Super Bowl Headed West As NFL Ponders International Future

With Super Bowl LIX in the books and the NFL world having migrated out of New Orleans, attention shifts to the Bay Area, which will host Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium on Feb. 8, 2026.

The biggest difference between the Big Easy and next year’s host locale is the lack of proximity for Super Bowl events: Levi’s Stadium, which previously hosted Super Bowl 50, is in Santa Clara, more than 40 miles south of downtown San Francisco.

“There’s things that we have to plan for. It’s not a walkable city,” Bay Area Host Committee president Zaileen Janmohamed said during an interview with Front Office Sports at Radio Row in New Orleans. “You’re not going to walk from San Francisco to Santa Clara.”

There will be a big push to promote public transportation—the Bay Area includes 27 transportation agencies—to ease the increased traffic flow with fans and the onslaught of media members and celebrities coming to town.

“A lot of people ask us about transportation, and the stadium being far from San Francisco,” Janmohamed said. “But it’s actually not just San Francisco and the Bay Area that has to deal with it. Inglewood has a stadium a long way from L.A. It happens in a lot of NFL markets.”

League Without Borders?

SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, which Janmohamed referenced, is hosting the 2027 Super Bowl, and Atlanta in 2028. 

The NFL has yet to name host cities beyond that. But last week in New Orleans, the idea of an international Super Bowl gained steam after NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said it could be a possibility at his annual state of the league press conference.

That idea is “really interesting” to 49ers president Al Guido. “This is for Roger,” he said. “Do we ever take the biggest game that we have and not host it here in the U.S.?”

The 49ers ownership group also owns second-division English soccer club Leeds United, and the franchise is one of seven with some U.K. rights in the NFL’s Global Markets Program. London, which has hosted more NFL games than any other non-U.S. city, would be an obvious choice for a Super Bowl outside of the league’s home borders.

“I understand all the issues with it around the performance side and how far it might have to go,” Guido said of an international Super Bowl, emphasizing that game quality must remain high as international expansion continues. “And if it just so happens that we can figure out schedule-wise where we can play somewhere else, and the fan bases really want it, then why not?”

As the NFL considers Super Bowl hosts for 2029 and beyond, any international bid will have competition from Nashville, with the Titans planning to open a new stadium in 2027, and popular host cities like Miami, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tampa, and Houston, among others, looking to return to the rotation.