Every NFL Team Playing Overseas Every Year is Bad for the NFL

International football is bad for the National Football League.

This isn't some weird, xenophobic rant. It's an argument for an American game to be played in front of die-hard American fans, not overseas and inaccessible to lifelong backers.

Every NFL Team Playing Overseas Every Year is Bad for the NFL

Before Super Bowl LX, Robert Kraft told a radio station that the NFL is going to 18 games soon and every team will play overseas every year.

That's going to be a net negative for the NFL.

It will water down the product, pull the game away from real fans, and makes regular season games seem like exhibitions.

International games are bad for NFL fans because they're:

• On too early
• Far away
• The host fans either don't really care or it's a sideshow vs. soccer
• Oftentimes the product on the field is substandard

When the Denver Broncos played the New York Jets in London last year, winning 13-11, I argued the NFL should do away with international games.

It was a comically bad effort from both teams. On six drives in succession, the Broncos punted five times and gave up a safety.

They were only outdone by the Jets complete ineptitude. New York somehow threw for a net -10 yards in the game and had a mere 82 total yards.

There were 13 total punts, five field goals, and one extra point; 16-of-24 points were scored by kicking the ball in.

That left the blokes in Merry ol' England gigglin', mate.

The game was terrible from each team. That was partially because the Jets were otherworldly bad and the Broncos offense was mostly bad for the first half of 2025.

But it was also because the game was in London. Both teams were away from home, on another continent. Professional athletes are huge on routines and controlling the uncontrollable.

Get them out of that rhythm and the product on the field suffers.

Anecdotally, Blake Griffin once explained his pregame routine to Dax Shepard of Armchair Expert and it was insane. He used to get to the arena many hours in advance of a game, perform the same shooting warmup, and even try to have certain things happen during a particular song.

The Broncos-Jets game was only one of eight international games in 2025. 6-8 were one-score games, and two went to overtime. But the Chiefs looked completely unprepared to start the season vs. the Chargers until they finally found their footing, the Vikings kept the Browns in it with two turnovers, and the Broncos anemic offense kept the Jets in it.

European-based games are on too early

7:30 a.m. (Mountain Time) on a Sunday is an ungodly hour to watch football.

Sure, if it's not your team playing, it's all gravy. It's icing on the cake of the already three timeslots full of games.

But when it is your team, it just doesn't feel right watching them that early.

*No one is drinking beer that early.

*Right?

Host fans are lukewarm on the NFL

I've had a few European-based NFL fans inform me that they love the game over there.

Hey, I mean that's great.

But this is our game. We've been to games in the rain, sleet, snow, and frozen our asses of cheering for our team only for them to lose and to go home sad, tired, and your feet numb.

We study football over here. It's an insanely complicated game, unlike soccer, the beautiful game. The world's game.

The NFL is so complicated no one knows what a catch even is these days. Nor what pass interference is.

It's great! (?)

I just don't see the fans at international games get going like NFL fans do here. It makes sense; a country likely has only one game a year outside of London, who regularly host three per season.

But it all just adds to the circus-like feel to the whole thing.

"Hey boys, the circus is in town! Let's go see the elephant and the lion!"

J.J. Watt, former Defensive Player of the Year, called these NFL international games a "traveling circus" this week.

It's gimmicky. It's arrogant to think they should or could take over the entire world in terms of being the most-popular sport.

Kyle Van Noy, another former NFL player, responded on Twitter per kyle Awful Announcing:

“It’s all they care about in my opinion because it’s the biggest growth which means money. YouTube , Amazon, and all the streaming services are global,” he wrote. “They going for it all JJ! Will be interesting seeing the game in the future where I’m sure teams will play multiple games overseas.”

Meanwhile, die-hard NFL fans can barely afford to attend a home game, let alone travel to Europe or Australia etc. to watch their team play.

These international games are basically off-limits to any regular Joe schmo football fan.

International Games Water Down the NFL Product

The on-field product should be chief among the NFL's concerns. But it's not.

As evidenced by their growing the regular season schedule from 16 games to 17, eliminating one preseason game which has left the first 2-4 weeks of the regular season feel more like preseason. The league will soon expand to 18 games, too, as mentioned earlier this year by Kraft.

Those early-season games feel more like preseason but fans are paying premium, regular season ticket prices. That’s unfair to them and could turn them off to the game.

Overall, adding games, scheduling teams on short weeks for Thursday Night Football games, and forcing teams to play internationally—with crazy flights, upended routines, and foreign kickoff times—are all contributing to the watering down of the NFL.

The thing the NFL has over the other American sports is a smaller number of games.

In the NFL, every game matters. Unless you expand the season, and then do so again.

The 17 (and soon-to-be 18) games still mean more on a per-game basis than the 82 games in the NBA, for instance. But what we're starting to see is the same thing we've had in the NBA for years; teams half-assing it to start the season before turning it on in the second-half.

Another edge the NFL has on the other sports is their games are only once per week. That builds anticipation for the next game and pushes ratings.

However, the NFL is watering down their product by scheduling games on Christmas, Black Friday, and now a Wednesday in 2026.

All three of those were areas the league didn't want to touch for years. Now they're trying to play all week long instead of (mainly) Sundays.

That's quite literally spreading the product thin across a week.

A bowl of ice cream is great after dinner as a treat. But if you have ice cream after every dinner, it loses its luster. It's not special anymore.

This year there will be 9 international NFL games.

Next year the number grows to 10 international NFL games per Adam Schefter.

It won't be long until it's 16 international games, encompassing all 32 teams.

And if the Jaguars move from Jacksonville to London, the league will be pushing past 20 international games in all likelihood.

Just like with capitalism, the NFL wants and needs never-ending growth.

But anyone with two braincells can tell you never-ending growth is impossible.

At some point, companies who push to be ever-bigger and more popular end up abandoning what made them great in the first place. They become a shell of what they once were.

The NFL is already nearing a growth cap in terms of games per year. 16 was arguably already too long, and soon it will be 18.

Player safety has been a focus of the league lately as a PR campaign but these international games and expanding the schedule flies in the face of that supposed safety.

If and when they expand internationally, with a team‘s home overseas, it will likely be a move too far for the NFL.

Remember NFL Europe? It was a fun experiment from 1995-2007. But the league lost $30 million per year and closed as it lacked fans, talented players, and support.

I also wonder why European soccer teams don’t travel to the US. It’s almost as if fans don’t care about soccer here.

NFL owners and American arrogance is propelling the need to be The World’s Game when there already is one.

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Rich Kurtzman was born and raised in Denver Colorado and attended Colorado State University in Fort Collins in the aughts. He's been a professional writer since 2011, covering Colorado State football and men's basketball, as well as the Denver Broncos, for many outlets. Current Denver Broncos work can be found on Mile High Sports. Previous credits include CBS Denver and The USA TODAY Sports Media Group.