Roger Goodell, commissioner of American football’s top-tier NFL, has alluded to future international games being played in the Republic of Ireland among other new locales, as he announced the league was seeking to play eight international fixtures in the 2025 campaign.
Speaking around the league’s final international game of the 2024 season in Munich, Germany, yesterday (November 10), Goodell said: "We expect to return to Mexico City [Mexico]. We expect to return to Brazil. We will certainly be back in the UK. And we're also looking at the potential of another game in the UK area - in Ireland, possibly.”
Goodell also confirmed the league will return to the German market, the site of one 2024 game, next year, adding: “We'll certainly be back here in Germany. So if that total is eight, that's what we're shooting for."
Two NFL Germany games have been hosted in Munich, and two in Frankfurt, over recent years, and Goodell heavily hinted that German capital of Berlin could stage games amid reports alleging such.
Speaking to the media on those reports, Goodell said “I usually say don’t believe rumors. In this case, I say believe them.”
Goodell did, however, qualify this by saying that nothing had been finalized with regard to the 2025 international games.
Currently, the NFL has six international games scheduled for 2025, but has the capacity for eight allowed for, and as such it aims to fill those eight slots.
Goodell has been public with his aims to expand this number further in future, to potentially as many as 16.
On November 10, Germany hosted its fourth NFL game, which saw the Carolina Panthers beat the New York Giants 20-17 (in overtime) in front of a crowd of over 70,000 at Munich’s Allianz Arena.
It was the second time the NFL has hosted a game at the Allianz, the first being the league’s inaugural Germany game two years ago, while Frankfurt’s Waldstadion staged both 2023 games.
The latest fixture was indicative of not just the fervor for NFL in the German market, but also the growing bond between the league’s operations and Germany’s top-tier Bundesliga soccer competition.
Both the Allianz Arena and the Waldstadion are full-time homes of major Bundesliga clubs, Bayern Munich and Eintracht Frankfurt respectively.
Speaking to a media roundtable including Sportcal (GlobalData Sport) ahead of the game Brett Gosper, the head of Europe and the Asia-Pacific regions for the NFL said of the relationship with German soccer’s DFL league organizer: “The DFL relationship helps us in Germany. The relationship then helps the DFL in the US through marketing activities, joint content programs, helping summer tours for clubs from the DFL with stadia, all sorts of different areas.
“And just the dialog and the conversations that we have with the DFL raise other possibilities to collaborate with it, beyond technology and other innovative areas.
“So it's been very productive for both of us. I think we're both challenger sports in in a lot of markets, but we happen to be a dominant league in our own markets, so we've got a lot in common, and we're dealing with some similar opportunities and issues, I think, in our own markets. It's good to be able to talk to another league that has similar challenges and opportunities.”
