What could European NFL expansion look like?
36 teams, built-in rivalries, and a whole lot of scheduling fun.
American football fans have long dreamed of bringing their beloved sport across the Atlantic to a wider audience. Previous attempts like the NFL Europa, which folded in 2007, may have failed to yield profit for the league, but I’m not here to talk about bottom lines. I want to find out how the NFL could solve the scheduling and travel logistics that come with having one league span across two continents.
Yes, that’s right. I’m not talking about setting up a separate European league — that ship has sailed and sunk already. I’m talking about having European teams play football against established, decades-old NFL franchises. Lately, most conversations about European expansion involve relocating American franchises across the ocean (such as Shahid Khan’s Jacksonville Jaguars). But relocating an existing team to Europe would create a division that spans across the Atlantic ocean, and the European team’s US-based divisional rivals would bear the brunt of the burden of relocation by being forced to travel internationally every year. It would be much easier if there was an entire European division, and unless four of the NFL’s billionaire owners decide to go to Europe, relocation likely won’t be the path taken.
So expansion it is. I propose a European division with teams in London, Frankfurt, Berlin, and either Dublin or Barcelona. The location of the fourth team is a toss-up between the Irish and Spanish cities: Barcelona offers a larger media market and access to the fan base of the defunct Barcelona Dragons, but Dublin sets up a nice rivalry with the London team to parallel the Frankfurt-Berlin domestic clash. The other three cities have all proven their love for professional American football in the past: the German teams consistently led NFL Europa in attendance, and the NFL International Series games in London are always played in front of sell-out crowds.
Adding this European division would bring the number of teams on the league to 36 and the number of divisions to nine. This prompts the question, would the European division join the AFC, or would they battle it out in the NFC? The answer: neither. There is just no simple way to add a division to either of the two conferences without making things wildly unbalanced between them. So I’ve decided to treat the European division as essentially its own conference. “But how will this work for scheduling games? And what about playoff brackets?” We’ll get there. Hold your horses.
By its very nature, having two conferences with 16 teams each and one with only four means the season schedule will look very different from the European teams compared to the American ones. Luckily for us, the NFL recently added a 17th game to the season, which will be extremely helpful. Let’s look at my proposed schedule for American teams first.
Each American team will play:
- Six (6) games against division rivals, home-and-home
- Four (4) games against a division within the same conference on a three-year rotating basis, two home and two away
- Four (4) games against a division from the opposite American conference on a four-year rotating basis, two home and two away
- Two (2) games against teams in the same conference that finished in the equivalent position within their respective divisions in the previous season, one home and one away
- One (1) game against the European team that finished in the equivalent position within its respective division in the previous season, home/away based on conference on a two-year rotating basis
The fifth category is the only real change from the existing 16-game schedule that is being used as of 2020 — and this is where having that 17th game really helps us in this thought exercise. The only real detail left to iron out is where the games would be played (home vs. away). The most logical solution would be to have a two-year rotation between the AFC and NFC. For example, in odd-numbered years, the NFC hosts European teams, and the AFC packs their suitcases (and vice versa for even-numbered years).
This would mean that in an odd-numbered year, AFC teams would play eight home games, while NFC teams would play nine. Is this unfair? My logic is that it’s more important to iron out disparities within the conference than between the two conferences, since teams primarily compete for playoff berths against teams from the same conference (we’ll get to playoffs in a minute). Might it affect inter-conference games between AFC and NFC teams? Yeah, maybe. But once again, every other team from the same conference would be in the same situation. Plus, any difference between the two conferences stemming from international travel would end up summing to zero in the long term because of the two-year rotation. Look at it this way: each of the NFL’s 32 American teams would have one European trip every two years, and that trip would happen during the same year as the other teams in its conference.
More relevant would probably be the timing of American-European games within the season. I would imagine that most fans of American teams would not want their team to have to travel to Europe the week before a Week 18 playoff-clinching game against a division rival. Similarly, I don’t think European fans would be very happy to watch the lower quality of play that would come from their team having to fly to the US every other week.
Here’s the best solution I can think of. First, schedule all international games happening in the US during Weeks 1–4. During this time period, all four European teams would be “on tour” in the US, playing their four away international games and then return to Europe afterward to play the rest of their season. A side effect of this scheduling decision would be that the NFL season for European teams would effectively begin in early October, about two months after start of the European soccer season. Avoiding competition with European soccer for TV time and attention would definitely be a positive for these teams.
Second, schedule all international games happening in Europe during Weeks 9–12. Why not earlier? I want to avoid giving the European teams a split schedule of 8 international games followed by 9 divisional games. Imagine if American teams played their six divisional games all in the row at the end of the season! That just wouldn’t feel right. I would give them Weeks 5–8 to play their first set of divisional games and a bye week before hosting their American counterparts. I would also be willing to give each American team a bye the week after they return from a European trip. Now let’s look at the schedule for teams in the European division.
Each European team will play:
- Nine (9) games against division rivals, consisting of at least one home and at least one away game against each opponent, with no more than five and no fewer than four home games.
- Eight (8) games against American teams that finished in the equivalent position within their respective divisions in the previous season, four home and four away.
Once we have the schedule sorted out for the American teams, the European schedule naturally falls into place. Four games against AFC teams, four games against NFC teams, and a triple round-robin within the division. The biggest wrinkle that I can see is the fact that two European teams would end up playing nine home games over the course of the season and the other two would only play eight. I’m not entirely sure how much this would matter, but one way that it could be ironed out would be for each European team to play one game per season at a neutral venue (my first thought would be Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, but perhaps somewhere closer to home like the Stade de France, Estadio Santiago Bernabéu, or Cruyff Arena might be more hospitable). In any case, this schedule seems sensible to me, and is close enough to a facsimile of the American schedule to be considered fair.
Now for the part we all want to hear about: playoffs. We’ll maintain the 14-team playoff that the NFL started using in 2020, but with slightly different qualifications and quotas. The playoff teams will be:
- Nine (9) division winners from the AFC, NFC, and European divisions
- Two (2) AFC wild card teams
- Two (2) NFC wild card teams
- One (1) at-large wild card team (could be AFC, NFC, or European)
“This all seems very reasonable to me,” you may say. “But what side of the bracket will the European team (or teams) play on?” Good question. The European division winner will always compete on the opposite side of the bracket from the at-large team. If the at-large team is American, then they compete in their home conference. If the at-large team is European, then they compete in the conference that traveled to Europe for their international games. All current rules for playoff seeding still apply (except the division winners don’t automatically get the top seeds because that’s a dumb rule anyway), and the higher-seeded team hosts every game except for the Super Bowl.
So now that we’ve come up with a set of rules to guide us, let’s see how this might work out in practice. Let’s say this is how every team finished within its division last year and we want to find out which teams the London team will play against this year. One potential schedule might look like this.
Now suppose this is how the 2022 season unfolds. The teams highlighted in green qualify for the playoffs. Because the Vikings (an NFC team) secure the at-large wild card spot, London qualifies for the playoffs as an AFC team.
So how has this thought experiment turned out? I would say this scheduling plan works pretty reasonably and would probably be embraced by fans in the real world if it were implemented. What do you think?