NFL determined to test the limits of its global reach

The 2024 NFL season will be remembered for a few things.

The Kansas City Chiefs, floating toward a third championship, suddenly had an entire season's worth of bad plays happen within two hours.

The Lions, Vikings and Bills offered long-suffering fan bases a glimmer of hope that they could finally end their Super Bowl donuts, only to fall short in typically crushing fashion.

The Washington Commanders were suddenly good again, and the much-loathed Dan Snyder had absolutely nothing to do with it.

But 2024 will also be remembered as the year the NFL leaned into manifest destiny. No longer content with just being a league that dominates the American sports calendar and churns out many billions of dollars in annual revenues for its owners, the league added games in Brazil and Germany to its usual United Kingdom slate of overseas dates. And before this season had even finished, it announced plans for 2025 games in Berlin, Madrid, and Dublin, and one in Melbourne for 2026.

Prime-time football was once a bit of a novelty but, this season, the NFL had a Friday night game and multiple Monday night doubleheaders to complement its season-long Thursday night schedule. It also moved beyond its usual U.S. Thanksgiving games to produce a Black Friday game and two contests on Christmas Day, even though Dec. 25 was a Wednesday.

Lastly, the NFL added Netflix to a list of U.S. television partners that already included all four broadcast networks, ESPN, Prime Video, Peacock, and the NFL Network.

It's all expansion, all the time.

And it doesn't show any sign of slowing down. While it was controversial when the NFL convinced the players' union to go along with a 17-game season a few years ago, it's now widely assumed that the 18-game campaign is inevitable. It's also assumed that the league will opt out of its 11-year media rights deal four years early - at the end of the 2028-29 campaign - to instead pursue richer contracts with the streaming services that have only dabbled in the NFL business so far.

Commissioner Roger Goodell has said he'd like to see the league's International Series, which currently includes five games next season, expand to as many as 16 in the coming years - an inventory that would seem ripe to be sold to a streaming service with a global presence.

Goodell has also expressed interest in taking NFL games back to Mexico City, where the league hasn't played since 2022. He also wants to return to Brazil, even though the soccer field in Sao Paolo was torn to pieces by the beefy members of the Green Bay Packers and Philadelphia Eagles. He also mused about putting a team permanently in London and suggested a Super Bowl could eventually be held there.

Seemingly ignored in all of these grand plans is the impact on the players, who have increased travel, irregular intervals between games, and, most significantly, extra games on their schedule. It all comes at a time when training staff are more aware than ever of the importance of rest and recovery in the avoidance of injuries. It's hard to take Goodell - or any league official - seriously when they stress the importance of player safety while simultaneously adding punishing new requirements to the job.

The NFL's expansionist mindset is said to be motivated by trying to be more like soccer, where clubs such as Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United, and Liverpool have huge global followings. This makes sense on some level: it's a big world, and there's plenty of money to be made beyond America's borders. But soccer is also a global sport, played by kids around the world because the rules are simple and the equipment is cheap. It's common for fans to have a local team to support in a domestic league while also rooting for one of the powerhouse clubs in England or Spain.

American football is much more of an outlier. It's played in North America almost exclusively and, no matter how much outreach the NFL does in these foreign lands, it can't honestly expect to create a real football culture overseas just by hosting a handful of games there. Especially when the NFL's prime-time matchups take place in the middle of the night in Europe.

Goodell seems unwilling to contemplate just how much is too much. Every time the NFL shows up somewhere new, whether that's a city, a broadcast platform, or a day of the week, people will watch it.

But then you get an example like the NFL game in Munich this season, where the 2-7 Carolina Panthers played the 2-7 New York Giants. It had its own morning broadcast window but was a showcase for absolute mediocrity. (And, as it turned out, it was Daniel Jones' final game with the Giants.)

As exports go, it wasn't a fabulous product. Nor was the Brazil game, nor were any number of Thursday night specials, suggesting that teams are struggling to adapt to short weeks.

But Goodell has, thus far, remained undaunted. More is always better. No trip is too far. Every schedule can be further padded.

Will the NFL ever hit its limit? We'll likely find out in the next few years.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.