Germany’s love affair with the NFL and the struggle to play Bundesliga games abroad

The influence of America in Germany continues to expand at an enormous rate. So much so that American football is now the fastest-growing sport in Germany. Exhibit A of America’s influence in Europe is this past weekend’s game between the New York Giants and Carolina Panthers. Both teams played a regular-season NFL game in front of a sold-out crowd of 70,132 fans at Allianz Arena, home to Bayern Munich.

Sunday’s game saw NFL fans travel from across Europe and the United States. Dressed in a kaleidoscope of NFL jerseys representing almost every team, the majority in attendance were Germans. These weren’t your casual fans either. Many of them were hardcore fans of NFL teams who watch the sport weekly on TV. Just as European soccer benefits from Saturday morning kickoffs on US TV, many Germans enjoy watching the early Sunday kickoffs in primetime on Sunday evenings via Sky Sports Germany.

Joining them were thousands of Americans wearing Panthers and Giants colors. In total, the game was a prime example of the NFL’s international expansion efforts and how, from start to finish, it was flawless and will further help expand the reach of America’s sport to fans in Europe. In fact, last week, Berlin launched an official bid campaign to host an NFL game at the Olympic Stadium for the next five seasons.

Bundesliga’s agreement with the NFL

So how does this tie in with soccer? NFL’s international expansion is due in large part to a partnership agreement with the Bundesliga, signed in 2022, where both organizations share best practices and help with marketing efforts. For the NFL, the Americans are certainly the greater beneficiary of its agreement with the Bundesliga, and after witnessing Sunday’s game in person, the NFL is already seeing tremendous success.

For the Bundesliga, it’s a little more complicated. The German top-flight league gets to see first-hand how the NFL operates. Not just the game itself, but all of the activations and marketing it does in the run-up to the game, and how they make the game feel like an event.

It begs the question though that if the NFL is playing games in Europe, is America paving the way for European soccer clubs to play competitive games in the States? After all, Germany, and the Bundesliga, are very open to Americans coming to their country and playing games stateside. There’s nothing wrong with that, but while the door has been opened for the American sports invasion of Germany, it appears to be permanently shut for the Bundesliga to play competitive games in the United States. Or does it?

While in Germany, World Soccer Talk asked Brett Gosper, Head of NFL Europe and the UK, whether the NFL would be open to seeing competitive German games played in the States.

“I don’t think we’d have any problem with that,” Gosper said. “It’s up to the leagues themselves to determine whether they want to do that.” 

Bundesliga International’s Chief Marketing Officer Peer Naubert quickly erased any hope of that happening. “I think it’s super unrealistic that we would ever play a regular season game anywhere abroad, even in the United States.”

However, Naubert did give hope that the DFL Supercup could be played overseas in the future. 

“That’s something many people have discussed already,” Naubert said. “[Playing the DFL Supercup outside of Germany] might be different. There’s nothing in the pipeline at the moment. Nothing discussed. But that’s something where I could imagine that this ‘never-ever’ [stance on not playing games overseas] might not count as much as for regular games.”

Without the Deutsche Fussball League (DFL) playing games in the United States, the partnership feels unbalanced and is certainly in the favor of the NFL since it has no qualms about playing competitive games in Europe.

Bundesliga and NFL: Opposites attract

As organizations, the Bundesliga and NFL are strange bedfellows and couldn’t be more different. The German league is supporter-driven and built on its ‘football as it’s meant to be’ slogan. Supporter groups – thanks to the Bundesliga’s 50+1 rule – play a central role in how the sport is run, many of whom are majority owners and have voting rights at their favorite German clubs. The league, as addressed above, is unlikely ever to play competitive games abroad because the fans won’t allow it.

Also, the Bundesliga clubs are very focused on making ticket prices and concessions affordable. German league executives boast about an average ticket price of $27 per game. Want a German hot dog and beer at a game? It’ll cost you less than $8.50 in total. Compare that to the NFL where prices are substantially higher.

The NFL sees Germany as a captive market. Speaking with Carolina Panthers Chief Strategy Officer Jake Burns, he explained that there are currently 820,000 NFL fans in Germany who haven’t picked a team yet. That’s a great opportunity for the Panthers and other teams to capture those fans as their own and increase profits.

For the Bundesliga, being associated with the NFL is certainly beneficial for its efforts to expand the awareness and reach of the league with Americans. At the same time, the German league is continuing its efforts to have more clubs play friendlies in the United States.

The irony of the Bundesliga partnering with the NFL

The irony of the Bundesliga having a memorandum of understanding with the NFL is that it was the NFL itself that was the inspiration for the creation of the Premier League.

In the mid-1980s, then Arsenal chairman David Dein saw how well the NFL experience was when he went to see the Miami Dolphins play. Meanwhile, across the pond, the English Football League, which governed all 92 professional clubs in England and Wales, was a bureaucratic, old-world organization that was poorly marketed. In 1983, the entire EFL brought in a paltry £5.2 million for a two-year TV deal, while the NFL’s deal in 1982 was a five-year $2 billion TV deal. Even worse for English soccer, the 1985/86 season wasn’t televised at all in the United Kingdom. In the late 1980s, there wasn’t much progress either. 

There was much to like about the way the NFL was doing business. Dein found similar bedfellows with Tottenham Hotspur chairman Irving Scholar and Manchester United chairman Martin Edwards, both of whom agreed with Dein that change was needed and that the NFL model was the path forward.

Thirty-two years after the Premier League launched in 1992, it’s the Bundesliga that’s seeking to copy the best practices of the NFL in its attempt to close the gap with the domination of the English league in the United States.

Photos: Christopher Harris and DFL/Getty Images/Daniel Kopatsch