Super Bowl outside the USA? “Wouldn’t surprise me”

In the near future there will be eight, as Commissioner Roger Goodell said at an event in London on Saturday, according to ABC News. In 2025, for example, the Spanish capital Madrid will have a game for the first time and the NFL will also come to Ireland, more precisely Dublin, soon. There will be concrete plans there with the Pittsburgh Steelers, whose owning family has Irish roots.

But Goodell wants more than eight games, twice as many: “If we expand our regular season to an 18-and-two structure, I see us playing 16 of those games in international markets.” That means: 18 games for Every team (currently there are 17) and two game-free weeks (bye weeks) instead of one as before. “A lot depends on whether we can make the game safer,” Goodell explained, so that players “feel comfortable playing for such a period of time.”

And even if 16 games were played internationally, meaning every team could theoretically get one per year, the NFL might still go further. According to Goodell, even a Super Bowl, i.e. the grand finale, abroad is not out of the question. “We have traditionally tried to play the Super Bowl in an NFL city. “This was a kind of reward for the cities that have NFL franchises,” said the league boss. “But things change. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it happened one day.”

In the end, German NFL fans should also benefit from all of these plans. There is already one game per year here, and in 2023 there were exceptionally two. The NFL has noticed how great the enthusiasm for the sport is in this country and will definitely come for many more years – perhaps with more games and certainly in cities other than Munich and Frankfurt.