Roger Goodell: NFL plans to play in Australia "for the long term"
On September 10, the NFL will play its first-ever regular-season game in Australia (where it will be September 11 at kickoff). While it may be the first time the NFL plays a game that counts in the land of koalas and kookaburras, it apparently won't be the last.
In a press conference at the location of the Week 1 49ers-Rams game in Melbourne, Commissioner Roger Goodell made it clear the NFL will be back.
"There's no question that we're going to be playing here again," Goodell said, via Reuters. "Our view is that we're coming here for the long term. We don't come as a one-off. This isn't a circus."
But it sort of is a circus. Because the circus typically comes to town once per year. While that may be enough to fill a stadium, it's not enough to fully monetize the product internationally.
Look at England. The NFL has been playing regular-season games in London for 20 years. And the NFL is still struggling to get sustainable traction there.
Last year's Week 1 Chiefs-Chargers game in Brazil - which was streamed globally at no cost by YouTube - had an international audience of 1.2 million.
The U.S. population is in the vicinity of 350 million. The rest of the world has 7.9 billion people. This means that only 0.015 percent of the rest of the planet watched the game.
That's not deterring the league from rolling the stone up a steep hill, even if some think the NFL should realize that it's not really working. And it won't work until international viewership improves, dramatically. That's where the real money is, as the NFL has learned in its domestic experience.
And so Australia will now become a stop on the NFL's traveling non-circus circus. It could be an annual thing; asked whether the 2026 game means the NFL could be back in 2027, Goodell said, "It might."
Might is the key word. In America, the NFL has plenty of it. It wants to get more of it beyond our borders.
It's obviously a long-term play. The overriding question is how long it will take. And whether, at some point, it's going to hit a hard ceiling on how big it will be.