The series is part of the NFL\u2019s strategy to deepen its foothold in Europe. \u201cWe\u2019re using the game as a catalyst,\u201d Tim Ellis, the league\u2019s chief marketing officer, tells Fortune<\/em>. \u201cTo get people interested, to get them talking, to get the media to pay attention.\u201d For Ellis, the 80,000 tickets available for the Stade de France game matter far less than the millions of fans the league hopes to convert in the weeks and months after the final whistle.<\/p>\n There are signs the league is generating real demand overseas. London will have hosted 45 games by the end of this season and remains the league\u2019s most mature overseas market. Melbourne and Paris, where Ellis says the league\u2019s fan base has grown past 14 million, are also expected to draw big crowds. Ticket interest for the NFL\u2019s Melbourne match has surpassed the Melbourne Cricket Ground\u2019s 100,000-seat capacity, with more than 151,000 fans registering interest. Meanwhile, more than 600,000 people joined the virtual queue for last year\u2019s Steelers game at Croke Park in Dublin. Ticket and hospitality revenue, Ellis says, pales in comparison to what the NFL hopes to build in media rights, sponsorship, and merchandise deals, once European audiences are converted into fans who watch 50-plus games a year rather than one.<\/p>\n The NFL isn\u2019t the only organization running this experiment. Earlier this summer, FIFA was in the process of successfully exporting soccer to the U.S. as it joined Mexico and Canada in cohosting the World Cup. Despite its global popularity, soccer has struggled to find the same fandom in the U.S. as it boasts across Europe. Roughly a quarter (27%) of U.S. sports fans show an interest in soccer, compared with a global average of 40%, according to Sports Innovation Lab and JvM Sports. However, this World Cup has been a turning point. More than 6.25 million people attended matches through to the conclusion of the last round of 16, according to FIFA, and 18 million tuned in for the U.S. Men\u2019s National Team opener against Paraguay across Fox\u2019s platforms. The NFL is taking notes. \u201cI\u2019ve long admired FIFA for their global reach,\u201d Ellis says, pointing to the power of \u201cborder-crossing stars\u201d such as Lionel Messi. \u201cAnother lesson is storytelling,\u201d he adds. \u201cPeople want to know the backstories of the athletes. That stuff is inspirational.\u201d<\/p>\n This is not the first time the NFL has sought to break into Europe. The first attempt, a 1974 plan for an Intercontinental Football League, with teams penciled in for Istanbul, Rome, Munich, West Berlin, Vienna, and Barcelona, folded before playing a single down. The NFL World League, established in 1989, enjoyed slightly more success.<\/p>\n The transatlantic tournament featured 10 teams: six from the U.S., one from Canada, and three from Europe. The league kicked off in 1991 at the Waldstadion in Germany, as the Frankfurt Galaxy took on the London Monarchs. However, the league suspended operations after its second season. Rebuilt as an all-European circuit in 1995 and rebranded NFL Europa, it limped on with squads in England, Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Spain until the league finally pulled the plug in 2007.<\/p>\n NFL Europa never landed a TV contract in its own markets, starving it of revenue that might have kept it afloat. The venture ran up roughly $400 million in losses over 16 years, according to analysis by Chang Wan Woo, published in the Journal of Communications Studies<\/em>. The constant rebranding, franchise relocations, and lack of experienced players limited the competition\u2019s popularity, with fans showing little appetite for a developmental league playing what was considered a watered-down version of the sport.<\/p>\n Courtesy of the NFL<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n Earlier expansion efforts struggled in part because the league assumed the product would sell itself, Ellis says: \u201cIt understood almost nothing about how outsiders actually saw the game.\u201d To the uninitiated European viewer, American football can seem \u201cchaotic,\u201d he says. \u201c[They view it] as a spectacle more than a sport: big men in gladiatorial armor colliding, stopping, colliding again, then cutting to commercials.\u201d By contrast, 41% of Americans say football is their favorite sport, a Gallup survey found. \u201cMost Americans absorbed the rules by cultural osmosis long before they could articulate them,\u201d says Ellis. \u201cStrip away that lifetime of exposure, and you\u2019re left with, quite frankly, a baffling and barbaric game.\u201d<\/p>\n Increasing the NFL\u2019s popularity abroad has been \u201can incredible challenge,\u201d Ellis says, but he believes his experience of working in the U.S. and across Europe makes him uniquely well suited to finally bridge the divide. Earlier in his career, Ellis traveled to Paris to study French. He then spent five years working his way around the world: driving tractors on a kibbutz in Israel; building platforms for North Sea oil rigs in Norway; bartending on a luxury cruise line; and briefly modeling in Tokyo. He spent 12 years in Sweden, much of it running international accounts at the advertising agency Forsman & Bodenfors, before moving client-side at Volvo. After a stint at Volkswagen, Ellis spent seven years working in Santa Monica for the video game company Activision. \u201cAfter living and working all over the world, I\u2019ve learned that markets don\u2019t reject the product, they reject the translation,\u201d Ellis says.<\/p>\n \u201cStrip away that lifetime of exposure, and you\u2019re left with a baffling and barbaric game.