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Roger Goodell is hell-bent on making international expansion his NFL legacy. It’s a topic the commissioner has spoken about year, after year, after year — all the while more and more games are scheduled overseas. This past week Goodell was asked about the possibility of permanent international expansion, i.e. having a team permanently located outside the United States, and his response could not be clearer.
“At some point, there will be NFL teams outside the USA,” Goodell said. “I have no doubt that this will happen one day.”
Goodell made a point of saying, “NFL teams outside the USA.” In his vision, this won’t be a reboot of NFL Europe, or a half-hearted attempt to launch the sport abroad, but rather throwing football in the deep end and going all-in with legitimate teams in the main competition. This raises myriad questions about international travel, scheduling feasibility, and competitive balance — which have long been the biggest sticking points about putting teams abroad. Well, that and assuming that people will care and come to games beyond once-a-year spectacles.
Let’s dive into which cities make the most sense for this expansion and rank every city that is even a remote possibility for a team to be located.
At the very top of the list is Canada, which has already been supporting a standalone American football league since 1958 in the CFL. The goal here wouldn’t be to supplant the CFL as a whole, but rather allow the Canadian league to be a feeder of sorts, and an incubator of talent.
Travel issues are functionally non-existent with Toronto. The tricky part is working out where they belong in the divisional picture. The natural solution is the AFC East, either adding to the division or supplanting the Miami Dolphins in the divisional shuffle. This would make a true Northeastern division, adding another brutal proximity rivalry to the slate with Toronto and Buffalo being a stone’s throw from each other.
If we look at a two-team solution (for now) then Mexico City fits the bill as the western team to add to the slate. The NFL has successfully run games in Mexico for a while now, and they have been received incredibly well. A natural fit here would be to put a Mexico City team in the NFC West, where a natural rivalry could build with the Los Angeles Rams.
How we fit together the division is tricky, but again, what makes Mexico City so appealing is the lack of travel complexity. Yes, there’s international immigration and customs, but we’re not looking at a trip that would be backbreaking for a team.
Cue up your stale old Jaguars jokes. In all honesty, there is zero chance a team moves to London — but the city makes so much sense in terms of expansion. International games sell out so quickly, and there’s already some inbuilt infrastructure both at Wembley Stadium and Tottenham Hotspur Stadium where a team could functionally just move in.
The big issue here is travel. It would be outright unfair to a London team and its opponents to have west coast travel as part of their regular-season routine, with 13+ hour travel required to get from California to London. Similarly we would need to balance any team traveling to London for games. Perhaps this can be ameliorated with long road trips and home stands, but there’s also angst about how you fit London into a division. The NFC East is storied and shouldn’t really be messed with, which makes this a fairly difficult prospect.
We have continued discussion on this topic in the NFL Feed:
So where should the NFL expand internationally?
It has felt for a long time that the international expansion was coming.
But this might be the clearest sign yet, with Commissioner Goodell calling it “inevitable.”
So where should the NFL add a team?
One of the things that the NFL did so intelligently was target Munich as its German base of operations, rather than Berlin. The city has a reputation for being even more sports-crazed as a city, and fans have loved the NFL games which have been played there.
Essentially the same issues as London exist, just turned up a few degrees. It’s difficult to justify the travel, and hard to see how they fit into divisions. If a European division was established then it feels like the best way, but what would be decades in the making.
The NFL has attempted to hold games in Brazil a few times now, and it’s a bit of a mess if we’re being entirely honest. There are socioeconomic issues inside the country which are deep seated, and the ever-present duality of the exceedingly wealthy and impoverished make it difficult to imagine how the NFL and teams could consistently guarantee the safety of players.
Sure, the season is kicking off in Australia this year, but putting a team down there is so monumentally stupid it’s not really worth discussing. The big issue is that the travel is utterly impossible, and then there’s the climate. A team deep in the Southern Hemisphere would play the majority of the season in Summer. It would be such an irresponsible idea that even as much as Australia might love football, there’s just no scenario where it makes sense.
