If the NFL has its way, two teams will be in for one heck of a regular-season road trip soon.
The NFL announced adding four new teams and two new markets to its Global Markets Program.
“The Ravens, Packers, Chargers, and Commanders are the new teams to gain international marketing rights in other countries,” Pro Football Talk reports. “The Ravens were granted rights in the United Kingdom, the Packers in Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Chargers in Greece, and the Commanders in the United Arab Emirates.
“Greece and the United Arab Emirates are the new markets for 2025.”
In addition to expanding markets and all the lucrative financial opportunities that expansion entails, the league also announced that it would like to play a regular-season game in Abu Dhabi sometime soon.
“We don’t know the timing, and it’s really an ‘if’ in terms of whether we’ll play a game there,” said Peter O’Reilly, the NFL’s executive vice president, club business, major events, and international. “But I will say is that’s a market where there’s strong interest in our game, strong interest in growing our game on a year-round basis. I think that’s why you see three clubs raising their hands with interest there. It’s a market we’ll continue to explore. We’ve done some exploratory trips there to understand the viability of the potential for a regular-season game in the market. We have more work to do there in terms of what that looks like over this next stretch. But obviously an important market and one that has hosted significant events in other sports in recent years, whether that’s the NBA or global soccer. There are learnings there, but we really do it as we try to do all these markets in the right, thoughtful, cadence way.”
The league has prioritized international growth in recent years, as it has watched MLB and the NBA reap large financial rewards from their foreign partnerships. As it stands, the league has 29 teams involved in its Global Markets Program. News of the new partnerships and aspirations of a regular-season game in the Middle East comes after another report revealed the NFL could play as many as ten regular-season games outside the United States in 2026.
Read the full article here
