Confirming months of rumors, the NFL announced Wednesday it will play its first regular-season game in Berlin in 2025, calling it a “multiyear commitment.”
The NFL posted the announcement on X.
Coming to Olympic Stadium in 2025… the first-ever regular season game in Berlin! 🇩🇪 @NFLDeutschland pic.twitter.com/2kDRMpu2rt
— NFL (@NFL) December 11, 2024
“Germany has a rich tradition of American football, and the NFL has a deep history with the city of Berlin,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement. “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.”
The NFL has held regular-season games elsewhere in Germany, in Frankfurt and Munich, which hosted this year’s Carolina Panthers-New York Giants game in Week 10.
Goodell confirmed during that Panthers-Giants weekend that the league wanted a Berlin game.
“I usually tell people, ‘Don’t believe rumors.’ In this case, I might say, ‘Believe it,'” Goodell said in fan Q&A session (via ESPN). “We’re working on it, but it isn’t finalized. We really feel like Berlin would be a great addition, so we’re looking very hard at that. Our people have been working very hard at it. But I want to add that does not mean we’re not going to be back in Frankfurt and Munich.”
Berlin’s Olympiastadion was built for the 1936 Summer Olympics. Goodell attended that preseason game the NFL hosted there in 1990, less than a year after the Berlin Wall’s demise.
“It was one of my favorite events,” Goodell said. “The German fans were just fantastic and overwhelming.”
No word yet on which network will broadcast the game, although the NFL Network has broadcast most NFL International Series games to date.
The NFL held five international games this year, including its first-ever visit to South America, for a game in Brazil. Goodell said earlier this season he would eventually like to hold 16 international games a season, twice the eight that owners have approved so far.
[NFL]