The selection of Bad Bunny for the Super Bowl LX halftime show was hardly accidental. It’s just another piece of the NFL’s broader puzzle of making pro football a global sport.
Before Sunday’s game, Commissioner Roger Goodell acknowledged that the effort could include the placement of a team in another country.
“I don’t take international expansion off the table,” Goodell told Scott Graham of Westwood One, via Sports Business Journal. “I think that’s very possible someday.”
The NFL has been dangling the carrot of a foreign-based team for years. Usually, it comes up in connection with the annual international games, as part of the effort to build buzz in the countries that are hosting the games.
At one point in recent years, Goodell hinted at a full division of European teams. That would require a significant overhaul of the current structure of the league. And it would raise real questions about whether the teams would be relocated from the U.S. or added to the current roster of 32 franchises.
If the league goes from 32 to 36 teams, why not just grow to 40? One conference would have a European division, and the other could have a Pacific division — with four teams in Japan and/or China and/or wherever else they could be placed in that part of the world.
It’s a long-term play, a 100-year plan. The NFL is already two decades into its international experiment, which began in 2007 with one regular-season game per year in London.
And it makes sense. If the league can establish a truly global footprint, a billion-dollar business eventually becomes a trillion-dollar business.
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