NFL executive says league is considering game in the Middle East in the future
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said last September that he hopes the league one day will play 16 international games.
The league is nearly halfway there, having scheduled seven games in five cities outside the United States in the 2025 season. That includes the first contests to be held in Ireland (Dublin) and Spain (Madrid). There also will be a game in Berlin for the first time.
And in 2026, the NFL will play a game in Australia.
“We feel like this game is destined to be global,” Goodell said on “Good Morning Football” on the NFL Network. “We expect to be in Asia soon. We expect to be in Australia soon. We’re going to make sure that our game is available around the globe.”
Mike North, the NFL’s VP of broadcast planning and scheduling, talked about international games on the It’s Always Gameday in Buffalo podcast, and he mentioned the league has talked about possibly playing in the Middle East.
“There’s an international group here in our building, led by Peter O’Reilly, the day-to-day guy who’s running point on venues,” North said. “And years and dates is Matt Shapiro, and yeah, they very much have to be aware of not just the political climate here, but the political climate in every place that they’re looking at. And I know this year, as we were thinking about Dublin, I think they literally had to wait for the new government to be installed before they could actually sign papers and dot I’s and cross T’s, and we could actually commit to a game there.
“So they are looking (at) 2025 obviously, we haven’t even announced the games yet. We haven’t gotten through them. There’s a few first-time places for us that we’re going to have to commit significant resources to, but those guys are already knee deep in 2026. You mentioned Australia. I know we’ll be back in London. There’s talks about other places that we haven’t played yet. And I know they’re really pie in the sky looking even further down the road, things like Abu Dhabi and stuff like that.”
Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East, and North certainly didn’t commit to the NFL having a game there. But it’s interesting that inside the league offices, there has been a discussion of playing a game in the Middle East.
And North’s remark and Goodell’s comment about playing a game in Asia shows the league seems open to sending teams nearly anywhere.
‘Mini Super Bowl’
North said planning for international games begins years in advance.
“Each one of these international games is sort of like a mini Super Bowl,” North said. “So there’s whole teams of people that are committing not just to Madrid this year or to Australia next year but also looking three, four, five years down the road: where might we play and who might go over and how would that work and when in the season could we do it? Like you said, what’s the travel? What’s the time zone difference? When’s the bye week? There’s an awful lot of planning going into that.”
That’s a lot about the future. As for this year, North said he expects the 2025 NFL schedule to be released next month, likely between May 13-15.
This story was originally published April 18, 2025 at 8:42 AM.