\u201d<\/p>\n Tim Ellis, EVP and CMO, NFL<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n When Ellis joined the NFL in 2018, he commissioned research across the league\u2019s priority markets to get a better understanding of the awareness and perception of the sport internationally. \u201cMany international viewers simply hadn\u2019t registered that these enormous men are also elite athletes, world-class sprinters, some of them Olympic medalists,\u201d Ellis says. \u201cThey\u2019re like ballet dancers, but they\u2019re 280 pounds of muscle.\u201d His team ran a parallel study: What does someone need to know to enjoy the game? The research found that the two factors most likely to put a newcomer off\u2014the sport\u2019s complexity and its violence\u2014are precisely what hooks them once they develop a deeper understanding of the sport.<\/p>\n This information has informed the NFL\u2019s European marketing strategy as it aims to turn casual viewers into committed ones. \u201cThe idea is not to dumb the game down,\u201d Ellis says, \u201cbut to escort newcomers across the threshold from confusion to fascination.\u201d The strategy is gaining traction. In 2019, the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London became the first arena outside North America specifically built to accommodate an American football game. Two NFL games are scheduled to be played there in October, with another being hosted at Wembley, and a fourth in Madrid.<\/p>\n One of the core elements of the strategy has been to give people an established U.S. club to root for and players to love, Ellis explains. All 32 NFL teams now hold designated international marketing territories, which has allowed the sport to tap into some of the tribal fandom that soccer teams enjoy across Europe. Additionally, the league is developing digital content centered on athletes\u2019 families and backstories. This \u201chelmets-off\u201d strategy is designed to help international audiences get to know players and turn the sport\u2019s stars into recognizable personalities in Europe.<\/p>\n The NFL has also had to rethink how to market itself to a continent that \u201cdoesn\u2019t do swagger,\u201d as Ellis puts it. \u201cU.S. sports marketing runs on swagger,\u201d he says. But the league\u2019s own research found that what reads as charisma in Dallas can land as arrogance in D\u00fcsseldorf. \u201cSomething that we would see as confident, they would see as bro-y or too macho,\u201d he adds. As the NFL expands overseas, it is also having to contend with anti-American sentiment in some markets. Because American football is closely woven into U.S. culture, the sport is often associated with overt displays of patriotism, such as flag ceremonies and military flyovers. Abroad, Ellis says, the league has to tread carefully, because that same patriotism can be read as \u201cpolitical in nature\u201d by international audiences if it isn\u2019t handled correctly.<\/p>\n Another element of the strategy involves increasing participation in the sport abroad. The NFL Academy, an elite development initiative for student athletes, is based in Loughborough, England, and has partnerships with Loughborough College and Loughborough University. The program combines academic study with daily training, giving aspiring young athletes in the U.K. an opportunity to make it professionally. \u201cCollege football rosters used to be almost entirely American,\u201d Ellis says. However, this year he expects over 30 international players to join NCAA Division I programs\u2014the highest level of college football in the U.S. The International Player Pathway, a separate initiative established in 2017, is tasked with identifying elite global talent and developing them into NFL-ready players.<\/p>\n A noncontact version of the game, called flag football, has also become a fast-growing entry point for girls in the U.S. and abroad. The NFL lobbied for flag football to become an Olympic sport, and it is set to debut at the Los Angeles Games in 2028. Ellis says the NFL is already pushing to keep the noncontact variant on the program for Brisbane 2032. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to get more Europeans to play football, not just watch it,\u201d he says. \u201cA child who plays the game is dramatically more likely to become a lifelong fan.\u201d<\/p>\n The financial stakes explain why Europe matters so much to the league. NFL revenue topped $23 billion in the past fiscal year, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, and the league is targeting $25 billion by 2027. Media rights are the largest contributor: The NFL\u2019s current broadcast deal, worth nearly $110 billion over 11 years, accounts for almost half of total annual earnings. Replicating this model in Europe would represent a major financial boon. The lesson from prior endeavors is that new markets aren\u2019t won by adapting a product to suit local tastes. They\u2019re won, as Ellis says, \u201cby exporting the real thing, unchanged, and building the story, stars, and trust.\u201d<\/p>\n This article appears in the August\/September 2026: Europe issue of Fortune with the headline \u201cCan the NFL finally conquer Europe?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n #NFLs #previous #push #Europe #lost #million<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When the Pittsburgh Steelers a… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1583,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1939,3150,1126,1008,673,616,3151,3152,680,56],"class_list":["post-1582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-europe","tag-football","tag-londonarticles","tag-lost","tag-million","tag-nfl","tag-nfls","tag-previous","tag-push","tag-uk"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/FINAL-041725-Tim-Ellis-112659-1A-v6-2_v1-1.jpg?format=webp&w=1440&q=100\"\/)
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