The NFL is going all-in on international growth.
Several league leaders spent Super Bowl week talking about the league’s strategy for growing its international footprint. The Seahawks’ win over the Patriots in Super Bowl LX culminated a season where the NFL played a record seven regular season games outside the U.S., and the league has already committed to nine international games in 2026. But commissioner Roger Goodell has long said he wants to increase that number to 16.
Radio announcer Scott Graham asked Goodell if the league was interested in adding new teams at some point. The league has not expanded since adding the Houston Texans in 2002.
“You can think of expansion as the number of teams, or you can think of expansion as us playing in international markets,” Goodell told Westwood One Sports in an interview that aired on Sunday.
Goodell said that if the league’s international growth continues, he can see a future NFL team based outside the U.S.
“Undoubtedly even today, I think there are cities out there that I think could support an NFL team, and we’re at the early stages,” Goodell said. “I don’t take international expansion off the table. I think it’s very possible someday.”
Even beyond an international team, the NFL wants more of its existing franchises to go abroad more often.
“The dream would be to have every team play an international game every year,” league EVP Jeff Miller told Front Office Sports at Radio Row. “There is the demand; the question is whether there’s the supply, because we only play so many games.”
NFLPA interim executive director David White said that players aren’t interested in increasing that supply. Last week, he called adding an 18th game to the schedule “a very serious issue” and said the players “don’t have any appetite for it.”
In January, Patriots owner Robert Kraft was frank with a local radio station in Boston about both the schedule and international expansion. “Every team will go to 18 [regular-season games] and two [preseason games] and eliminate one of the preseason games, and every team every year will play one game overseas,” Kraft said on the Zolak & Bertrand show. Goodell later said the 18-game regular season is “not a given.”
The NFL has 32 franchises, meaning each team playing one game abroad would give the league its 16 international games. The Jaguars are the league’s model, having played one or two games in London every year since 2013 (except 2020).
Latin Halftime Show Amid International Push
To find evidence of the NFL’s strategy, look no further than its halftime performance by rapper Bad Bunny.
The singer, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is from the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico and sings mostly in Spanish. Bad Bunny’s halftime show was a cultural celebration highlighting the Latin American community in the U.S. At the end of his performance, he shouted out countries in the Americas and flew their flags, and showed a football reading “Together We Are America.”
The NFL has been increasing its presence throughout the Americas, playing its first game in Brazil last season and going back to Mexico City in 2026.
Bad Bunny called for “ICE out” during his acceptance speech at the Grammy Awards, after which Goodell seemed unconcerned about whether the singer would make a strong political statement at the Super Bowl.
“Bad Bunny is, and I think that was demonstrated [at the Grammys], one of the great artists in the world,” Goodell said in the week before the game. “And that’s one of the reasons we chose him.”
