As far as the NFL is concerned, there’s no such thing as too much football. Not only do we get three days of NFL action most weeks during the season, but lucky fans are increasingly in position to head across the pond (or the other side of the globe, in some cases) to witness their heroes perform for an international audience.
This season, that's true more often than ever—nine NFL games are being played outside the United States, the most international matchups the league has ever scheduled in a single year, spread across four continents and seven countries.
- The rise in NFL action abroad mirrors broader sports tourism trends, with the market size for such travel projected to hit $2.7 billion in 2026.
- Among the myriad reasons for today’s boom is the globalization of sports content and investments made by various leagues to effectively export their product to markets with so much untapped potential. The NFL, unsurprisingly, has been among the most aggressive.
"Replicating a Super Bowl-inspired week of programming, city takeovers, halftime performances and a robust game day experience is very intentional," NFL SVP Jon Barker, Global Head of Major Events and International Games, told Yahoo Sports in 2025. "We want to make these games special for our international fans and for our fans traveling over from the U.S."
Key Takeaways
- The NFL is playing a record nine international games in 2026, across Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro, London (three games), Paris, Madrid, Munich, and Mexico City.
- Each city pairs the game with its own week of fan events, local halftime performers, and—in London and Madrid especially—team-branded bars and rallies you can build a trip around.
- InteleTravel Advisors have access to NFL International Series inventory ahead of the resale market, so the game becomes the anchor of the trip instead of the thing you scrambled to find tickets for.
The 2026 Slate at a Glance
Two of this year's nine games have already kicked off. The rest are still ahead of you.
Already played:
Still to come:
A record seven of the nine international games will feature halftime shows presented by American Express, with the NFL pairing the events with locally resonant entertainment: Jonas Brothers in Melbourne; Pedro Sampaio and Ricky Martin in Rio; Ayra Starr for Eagles-Jaguars in London; Cage The Elephant in Munich; and Mexican rock trio The Warning in Mexico City. The broader program is designed to make the games multi-day celebrations of football, entertainment, and local culture.
London: The Centerpiece
London gets three games this season—Colts-Commanders and Eagles-Jaguars at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, then Texans-Jaguars closing out the run at Wembley. If you're only picking one international trip this year, London gives you the most fully-built fan experience of any city on the list, and the widest choice of dates.
The Jaguars’ relationship with London is its own story at this point: Their 2026 games will be the franchise’s 12th at Wembley and fourth at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Under owner Shad Khan—who also owns Fulham FC—the club has made London a central part of its international strategy for more than a decade, treating the city as a virtual second home.
That history shows up in the city's fan infrastructure: Team-branded "landing bars" have become a genuine London game-week tradition, with Passyunk Avenue serving as the Official Eagles Landing Bar and The Admiralty in Trafalgar Square carrying the Jaguars' colors for match weekends.
If you're going for the Eagles-Jaguars game on Oct. 11, you'll also catch Ayra Starr headlining halftime—one of the biggest names in global pop right now, and a reminder that London games have become entertainment events in their own right, not just football played on a different continent.
Pro Tip: If you want the fullest London game-week experience, the Eagles-Jaguars date does double duty—a marquee halftime performer and two fanbases with the most established pub culture in the city.
Munich: The Beer Hall Pivot
The Patriots and Lions meet at Allianz Arena on Nov. 15, marking Munich's third regular-season NFL game after 2022 and 2024. Munich's NFL energy lives downtown, not at the stadium.
Past game weeks have turned the city's classic beer halls—Hofbräuhaus, Augustiner Stammhaus, and others—into de facto NFL fan zones, with team events, watch parties, and the kind of atmosphere you'd expect from a city that already knows how to host a few hundred thousand people drinking beer in close quarters. Marienplatz fills from late morning on game day, and that's where you want to be positioned before making the roughly 20-minute ride out to Fröttmaning on the U6.
Since your pregame is downtown anyway, build in an extra hour or two to actually see the city rather than treating it as a beer-hall waiting room. Marienplatz itself is worth 10 minutes at 11 a.m. or noon for the Glockenspiel—Munich's mechanical clock show, and one of the few free tourist attractions anywhere that actually delivers.
From there it's a short walk to the Viktualienmarkt food market for a quick bite, or, if the November weather cooperates, out to the English Garden, which is one of the largest urban parks in the world, and worth the walk even in late fall for the Chinese Tower beer garden alone.
