The NFL is Ruining Football with Streaming and International Games

LONDON, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 13: Tyson Bagent of Chicago Bears enters the pitch prior to the NFL match between Jacksonville Jaguars and Chicago Bears at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on October 13, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Harry Murphy/Getty Images) | Getty Images

Hello, Chicago Bears fans! I knew I had officially become an old man when the AARP started sending me letters. As such, it is now my right, duty, and privilege to yell at clouds. The cloud today is the NFL's headlong bent to move the game to the international stage and engage with as many networks and streaming services as you can shake a stick at. Thus, I'm going to take a break from talking specifically about the Bears and address an issue that has been with us for a while, but the league seems quite intent on making it worse and worse. And that is its continual departure from the traditional seven-day schedule for NFL football games in season.

On Thursday night of Week 1, the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams will open their 2026 season not in California, but at the Melbourne Cricket Ground - a Friday-morning kickoff in Australia packaged for American prime time and streamed on Netflix. It is a 16-hour haul from the West Coast, a 17-hour time difference from the East, and a Wednesday-into-Thursday disruption of the only major American sport that was built around a weekly recovery cycle rather than a daily one.

That game is just the latest in what started as a one-off spectacle that a couple of teams in the league had to deal with, to now a regular feature of league play and one that has a substantial impact on every team in the NFL. It is the logical next step in a league business model that has spent a decade slicing its calendar into streaming windows, short weeks, and overseas home" games. The NFL still sells scarcity better than any other sport. It is also busy spending that scarcity down - to the detriment of its teams, its players, and its dedicated fanbase.

Football is Uniquely Unsuited for International Play

There is a reason Major League Baseball plays 162 games and the NBA plays 82, while an NFL team plays 17. Football is a collision sport whose preparation and recovery are measured in days and weeks, not hours and overnights. A baseball team can fly overnight, take batting practice, and play again. An NBA team can play on consecutive nights and still field a recognizable product. Even hockey, another physical, high-impact sport, does not require the kind of downtime football has always required. An NFL team that plays on Sunday is not simply tired." It is mid-rehabilitation, mid-install, and mid-film study. The next opponent's scheme has to be learned. Soft-tissue damage has to be managed. The offensive line has to get its timing back.

That is why the old NFL week worked. For decades the league was almost entirely a Sunday product, with a single Monday night game as the exception. A one-day difference between Sunday and Monday did not wreck the calendar. Teams knew the rhythm: play, recover, install, practice, travel, play. The product was scarce because the bodies that produced it needed time to heal, and the teams needed time to prepare for next week's opponent. And the cost of playing the game - the physical and mental toil - was distributed fairly among all the teams.

The modern schedule has no such regularity. Thursday Night Football is a standing short week. Streaming partners have pushed for standalone windows, given they are being parceled out just a few games in the schedule. The NFL is clearly eyeing international markets and salivating over the prospect of expanding their fan base by millions of viewers, which is why we see regular-season games played on the international stage. The result is a league that now treats a 17-game season as if it were infinitely flexible, that it simply doesn't matter how long between one game and the next, and what travel time is necessary to get there.

The calendar has been parsed for platforms, not players

Thursday Night Football exists because Amazon paid for a night that used to belong to recovery. Netflix has Christmas and now Australia. YouTube has taken exclusive regular-season windows. Peacock and Paramount+ have gotten in the game, literally, as well. The business logic is obvious: more windows, more rights fees, younger audiences. Prime Video's Thursday package has grown into a 15-million-viewer product and a younger demographic than the broadcast networks. The impact on the football game itself, however, is getting lost in the NFL's avarice.

A Thursday game after a Sunday game is not a slightly shorter week. It is a collapsed one. Meetings still happen. Treatment still happens. A real practice week does not. Coaches have less time to install. Players who might have recovered sufficiently from a minor injury in a normal week either have to play hurt or sit the game out. Former coach Jon Gruden's recent verdict was blunt: no preparation, no recovery, dump the games. Players have said versions of the same thing for years - Richard Sherman after an Achilles tear blamed the shortened schedule, Doug Baldwin called the turnaround illegal," and Christian McCaffrey tied a hamstring strain, one that lingered for most of the season, to the short week.

