You will beg for its return.

There’s no mystery why. For Madrid businesses, the NFL is great news. City officials estimated that a single game brought roughly $200 million to the local economy, doubling expectations, with hotels at 90 percent capacity and restaurants crammed. The league picks its international travel teams carefully, and here they were wise enough to deem the Miami Dolphins the host team; the Dolphins have a large number of Spanish-speaking fans with connections to the old world. They took to the city naturally, with a massive fan experience at the Plaza de España, three giant inflatable dolphins, fan events at restaurants and bars and Instagram-friendly tours.

Less impressive was the presence of the Washington Commanders, albeit another capital city with plenty of direct flights to Madrid. Still, they traveled – the game’s total attendance topped 78,000, though some fans seemed rather unclear as to whether to expect paella or tacos on arrival to Madrid. But they were the exceptions.

There is still skepticism about Goodell’s ambitious global undertaking in some corners of the league and sports media. For American audiences, football is the unchallenged king. Every streaming service wants the league, and most have gotten a piece of it. In a typical year, the NFL accounts for 97 of the top 100 broadcasts (the only exceptions being election night, the Oscars and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade – which is itself a pre-game show for more NFL).

The commissioner’s recent floating of an international edition of the Super Bowl was roundly condemned by fans and commentators who want to see the championship exclusively hosted in the United States. But the backlash to the headlines ignored the context of Goodell’s remark: he was teasing the possibility of an international franchise – or perhaps more than one.

The feasibility of such expansion has practical limits. Franchises have already had to navigate the logistics of short weeks and juggling player injuries with flights across the Atlantic – some West Coast teams such as the Los Angeles Rams have come up with novel solutions such as staying on Eastern time to avoid jet lag. But the real solution could come from technology.

According to the Wall Street Journal, NFL executives traveled this year to witness a test flight in the California desert presenting the XB-1 –  “the first civilian jet to break the sound barrier since the Concorde.” Boom Technology chief executive Blake Scholl says the new plane would cut travel time to Europe in half, enabling not just team travel but perhaps a whole new NFL division overseas. Some league insiders believe the expansion plan can realistically be achieved within the next decade. “It’s inevitable,” Scholl told the Journal. “The only reason they aren’t already is the speed of travel.”

For Goodell and the massively wealthy corporate groups he represents, the sound barrier is no barrier at all to what is, for them, an expression of global manifest destiny. And as the cultural footprint of the US has declined, with Hollywood putting out fewer and fewer hits that resonate globally every year, it stands to reason something must replace it. The owners, streamers, advertising partners and a network of billion-dollar brands see it purely as a question of money, of expanding beyond the already saturated and financially tapped-out market of the American audience.

For Goodell, who as a college kid wrote a letter to every franchise to get the NFL internship that then became the first line of his résumé, the aim seems to be something greater. He wants to be the commissioner who conquered the world.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.