LONDON — The National Football League and Premier League have a lot in common. Each is the most popular sports league in its home country. Each is intent on growing its brand across the world.
And both leagues have enjoyed an uptick in respective global fanbases.
In at least one way, though, their approaches to grabbing an international audience are very different.
The NFL plays regular-season games outside the U.S. seemingly as often as it can. In 2025 alone, seven league games were played outside the U.S. in countries including Brazil, Ireland, Germany, Spain and the UK.
The Premier League has never taken regular-season matches outside England. It has played “friendlies” or exhibition games in countries around the world, including the U.S.
For the Premier League, there are warning signs for bringing matches overseas. Previous proposals were tabled after backlash from fans who live and die by their clubs.
“The most important person outside of the players is probably the fans,” Owen Hargreaves, a football commentator and former Bayern Munich midfielder, told The Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism and Capital News Service. “Taking a game away from the people that’s kind of their break from reality, from life, jobs, and stresses and kids.”
But speculation persists that it might take the plunge someday.
“The money’s so big,” Hargreaves noted.
Still, both league’s current strategies appear to be working.
NFL’s growth in the U.K.
NFL UK notes there are 17.3 million UK fans, with 3.3 million considered avid NFL fans. The NFL’s three London games in 2023 marked the first time ticket sales to UK-based buyers outgained those to non-UK buyers, according to the ticketing platform Viagogo.
The NFL has visited five countries since it began playing regular-season games outside the U.S. more than two decades ago, with Australia slated to become the sixth in 2026. The first regular-season game outside the U.S. was in Mexico City in 2005 between the San Francisco 49ers and Arizona Cardinals. It brought in 103,467 fans, among the highest marks for any game.
Now, each NFL team must play an international game at least once every eight years. Annual regular-season games in the UK began in 2007, while preseason games there date back to the 1980s.
“The NFL obviously has a very clear priority around growing the game globally, but London’s really been at the center of that for the longest time,” Henry Hodgson, General Manager at NFL UK since 2022, told the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism and Capital News Service in an interview at NFL UK offices.
The NFL wasn’t always a success outside of the United States, though.
The Buffalo Bills played six regular-season games at Rogers Centre in Canada from 2008-2013. The maximum seating capacity was increased from 49,500 seats for Toronto Blue Jays baseball games to 54,000 for football games. While 52,000 fans attended the Bills’ first game there, just 38,000 came to their last.
It was a setback, similar to another league that started years prior.
NFL Europe was a developmental league from 1991-2007 featuring teams based in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK. Alumni include Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner, who participated in the league in 1997 before leading the St. Louis Rams to a Super Bowl title in 2000. NFL Europe cost the NFL more than $400 million, according to a study of the league by James Madison University.
“[NFL Europe was] developmental both from a player perspective — actually developing players for the NFL, which it was relatively successful with — but then also developmental in terms of developing fans internationally,” Hodgson said, adding, “It educated fans just enough for them to recognize that it wasn’t the real thing.”
Hodgson said there were more than 500,000 ticket requests within a day of the announcement that the first regular-season game would take place at Wembley Stadium — enough to fill the venue five times.
“That, in itself, was a “wow” moment,” Hodgson said.
That contest was between the New York Giants and Miami Dolphins in 2007. The Giants, who went on to win the Super Bowl, won a rain-filled game, 13-10. Nat Coombs, an anchor of NFL coverage on television and radio in the UK for the last 15 years, said the Giants’ ensuing Super Bowl run quelched concerns among teams about traveling to the UK during the regular season.
“That was instrumental,” Coombs said. “People thought, “It’s not going to disrupt our season. This is fine.”
In the UK, younger fans are the NFL’s top audience. People aged 16-34 make up 43% of NFL UK fans, according to a study by Think Beyond Consulting.
“We’re probably not going to attract people who are 40 years-plus, they may have made the decision on what they are or aren’t interested in,” Hodgson said. “The 12-to-24 year old audience feels like one that we can really lean in on.”
A key is flag football.
Hodgson said the number of children in the UK playing the sport — in which players grab flags instead of tackling each other — has doubled each year for the last three or four years. He added that there will be about 250,000 kids participating in schools across the UK by the end of 2026.
Flag football’s success partly is due to the fact that less equipment is required than for tackle, lowering barriers to entry and allowing more casual fans to try football. In turn, they may be more inclined to watch the NFL.
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft stated recently that the NFL has pushed for an 18-game season where each team would play at least one international game. If that happens, might the league’s next move be a team based in London?
“It’s certainly a conversation that we’ve been having over the years,” Hodgson said.
Premier League’s growth in the U.S.
It’s unlikely that regular-season Premier League matches will come to the U.S. in the near future. Despite a widespread sense of such a move being inevitable, backlash could be harsh in England — and club owners likely would take the heat.
There’s plenty of other ways to grow the game overseas, especially with the men’s World Cup coming to North America in June for the first time since 1994.
“There are so many parallels [between the Premier League and NFL growing internationally], in terms of how they sit right now in the overall lexicon,” Coombs said.
The Prem, as it is known, has an advantage in growing “The Beautiful Game” across the Atlantic: A large base of soccer players in the U.S.
“One of the number one predictors of being a lifelong fan of a particular sport … is that you actually played the sport when you were growing up,” said Darin White, founder and executive director of the Samford University Center for Sports Analytics.
Over 850,000 American high school boys and girls played soccer in the 2024-25 school year, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations’ participation survey. That’s up from 670,000 in 2004-05, and 464,000 in 1994-95.
“In my generation, the popularity of soccer, versus [the younger] generation, it’s vastly different,” White said. “[The younger] generation has had so many more people growing up playing soccer, being exposed to soccer.”
There’s another, much more straightforward, way that clubs can grow their fanbases: winning.
For clubs outside the Big Six — Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, Manchester City and Manchester United — success is the best predictor of club fanbase growth, according to research from Samford University’s Sports Analytics Center.
No club exemplifies that better than Newcastle United. Its highly-publicized ownership takeover by Saudi investors in 2021 came with an influx of money and a promise of success that quickly came to fruition.
Between 2022 and 2025, Newcastle enjoyed its three best Premier League finishes since 2012. Winning the 2025 Carabao Cup earned the club its first major trophy since 1955.
In turn, the club’s American fanbase grew 970% from 2020 through 2024 — compared to 62.3% growth leaguewide.
Likewise, Ryan Reynolds’ and Rob McElhenney’s takeover of Wrexham — and subsequent FX series on the team — brought worldwide publicity to a club that was then in the fifth division of English football. Three seasons and three promotions later, Wrexham is in the running to make the EFL Championship playoff for a chance at entering the Premier League.
The World Cup will return to the U.S. in June. That’s another massive opportunity for growth — especially given the improvement of the U.S. men’s national team this century. Players like Christian Pulisic at Chelsea, Tyler Adams at Fulham and Brendan Aaronson at Leeds United correlated with increased viewership of those clubs’ games.
None of them were superstars. That may be what it takes to elevate the Premier League’s American popularity to full potential.
“The only thing holding back the U.S., from getting to be with the NBA or the NFL, is you need a LeBron James or a Michael Jordan,” Hargreaves said. “You need a guy that can change the landscape — and I think if they do that, the profile is just going to explode.”
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