Shipping a Week 1 Game to Brazil Felt Like a Step Too Far

The NFL wants to keep growing its international presence, but the opening weekend of the season should belong to the die-hard fans back home.

Jalen Hurts scrambles in the season opener from Brazil. / Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

It’s difficult, and honestly feels a little pointless, to raise a question when you already know the answer is some combination of money, politics and the unstoppable avalanche of what we lovingly refer to as capitalism but is really just a savage grab for money and attention. Despite all that, sometimes we like to be heard out, and—after watching the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Green Bay Packers 34–29 in a stadium that you cannot drive to from the Philly suburbs without shipping your car over something called the Darién Gap—I have a feeling some people want to be heard.

I begrudgingly accept that in five years the NFL will have hooked its tentacles into every facet of our lives. The league will arrive at a 20-game regular season before long. It will start playing on Labor Day weekend, then push back to National Buttered Corn Day (August 23, in case you forgot), then, eventually, the Fourth of July. Replica uniforms will become fully absorbed into our workwear rotations, and our paychecks will soon come with an option to receive the direct deposit or let it ride on the outcome of Thursday Night Football thanks to a full integration of FanDuel into our personal finance plan. For the most part, this is all part of the lifecycle of a product that has captivated us all.

But there was something about the Eagles and Packers kicking off their seasons thousands of miles away that bothered me more than I expected. It was after Saquon Barkley scored his second of three touchdowns in his Eagles debut, as he ran around the corner of the end zone with his arms spread wide. I personally know two dozen people who have made it their life’s goal to be at Lincoln Financial Field for that kind of moment—that utter buffet of haughtiness and self-satisfaction that comes from seeing your favorite team steal away a former rival’s best and most popular player, then taking a picture of yourself after he does something great while holding up a middle finger and texting it to a New York Giants fan—who were waiting for a livestream to buffer so they could see it from another continent for $10. Not long after, the broadcast played a clip of Corinthians fans cheering after a goal during a futbol match at the same stadium, and there was something similarly visceral and lovely and familiar about their reaction. I wondered how weird it would have been for those Brazilian fans to watch if that goal had happened on a turf field somewhere in Charlotte. 

Let’s back up for one moment and make it clear that we should all be for international football. Truly devoted international fans are some of the most knowledgeable football minds on Earth and have so many more barriers to entry when it comes to connecting with the sport. We don’t own football, and we’re better as a society of fans when everyone gets to experience the sport in person. Let’s also make clear that these thoughts have nothing to do with Brazil itself.

Instead, it’s simply this idea that commissioner Roger Goodell plans to double—his words, from a pregame interview on the ground in Brazil—the international schedule and begin selling off games to hotbed cities around the world. The idea that the league’s quest to outearn the GDP of Luxembourg does not take away from the very deep and specific roots the sport has here in the United States. Opening weekend, for example, should be as sacrosanct as Thanksgiving when it comes to the NFL calendar. If fans are sacrificing a home game, don’t make it the home opener—the first and possibly only chance to attend a game when the team is still undefeated and propelled by foolish hopes and ambitions. 

The kinds of people who live for that moment, who become reborn on that day and form the unshakable foundation of the NFL’s business model, the people who have stayed with the league through all of its cringeworthy moments and devote a sizable chunk of their income to tickets and parking and memorabilia and the mafia-like blood oath that is personal seat licensing, do not deserve to miss the chance to wear a Giants Barkley jersey with some sort of obscenity written over the logo on a piece of duct tape and have it appear on the broadcast. 

Oddly specific, I know, but the only people who truly thought this game was a great idea were Brazilian fans, who likely would have been just as happy to see a game in Week 9 that wasn’t as personally important to the fan bases here, and the increasingly uber-rich ownership class which has all but lost touch with its core consumer; the kinds of people who don’t understand that for some Eagles and Packers fans, Friday night was like receiving notice that this year’s family Christmas party was being held on the dark side of the moon and that they must own a personal spacecraft to attend. 

If there’s such a desire to showcase the NFL in different venues, play the thing at Penn State’s Beaver Stadium and allow Eagles and Packers fans to camp out together in the Kalahari Desert–sized parking lot there for a weekend. And, while we’re at it, play it in a place that we are closer to 100% sure can actually facilitate a football game and not unleash some of the greatest skill-position players in the NFL onto a field patterned after the surface of Ice Capades. Field conditions in London and Munich have been equally as poor, at least according to some players who have complained after the fact. 

Again, I’m not naive as to the why this happened. The first two games of this season have showcased the power of the drug the NFL now gets to sell around the world. The roadshow, despite its strain on native fans and players and coaches and officials and staffers, will succeed in sucking millions more into this cash vacuum. It really is the perfect sport, and sharing can be hard, especially on a night such as Friday when it felt so far away.