Pro Tip: Structure your day around Marienplatz first, stadium second. The beer halls are where the game-week atmosphere actually lives in Munich—the walk from the U6 station to Allianz Arena is functional, not festive.
Madrid: The Second Edition
Madrid in November has its own kind of pull—Gran Vía lit up early against the shorter days, terrace heaters running late into the night, a city that treats any excuse to stay out as a good one.
The Bengals and Falcons play at the Santiago Bernabéu on Nov. 8, Madrid's second consecutive year hosting a regular-season game, following the Dolphins-Commanders matchup in 2025.
Gran Vía itself is worth knowing regardless of which team house ends up where, as it's Madrid's central boulevard, dense with hotels, bars, and restaurants, and it sits close enough to the Bernabéu that most fan-event venues cluster around it by default.
Even if you've only got a day or two around the game, Madrid rewards you for stepping away from the stadium.
The Prado is one of the world's great art museums and a short walk from the Retiro Park, well worth an hour on its own for the boating lake and the Palacio de Cristal. Skip-the-line tickets are worth a few extra euros for both the Prado and the Royal Palace, since lines build fast even outside peak season. For food, Mercado de San Miguel near Plaza Mayor packs a full tapas crawl—jamón, tortilla, patatas bravas, vermouth—into one covered market, which is about as efficient as "trying Madrid" gets on a tight schedule.
The Expanding Map: Paris, Melbourne & Mexico City
Three cities joined the NFL's international rotation for the first time in 2026, and each is worth a different kind of attention.
Paris hosts its first-ever regular-season NFL game on Oct. 25, with the Steelers facing the Saints at Stade de France. It is the only venue in the world to have hosted a FIFA World Cup final, Rugby World Cup final, and UEFA Champions League and European Championship finals. If you're planning around this one, treat it as a Paris trip first and an NFL game second—the city needs no introduction, and its NFL infrastructure is still being built.
Melbourne delivered on every level the NFL could have hoped for. The Sept. 10 game featuring the Rams vs. 49ers at the Melbourne Cricket Ground was Australia's first-ever NFL regular-season game, and it drew 100,021 fans: the second-largest crowd for an NFL game outside the United States and the seventh-largest in league history, with attendees from more than 30 countries and nearly half traveling from interstate or overseas.
Those numbers track with what the league has been saying about Australia for a while. The league estimates its Australian NFL fan base at 8.8 million, and says local interest in the sport now trails only the English Premier League among non-Australian competitions.
Mexico City closes out the international slate on Nov. 22, with the Vikings facing the 49ers at Estadio Banorte—the renamed Estadio Azteca—in a Sunday Night Football matchup. Mexico is the NFL's largest fanbase outside the United States, and this game marks the start of a new three-year commitment to bring regular-season football back to the city. The halftime show alone tells you how much the league is leaning into that market: Monterrey rock trio The Warning, performing in their home country at what they've called an honor of a stadium.
How to Plan the Trip
Here's the part that trips people up: Buying a single ticket to an NFL International Series game is the easy part. Building the rest of the trip around it—flights that land you in the right city with enough runway before kickoff, a hotel that's actually walkable to the fan-event action instead of 45 minutes away, dinner reservations that don't collide with a 9:30 a.m. ET kickoff that's mid-afternoon local time—is where things get complicated fast, and every one of this season's host cities comes with its own version of that puzzle.
This is exactly where an InteleTravel Advisor changes the equation. InteleTravel Advisors have access to NFL International Series inventory, meaning you don’t have to hunt through secondary sites, no guessing whether a listing is legitimate, no paying a markup for tickets that were available at face value a month earlier.
Pair that access with an advisor who specializes in event-centered travel, and the whole trip gets coordinated as one package: game tickets, hotel placement near the fan-event action, and a schedule built around your kickoff time instead of against it.
If you're choosing between this season's remaining games, think about what kind of trip you actually want. London gives you the deepest fan infrastructure and three dates to choose from. Munich rewards travelers who don't mind trading a stadium tailgate for a proper beer hall. Madrid and Mexico City both come with genuine local-culture payoffs—a Gran Vía sports bar takeover, a hometown halftime headliner. And if you're building a trip around next year's slate instead, the lesson from this season is clear: Book the destination as seriously as you book the game, because both halves of the trip now come with real production value behind them.
Ready to build a trip around one of these games? Connect with an InteleTravel Advisor who specializes in event-centered travel to explore ticket access, hotel placement, and full trip coordination for whichever international matchup fits your team—and your travel style—best.