"No preparation, no time to recover, no chance. Get rid of these Thursday night games! Dump them! It's not fair to the players, it's not fair to the coaches." - Jon Gruden pic.twitter.com/6gvPxiz5A2

- Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) November 10, 2025

The box-score defense of Thursday night the NFL tends to cite when these kinds of objections are raised is thinner than the league pretends. While it is true that scoring is not reliably lower (several multi-year samples put Thursday totals within a point of Sundays) and penalty rates, in large play-by-play studies, are relatively similar, that is not the same thing as saying the games are as good. Since both teams suffer from the schedule disruption, penalties tend to cancel. Poor play is met with poor play. And we should keep in mind that teams are not evenly selected for these feature" games.

The more streaming services and networks that get a game, the more they demand that their game feature a marquee matchup. Thus there is a selection effect that puts more marketable offenses - better teams - in those games. And there is, in fact, data that shows the rest gaps matter. A team on a short week against a rested opponent is not playing the same game the schedule implies, and late-season home teams on Thursday have historically held a real edge over visitors who just flew in on fumes. Sometimes the sloppy and uneven play that these disruptions cause is not subtle. In November 2025, Denver and Las Vegas produced a Thursday night game in which both teams finished with more penalties than first downs - the second such game in 75 years. That wasn't an accident, and it wasn't a coincidence. We get measurably worse football from the NFL when it violates the traditional week of recovery and preparation in the scheduling of its games.

Injury studies of the effect of Thursday night games have been inconclusive. An NIH study found no significant spike in Thursday injury counts versus Sunday. On the other hand, we have the players who actually play and travel to the games and their testaments that players arrive less prepared, less healthy, and less able to practice the game they are about to play when they are forced to deal with short weeks. It creates competitive disadvantages for some teams over others. And, further, given the headlong pursuit the NFL is engaged in of the international markets - it is becoming a regular factor for the whole of the season, rather than just one or two weeks. In other words, the NFL is moving into uncharted waters by introducing exponentially more short-week games and at the same time introducing more and more international games that require substantial travel time and adjustment to radically different time zones.

No other league asks this of a collision sport

Other major leagues travel. None ask 53-man rosters to play meaningful games on multiple continents in the same regular season, then return home and pretend the week was normal. In 2026, the NFL will stage a record nine international regular-season games across seven countries and four continents: Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro, London (three times), Paris, Madrid, Munich, and Mexico City. Half the league will play abroad. Jacksonville and San Francisco each play twice. The Melbourne game kicks off at 8:35 p.m. Eastern on Thursday - 10:35 a.m. Friday locally. European games kick off at 9:30 a.m. Eastern, which is morning television in the league's core market and afternoon football for people who did not buy season tickets.

Soccer clubs travel internationally because they play twice a week by design and because the sport's recovery profile is different. NBA and NHL teams live on airplanes, but they also live on an 82-game schedule in which one road trip is a rounding error. MLB can open in Tokyo or stage the World Baseball Classic in March because baseball's regular season is long enough to absorb the exhibition logic. The Classic is the right comparison, and the NFL keeps drawing the wrong lesson from it. Baseball exports the preseason, while the NFL is trying to export its season, and a substantially larger portion of that season than any other league in the world, considering football has the fewest games per season of any major sport.

Circadian research has already shown that even the domestic version of the impact travel has on teams is real and significant. West Coast teams and East Coast teams do not play the same night game. Classic Monday Night Football studies found West Coast clubs at a striking advantage in late windows; East teams going west for night kickoffs have historically paid for it. A three-hour shift is already a real competitive factor. A 14-to-17-hour shift, plus a 16-hour flight, plus a Friday-morning body clock in Melbourne may be growing the game" but is unquestionably doing so at the expense of the quality of the game itself.

