The NFL is clearly making it their mission to expand the game of football to an international stage. Their efforts have been focused on London for the past several years. However, the league has taken steps forward to reach new countries. They reached Mexico City last season and just played a game in Frankfurt, Germany. It feels like only a matter of time before they look for other destinations to visit, hoping to attract new fans. Sure enough, rumblings have begun surfacing this week on that front. The Chicago Bears are at the forefront of it.
Peter King of NBC Sports, one of the top insiders out there, reported that Spain is the likeliest next step for the NFL. According to rumors he’s hearing, the Bears will be the team hosting the game in 2024.
“Spain and Brazil in the next two years, Paris in 2025 or beyond, and Dublin at some point soon. The Steelers would like to play a designated home game there at some point soon and would likely have nine home games in 2025 and 2027. Significant rumors here about Spain being the game site for 2024, likely with the Bears as home team. But stadia in Brazil—after the World Cup and the Olympics in the country in the past seven years—are a bit better, and that could be a factor as well.”
This would mark NFL history as the Bears would be the first team to host a game in Spain. It also feeds into what the league has designated as International Home Markets. These are zones overseas where teams are permitted to engage with fans and sell sponsorship rights. Spain was awarded to the Bears in December of 2021. So it makes perfect sense they’d eventually play a game there.
The question is how different the Chicago Bears will look.
There is a strong possibility the version of the team we’re watching this season won’t be anything close to the same a year from now. Depending on how the rest of 2023 goes, there is a growing likelihood the Bears could be fielding a new head coach and a new quarterback. Matt Eberflus is 5-21 running the team after another dispiriting loss in New Orleans. His defense continues to disappoint despite the arrival of new pass rusher Montez Sweat. As for Justin Fields, he’s been mediocre outside of two games against league-worst defenses. He’s also missed time yet again with an injury.
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It is hard to imagine the Chicago Bears keeping the status quo for another year after this pairing has yielded four victories together (Tyson Bagent won the fifth game). At least one of them will be gone next year, and that should make for at least some intrigue once they head over to Spain. The question becomes where they play. Camp Nou in Barcelona has the largest stadium. However, Santiago Bernabeu is located in the capital Madrid and isn’t that much smaller. It will be interesting to see how the league approaches this.
Spain? Is this just to make them dislike American football further?