The NFLwhich He will land next year in Madrid with a match at the Santiago Bernabéudon’t forget Barcelona nor the Metropolitan, future goals for further European expansion of the American league.
The agreement signed at the beginning of the year with Real Madrid to host a regular league match at the Santiago Bernabéu He is not the only one that the NFL has in mind for Spainthe fifth country to take part in the international meetings of the competition and the third in Europe, after the United Kingdom and Germany.
The British are the ones who have the closest relationship with these meetings and, with the three scheduled in London this year – the last of them this Sunday, October 20 -, they have 37, above the six in Canada, five in Mexico, two from Frankfurt, one from Munich and one from Sao Paulo last September.
Spain will join this group on a date yet to be defined, in September or October of next year. The The NFL is currently working with the teams and Real Madrid to find a date that suits everyone.
This could well be between October 7 and 15a day in which there will be no club football due to the international break, which would leave the Santiago Bernabéu free for events. The same case could occur if the white team played away from home.
The retractable grass of the Madrid temple also makes it possible to avoid repeating scenes like when Barcelona faced Tottenham Hotspur in 2019, five days after there were two NFL games at Wembley. This caused a deplorable state of the field, with the American football lines more than visible on the green.
Currently, the NFL is working to provide an experience in Madrid similar to that in London, where The Tottenham stadium is completely transformed to leave football aside for American football.
If Real Madrid signs an agreement similar to the one Daniel Levy sealed with the NFL in 2019, by which the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium will be the home of the American League until 2030, the white club, in addition to a fixed income from the rental of the stadium , will take full income from the sale of beer, food and merchandising on match day.
In beer alone, Tottenham’s stadium generated more than a million pounds in 2019the first in which it hosted matches. Furthermore, the NFL has an advantage in the United Kingdom with respect to football and that is that it is much more profitable because, in Premier League matches, alcohol consumption has been prohibited in the stands since 1985 to stop ‘hooliganism’. This regulation, however, does not come into effect for the NFL.
The great challenge for Madrid is to find spaces in which to hold activities during the week before the match and the location of the Bernabéu, without large open spaces nearby, does not allow the installation of ‘fan zones’, so the league will have to reach an agreement with the city council to use other places, such as the Plaza del Sol, Plaza Mayor and Plaza de Felipe II, where Liverpool’s ‘fan zone’ was already installed in the 2019 Champions League final.
The NFL also has to define a show for halftime, with a renowned artist for the Spanish public. The closest example is that of Sao Paulo, where the Brazilian singer Anitta performed.
According to the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, The economic impact of hosting at least two matches in the capital is 300 million pounds (360 million euros) It is estimated that the city receives, from the United States alone, between 5,000 and 10,000 attendees at the Wembley and Tottenham matches.
Regarding an expansion to other Spanish cities starting in 2026, Antoine Griezmann confirmed in a conversation with journalists in London that he mediated for Atlético de Madrid to reach an agreement with the American competition so that the match instead of being played in the Bernabéu will be played at the Metropolitano. The possibility of there being two meetings in Madrid is not crazy and may depend on the success of the one in 2025.
Barcelona, perhaps the city with the most American football tradition in Spain thanks to the now extinct Dragonswould be the city that would accompany Madrid, in case the NFL approved another meeting in Spain.
Teams push to try to go to the cities and countries with which they have the most sponsorship agreements, and recently, Both Paris and Dublin have been among the names that the league has considered for the future.