The existing fan is the one who loses a home date

International games are sold as an additive by the NFL, but for the designated home teams, they are clearly subtractive - particularly with respect to season ticket holders. A team that hosts" in London or Munich is not adding an extra home game. It is moving a home date out of its own building (many of which were publicly financed stadiums). Season-ticket holders who paid for eight or nine home games now get one fewer - and more home games lost may be on the way, if the NFL continues on this course. The visitors, meanwhile, often leave with the better end of the bargain: they did not surrender a true home date. Early international series history was brutal on designated hosts; for years almost none of them reached the playoffs. Again, whether that was coincidence or a real impact isn't clear, and the competitive tax seems to have eased as the league has gotten better at the logistics of international games. But the fairness tax on the home team fans and home team businesses that lose the economic benefits of those lost games - has not.

In 2026, the NFL is taking another step down the road of moving the NFL to the international stage. Teams that once could protect two home games from export lost that protection. The official explanation was schedule flexibility and respect for international fans. From the NFL's fanbases here at home - those explanations have fallen on increasingly unsympathetic ears. Key matchups are being moved out of team home stadiums and out of the continent. If you are a fan that wants to attend that game, good luck. The travel costs are prohibitive for most regular fans - even season ticket holders. There is nothing illegitimate about wanting new fans in Germany, Brazil, or Australia. There is something extractive about charging the fans in the good ole US of A for the privilege.

They already tried a league over there. It failed.

This is not the NFL's first attempt to plant the flag. The World League of American Football, later NFL Europe and NFL Europa, ran in various forms from 1991 to 2007. It developed some players - Kurt Warner most famously - and it often found real crowds - particularly in Germany. It also lost on the order of $30 million a year and roughly $400 million across its lifespan. It never secured a serious local television contract. The quality was visibly minor league. Franchises moved, and names changed until the circuit was, in practice, a German developmental league funded by American owners. In June 2007, the NFL shut it down and announced the new strategy: send the real teams overseas instead.

That strategy is now approaching its end state. Commissioner Roger Goodell said this August he has no doubt" there will be NFL teams outside the United States - plural. London is the consensus favorite among executives. Mexico City certainly has the fan base to support an NFL team, and Germany has the history of football fandom. Goodell has talked about having a team in an international city before a Super Bowl is held abroad. He has also floated the idea that an 18-game season could mean 16 international games. The Melbourne experiment is not a one-off tourist date. It is a proof-of-concept for an NFL looking to export football to the world. And while that may be a laudable goal, when it comes at the expense of the play and the expense of the current fans, it is a bridge too far. A London franchise is already a brutal travel ask. An Australian franchise would be something no closed North American league has ever attempted: a weekly intercontinental commute in a sport that cannot hide a bad week inside 161 other games.

The NFL's advantage over baseball and basketball was never that it was more global - it wasn't. Baseball and basketball have had a stronger international presence - with actual leagues in play for decades - than football, which has, by its nature, been an exclusively American pastime. One game a week. Sunday afternoon football organized the American calendar. Streaming did not, by itself, get us here, but it has certainly exacerbated this problem. International games did not, by themselves, lead to these disruptive short weeks, but they have made it worse. In combination, they are producing a league that is simultaneously richer and expanding globally, but it is sloppier and more expensive for traditional fans to both watch and attend the games. The NFL's pursuit of international fans has come at the expense of its current fanbase. More windows, more time zones, more designated home" games in stadiums the season-ticket holder cannot reach, and a growing official ambition to station a real franchise across an ocean threatens to seriously degrade the product on the field and represents a real harm to fans of NFL teams here in the United States.

If the goal is interest abroad, the baseball model is sitting right there, NFL. Use the preseason, which is of less and less interest to home team fans, to expand the international fanbase. Play the World Baseball Classic equivalent when the regular season is not asking 300-pound men to recover in 72 hours after a violent three hours on the gridiron. Do not take a home date from Pittsburgh or Jacksonville or San Francisco and call it growth. Football was built on rest, routine, and a short season that made every game count. The league is now asking that same sport to play on Mondays and Thursdays and soon perhaps every day of the week, to stream on Wednesday night in another hemisphere, and someday, perhaps, have entire franchises stationed abroad. What the NFL seems unwilling to grapple with is that this has a serious cost. It degrades the quality of the games played, and it does so at the expense of fans and season ticket holders.

But what do you guys think about the NFL schedule and programming in 2026 and abroad? Should the expansion to international markets continue, or should the NFL refocus on the USA? Tell us in the comments below.