PLL Takes Page From NHL With 4-Team International Tournament

The Premier Lacrosse League is borrowing from the NHL’s playbook, launching a 4 Nations Face-Off of its own. The PLL, along with its Women’s Lacrosse League, will create the four-country Lexus Global Lacrosse Games tournament. 

The launch comes off the back of a wildly successful recent run of international tournaments in major sports. 

The NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off in February 2025 was an enormous win for both the NHL and ESPN. The tournament including the U.S., Canada, Sweden, and Finland brought in record ratings; the contentious final between the two North American powerhouses became the most-watched NHL Game in U.S. history, handing ESPN the record for the NHL’s biggest U.S. broadcast ever. March’s World Baseball Classic, too, drew huge ratings, including a staggering 10.8 million viewers for the final on Fox, breaking a record for the event.

At the Connecticut stop of the PLL’s touring season, league cofounder and president Paul Rabil told Front Office Sports that it took direct cues from those two tournaments to create its own international event sanctioned by lacrosse’s national and global governing bodies.

The significantly smaller sport of lacrosse will have to see if it can ride the same wave.

For now, Rabil told FOS it’s “hoping” the U.S. and Canada will be involved—though with the majority of players in North American pro leagues hailing from those two countries, it’s difficult to imagine the competition series will launch without both nations participating. That’s especially the case following the spectacle of the U.S-Canada games in 4 Nations Face-Off that drew massive ratings and fan engagement, and again with the 2026 Winter Olympics’ contentious men’s and women’s finals matchups between the same two countries that also smashed viewership records. 

Another contender for the field could be Japan, which the PLL visits each year as part of its outreach initiatives. Lacrosse is fast growing in the country, and Tokyo is the site of the 2026 World Lacrosse Women’s Championship currently ongoing. Australia, hosting the 2032 Summer Games, could also make an appearance.

Debuting Dec. 8–13 in Washington, D.C., the new event will run for the next two seasons in the lead up to the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, which will reintroduce lacrosse as a medal sport for the first time since the 1908 London Games. It will be played in the same Olympic sixes format as LA28. The NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off was also an Olympic lead-in for the Milan Games; Rabil hopes the four-country lacrosse tournament will “propel” viewers into Olympic lacrosse the same way.

“It should be used promotionally and competitively for the players in the nation to get ready for the Olympics, to prime the audience for what an Olympic competition will look and feel like,” Rabil told FOS. After the Olympics, he added, they’ll decide whether they want to keep the event—he doesn’t want the “novelty” of international competition to wear off.

On the men’s side, the Global Lacrosse Games will draw players from both the PLL and the 14-team National Lacrosse League, which is North America’s main pro indoor box lacrosse league that plays during a different season. There are several PLL stars who play in both leagues—including 23-year-old American CJ Kirst, whom many people consider the current best player in the world—but working across the two leagues will enable the international event to pluck from a deeper talent pool.

Rabil declined to confirm the Global Lacrosse Games’ broadcast partner. ESPN is the current exclusive home for PLL and WLL games (mostly through ESPN+, with a few national slots each season on ESPN and ABC), and also a minority stakeholder in the league.

The Global Lacrosse Games is another piece of the PLL’s push to raise its profile and expand. 

The league launched the first full season of the four-team WLL this year, and in June closed a $100 million Series E financing round led by Ares and former Yale lacrosse player Joe Tsai (who also owns two NLL teams). Earlier this year, Rabil told FOS that the PLL is continuing to march toward its goal of moving away from the single-entity model into individual franchise ownership. It’s also currently in market shopping both scripted and unscripted IP, including a television show and motion picture.