Far From Home: The NFL's $24 Billion Global Game

In November 2022, during a third-quarter television timeout at the home of Bayern Munich, the stadium speakers began playing John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads." The crowd sang along. When play resumed, they kept singing.

Peter King, who covered the NFL for four decades, was in the building for the league's first regular-season game in Germany. "I have never heard or seen anything like that," he recalled. Tom Brady, whose Buccaneers won that day and whom King interviewed for NBC as he walked off the field, loved it. Pete Carroll, whose Seahawks lost, said afterward that he hoped they would be invited back.

He told the story at 92NY on October 13, the night his new book, The Game, was published, in conversation with ESPN's Adam Schefter. International football was one thread in a long evening of stories, but it was the one I kept thinking about afterward. A German crowd had taken an American game and made a moment of its own.

The Economics of America’s Game

The scale of the business is easy to state and hard to absorb. According to Sportico, the NFL's 32 teams generated an estimated $23.5 billion in revenue in 2025, a 6% increase. Counting money retained at the league level, total revenue surpassed $24 billion.

For perspective, the World Bank puts Jamaica's 2025 gross domestic product at roughly $22.7 billion. The two figures measure different things. Revenue counts every dollar a business takes in, while GDP measures the value an entire economy adds, so the NFL is in no sense larger than a nation. The comparison simply conveys the size of what a sports league has become.

Much of that growth followed a target set long ago. At the owners meetings in March 2010, when league revenue stood at about $8 billion, Commissioner Roger Goodell set a goal of $25 billion a year by 2027. Sportico now expects the league to reach roughly that figure in the fiscal year ending March 2027. Major League Baseball, the next largest American league, brought in about $12.8 billion in 2024.

Ownership tells a related story. At 92NY, Schefter marveled that a franchise had sold this summer for $9.612 billion. That was the Seattle Seahawks, whose sale to the Khosla family NFL owners approved on August 26. It was a league record, well above the $6.05 billion paid for the Washington Commanders in 2023. Paul Allen bought the team in 1997 for $194 million.

Revenue is what a team earns in a year. Valuation is what a buyer will pay for every future year, plus the scarcity of owning one of only 32. Sportico calculated that the Seahawks sold for about 13.6 times their 2025 revenue. Its 2026 rankings put the average NFL franchise at $9.34 billion, up 31% in a single year.

King offered a reminder of how far that has come. In 1984, he said, a New York businessman named Donald Trump dropped out of bidding for the Dallas Cowboys when the price reached $50 million, telling the New York Times he felt sorry for whoever paid it. Sportico now values the Cowboys at $15.5 billion.

How the NFL Built Its Commercial Machine

King traces much of that value to a decision made in 1961. Commissioner Pete Rozelle persuaded owners in the biggest markets, including Chicago's George Halas, to split television money evenly with every team. Halas, in King's telling, agreed to hand the Green Bay Packers as much television revenue as his own club received.

That model still anchors the league. National revenue reached roughly $14.5 billion for the 2025 season, according to Sportico, with each team receiving more than $450 million. Shared money accounted for about 62% of total team revenue. Most of it flows from media deals worth nearly $110 billion that run through 2033, with opt-outs available as early as 2029.

Television did more than pay the bills. King recalled that when he started covering the league in 1984, Monday Night Football ranked only 25th among network programs. Over decades it grew from what he called a novelty act into an institution. NFL games accounted for 89 of the 100 most-watched U.S. television programs last season, according to S&P Global.

The second engine is attention. King described a planning tool the league adopted in 2009 called the calendar wheel, a circular 16-month view of the football year that runs from the postseason through the offseason and back to the regular season. When it reveals a gap, the league looks for an event to fill it. The televised schedule release in May exists, King said, because there was a gap. Goodell, he added, has told the league's special events department that the last two weeks of June and the first two weeks of July are still open, and Peter O'Reilly's team is working out what might go there.

Add the combine, free agency, the draft and training camp, and a sport once concentrated in a few autumn months now commands attention nearly all year. Schefter predicted the Super Bowl will eventually move permanently to Presidents' Day weekend, carrying the season deeper into February. King agreed that it will. For now, that is their prediction.

The two men on stage show how coverage changed along with the calendar. Schefter opened the evening by recalling that in the early 1990s, as a young reporter covering the Denver Broncos, he was one of the stringers who fed information to King's weekly Sports Illustrated column. If one of his notes made it in, he said, that was the thrill of the year. Today Schefter reports morning, noon and night. "Every day, there's something," he said. "Every day, that thing is the biggest thing until the next thing comes along."

The business behind that news has consolidated too. ESPN completed its acquisition of NFL Network in early 2026, a deal that gave the league a 10% stake in ESPN. The two outlets, in Schefter's words, are now "essentially one company." A year-round sport has a year-round news operation, and the league owns a piece of it.

