FIRST WE TAKE MANHATTAN, THEN WE TAKE BERLIN: NFL announces first-ever regular season game in Berlin in 2025.
The NFL has announced it will play a regular season game in Berlin for the first time in 2025.
The game will be played at the iconic Olympic Stadium in the German capital.
The NFL has held regular season games in Munich and Frankfurt since 2022, with the game in Berlin set to mark the fifth NFL regular season game in Germany and the first in the German capital.
‘Germany has a rich tradition of American football, and the NFL has a deep history with the city of Berlin,’ said NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
‘We first held a preseason game at the Olympic Stadium 34 years ago, before it was home to NFL Europe’s Berlin Thunder in the early 2000s.
‘Now, with almost 20 million NFL fans in Germany, we’ll make a historic return to the city playing a regular season game for the first time as we open the next chapter in our relationship with Berlin.’
Related: Why does the NFL keep exporting its worst games to Europe? Because it can. “The matchups that the NFL has inflicted on crowds in the United Kingdom and now Germany have almost always been putrid. There have been 42 NFL games in Europe since the NFL first brought its product overseas in October 2007. Of those, only two have pitted a pair of teams with winning records, a matchup between the Giants and Packers in 2022 and one between the Chiefs and Dolphins last season. Nine times, the NFL has subjected crowds in Europe to a game featuring at least one winless team. The 2017 Cleveland Browns made a London appearance on their way to becoming the second 0-16 team in NFL history, as did the legendarily bad Urban Meyer-coached Jaguars and a 15-loss Dolphins team quarterbacked by the immortal Cleo Lemon. It’s like introducing Italian American cuisine by opening up a can of SpaghettiOs. Or showcasing the best of American barbecue by serving a McRib.”
Couldn’t the NFL fix the onside kick and ban that weird new kickoff formation instead?
(Classical reference in headline.)