Nine games this season are played outside the United States, the most the NFL has ever staged in a single year. Three of them are in London, one is in Paris for the first time ever, and if you are reading this from the UK or Europe, that is not a coincidence. The league has spent nearly twenty years turning “American football” into something you can watch in person on a Sunday afternoon without crossing an ocean. Here is how that happened, and why the NFL keeps doing it.
It comes down to money and fans, in that order
The NFL plays abroad to grow its audience in places where the sport is already catching on, and to earn money it cannot earn at home. That is the whole engine, and everything else is detail.
A regular-season game is a scarce thing. Each team plays only 17 of them a year, so every single one is valuable, and moving one to London or Munich puts the league in front of a live crowd of 60,000-plus people who might otherwise never see a game. It also sells tickets, television rights and sponsorship in a market the league wants to own. A club gives up a home game to make it happen, which tells you what the league thinks the trade is worth.
Where it started: one game at Wembley, 2007
The first regular-season NFL game in another country was actually in Mexico City in 2005, when the Arizona Cardinals beat the San Francisco 49ers 31-14 at Estadio Azteca. That crowd of 103,467 is still the largest for any international NFL game. But the series as we know it began two years later.
On 28 October 2007, the New York Giants played the Miami Dolphins at Wembley Stadium in London. The Giants won 13-10, the stadium was full at just over 81,000, and the first 40,000 tickets had sold in 90 minutes. That last number is the one that mattered to the league. It proved there was real, ticket-buying demand in Britain, not just polite curiosity.
From there it grew steadily. London had one game a year through 2011, then more. Other cities came on board. What began as a single fixture is now a nine-game programme across four continents.
London in 2007 was the test, and it passed loudly enough to build everything else on.
What came before: the American Bowl years
The NFL did not arrive in London cold in 2007. It had been testing the water with exhibition games for decades.
From 1986 to 2005, the league ran the American Bowl, a series of preseason games played in cities like London, Tokyo, Berlin and Mexico City, 40 of them in all. Preseason games do not count and the star players barely feature, so they were never going to build a serious following on their own. But they showed the league where the appetite was. The first NFL game ever played outside North America was even earlier, an exhibition in Tokyo in 1976.
Preseason (the warm-up games before the season proper, which I explain in how the NFL preseason works) was the league dipping a toe in. The switch to real, regular-season games in 2007 was it deciding the water was warm.
Why these games are good news if you are in the UK or Europe
For anyone learning the game from this side of the Atlantic, the international games solve the single most annoying thing about being an NFL fan here: the clock.
A normal NFL Sunday kicks off at 1:00pm US Eastern, which is 6:00pm in the UK, and the night games run past midnight and into the small hours. The London, Paris and Madrid games kick off at 9:30am Eastern instead, which lands at 2:30pm UK time. A Sunday afternoon, not a bleary-eyed all-nighter. You can go, or you can watch at a civilised hour, and several of the UK games are on free-to-air television.
There is also the obvious one: you can be in the room. A ticket to a London game costs a fraction of a transatlantic trip to see the same thing. This is the one part of the NFL calendar built around your time zone rather than against it.
How the NFL decides which teams play abroad
No team volunteers to lose a home game, so the league shares the load. Every one of the 32 teams is signed up to the Global Markets Programme, which hands each club the marketing rights to specific countries so it can build a fanbase and commercial deals there. The Jacksonville Jaguars, for instance, have played a “home” game in London almost every year for over a decade.
On top of that, the league has committed that every team will play at least one international game every eight years. So if your team has not been abroad in a while, its turn is coming. The designated home team gives up a home fixture; the away team just travels further than usual.
A note on betting terms
Follow the games in the British media and you will run into betting language, because the UK fixtures fall in prime viewing hours and get heavy coverage. Here is the one term worth knowing, explained as a concept, not a suggestion.
The “spread” is a handicap. Instead of betting on the winner, the margin is what counts: the favourite has to win by more than a set number of points. It exists to turn a one-sided game into a roughly even question. That is all it is.
Where this is heading
The nine-game season is not the ceiling. The league has already approved room for up to 10 international games in future seasons, and the list of host cities keeps growing: 2026 added Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro and Paris to a roll that already included London, Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Madrid, Dublin, São Paulo, Mexico City and Toronto.
Two bigger ideas get floated regularly. One is a permanent overseas franchise, an actual team based in London or elsewhere. The other is a Super Bowl played abroad. Neither is close, and the logistics of both are genuinely hard, but the commissioner has said an international Super Bowl is “possible” rather than ruling it out. Twenty years ago a single London game was the experiment. That tells you which direction this travels.
This season’s international NFL games
Here are all nine of the 2026 international fixtures, with UK kickoff times so you can plan around them rather than around US Eastern. Ticket links go to the official NFL international page; some games may be sold out by the time you click. This is the part of the page I refresh each season.
| Date | City | Matchup (Away @ Home) | Venue | Kickoff (UK) | Tickets |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thu 10 Sep | Melbourne | 49ers @ Rams | MCG | 11:35am | Played |
| Sun 27 Sep | Rio de Janeiro | Ravens @ Cowboys | Maracanã | 9:25pm | Get tickets |
| Sun 4 Oct | London | Colts @ Commanders | Tottenham Hotspur | 2:30pm | Get tickets |
| Sun 11 Oct | London | Eagles @ Jaguars | Tottenham Hotspur | 2:30pm | Get tickets |
| Sun 18 Oct | London | Texans @ Jaguars | Wembley | 2:30pm | Get tickets |
| Sun 25 Oct | Paris | Steelers @ Saints | Stade de France | 2:30pm | Get tickets |
| Sun 8 Nov | Madrid | Bengals @ Falcons | Bernabéu | 2:30pm | Get tickets |
| Sun 15 Nov | Munich | Patriots @ Lions | FC Bayern Arena | 2:30pm | Get tickets |
| Sun 22 Nov | Mexico City | Vikings @ 49ers | Estadio Banorte | 1:20am (Mon) | Get tickets |
The Melbourne opener has already been played (the 49ers won it 27-7). The Jaguars are the busy ones again: two London games in three weeks, the home team both times.
For the full week-by-week fixture list, kickoff times and results, see the 2026 NFL schedule. And if you have ever wondered why each team plays only 17 games in an 18-week season in the first place, that is its own strange story: why the NFL plays 17 games.
If one of these lands near you this autumn, go. It is the easiest, cheapest and best-timed way to see this game live that you will ever get.