The World Becomes a Home Market

International games extend that logic across borders. The first regular-season game outside the United States came in 2005, when 103,467 fans filled Estadio Azteca in Mexico City. Two years later the league launched its series at London's Wembley Stadium. Heading into this season, 62 regular-season games had been played abroad.

The 2026 season features a record nine games in seven countries on four continents.

Six have already been played. The season opened in Melbourne on September 10, with the San Francisco 49ers facing the Los Angeles Rams at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Rio de Janeiro hosted its first game at the Maracanã on September 27, with the Baltimore Ravens facing the Dallas Cowboys, following two earlier games in São Paulo. London staged three consecutive October games, two at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and one at Wembley, with the Jacksonville Jaguars playing in two of them. Paris hosted its first regular-season game at the Stade de France on October 25, between the Pittsburgh Steelers and New Orleans Saints. Still to come are the Cincinnati Bengals and Atlanta Falcons at Madrid's Santiago Bernabéu on November 8, the New England Patriots and Detroit Lions in Munich on November 15 and the Minnesota Vikings and 49ers at Mexico City's Estadio Azteca on November 22.

Those cities serve different purposes. London, which has hosted regular-season games since 2007, is a mature market where the league now stages several games a year. Paris is a first test. Rio extends an existing relationship with Brazil to a new city. Madrid returns for a second season after hosting its first game at the Bernabéu in 2025, and Mexico City hosts its first game since 2022, following a renovation of Estadio Azteca ahead of this summer's World Cup.

Germany may be the clearest example of an audience the league found and kept serving. King attended the first two seasons of games there: Brady's Buccaneers against the Seahawks in Munich in 2022, then Tua Tagovailoa's Dolphins against Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs in Frankfurt in 2023. Frankfurt hosted three games across 2023 and 2024, and Berlin hosted its first in 2025. The Patriots and Lions game this month will be the sixth regular-season game played in the country.

Underneath the games sits the Global Markets Program, launched in 2022 with 18 clubs in eight countries. It grants clubs international marketing rights in specific countries for five-year terms, allowing them to pursue fan events, sponsorships and youth flag football much as they would at home. All 32 clubs now participate across 22 markets, with Italy added this year. Germany draws the most interest, with 11 clubs holding rights there.

A sold-out stadium proves demand for an event. Whether it builds a lasting fan base takes years to know.“They've been very reluctant to crack down. So there's always a platform for these groups to migrate to when a mainstream platform acts against them. It's been a game of whack-a-mole for the most part.”

What a Football Game Means for a City

When the NFL arrives in Munich or Paris, two American teams are only part of the operation. Stadium operators, broadcasters, airlines, hotels, restaurants, sponsors and transit agencies all have a role. The league enters a new market without building a stadium or relocating a team. What it exports is an experience, staged for a weekend inside infrastructure the host city already owns.

The economic results can be substantial, though they deserve careful reading. A 2022 impact assessment of the first Munich game, compiled by The Sports Consultancy and released by the NFL, estimated a total economic impact of €70.2 million, including €32.2 million in direct spending. NFL visitors spent an average of €333 per day, compared with €225 for a typical Munich visitor.

The headline total folds in estimated ripple effects beyond direct spending, and the report came from the league itself. Impact studies of this kind also struggle to separate genuinely new spending from money that would have been spent in the city anyway. The more durable return may be harder to price: the same report noted a flag football program launched in 153 German schools.

Berlin's experience shows the exchange runs both ways. A study of the city's first NFL game in November 2025, published by Berlin's government, estimated €74.3 million in total economic impact and €6.8 million in sales tax revenue, with spectators spending an average of €373 per day. The city also committed more than €2 million to youth American and flag football programs across a 2025 to 2029 game series. Host cities are investors as much as recipients, betting public money that a weekend of football will leave something behind.

How Far Can the NFL Expand?

King supports nearly all of this, up to a point. "There should not, however, be a franchise anywhere other than the United States," he said.

A permanent overseas team would face weekly transatlantic travel, time zones and a schedule built around American cities. Schefter raised travel directly, suggesting the Rams might still be recovering from their trip to Melbourne. King dismissed the concern, noting that West Coast teams already fly long distances. Players and coaches may not all agree.

There are costs closer to home as well. Each international game is a regular-season date taken away from a home crowd, and the Jacksonville Jaguars gave up two this year to host in London.

King also challenged the premise behind much of the growth. Goodell has said fans want more football. "I'm not sure the fans do want more football," King said. Fans plainly have no appetite for preseason games, he said, and starters rarely play in them. By King's count, Matthew Stafford has not taken a preseason snap in six years. Replacing an August game in which starters play zero snaps with a regular-season game in which they play 60 or more is, in King's words, "not exactly an even trade" for the players. The debate matters abroad as well, because every international game comes from the same limited supply of regular-season dates.