NFL expansion is gonna happen
 

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">ICYMI: While discussions are at an early stage, an NFL owner told <a href="https://twitter.com/FOS?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@FOS</a> that creating a four-team European division via expansion is something that is under consideration. The expansion fee for each team would be in the $3B-$5B range. <a href="https://t.co/ZzKpsTQ6Dd">https://t.co/ZzKpsTQ6Dd</a></p>&mdash; A.J. Perez (@byajperez) <a href="https://twitter.com/byajperez/status/1641499763588620296?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 30, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

That's just going to water down the product even further. not to mention a travel nightmare for all the teams affected.

Translation: each of the owners want an extra $600M.

Oh it's better than that...if you do that then that's an extra division which means...4 new teams stateside followed by realignment so there are 5 divisions on both sides.

If the league gets watered down, that means even more Super Bowl wins for the team with the best quarterback.

The end game is 40 teams and an 18 game schedule, they've been angling for this forever.

Ok. Lets start naming some teams

London Limeys
Berlin Battletoads

Those 4 teams are going to get sick of playing each other in a 16 week season

France Tuck and Runners

I've already seen people saying that draft picks will refuse to go there, no one will sign there etc etc..

I find it hard to believe that no NFL players at all would be interested in living in Europe.

No No

Paris Pussys

**** that imagine a 36 team draft. It spreads the talent out even further and adds 4 more Goff/Cousins turds to an already sliding product. Also Bill O'Brien, come on down.

A developmental league thats seasonal would make more sense. Let the undrafted, practice squad and tryout guys go play a summer league to try to get some film out.

I've been saying forever the end game is 40 teams.

If I was an NFL prospect, I would be thrilled at the prospect of living in Europe for a few years in my early 20s. Being drafted by the Paris Revolutionaries would be an amazing opportunity, especially if my other options were places like Detroit and Buffalo and Atlanta.

I wonder if there would be any visibility concerns for the big stars, though. Will American brands sign up the quarterback of the Rome franchise for their ads?

There are so many good North American locations, I don't know why they need to go foreign.

Like, Mexico City is maybe the largest city on the planet is bananas about the NFL. Football hasn't caught on in St. Louis like it perhaps should have, but St. Louis makes a ton of sense to me, San Antonio, another California city or two like San Jose or bringing a team back to Oakland.

Austin is surprisingly large, or El Paso, or Portland.

So I don't know why they don't expand more in America.

Had same thought. If you add 4 more teams, at this point that's going to mean 4 more teams with dogshit at QB.

They'd live on the East coast, likely New York or Florida area, and fly over throughout the week from one of the hub airports. Their family would remain in USA most likely and they'd just travel for work more often. It's basically the NFL saying to the players, "We know you'll pretty much do anything to play in the league following college, and with little to no competition it's either us, or the real world and your public speaking degree with no experience. Good luck." As far as FAs, they'd fly back and forth, you also have to deal with green cards and dual citizenship etc, so there's a good amount of annoyances to the whole thing. You have athletes who do it within the United States, live on a coast, play on the opposite coast, get to go back home in the offseason and relax. I think it's a bad idea, but we all knew the NFL was going towards this path eventually. Especially with them having games in multiple European cities now. So we can pretty much put England and Germany down as new teams, wonder where they'd put the other two teams, Italy and Spain?

Football already failed in San Antonio. It failed in St. Louis twice.

No, there really aren't any great markets left in the US for something the size of the NFL.

Europe is a new frontier in terms of product saturation.

I’d love a Spring/Summer league to bridge the gap of the offseason.

It’d be a lot of fun to watch the late round picks and practice squad guys play.

Maybe even let the Assistant Coaches get a shot at being head coaches too. See how a Bieniemy does without Reid.

As Americans, we shall not send a valuable strategic asset like Patrick Mahomes II into Russia. Buechele will be quarterbacking any games against the Moscow Vlads.

This. Of course the CFL would object, but why not move into Canada too? Toronto makes perfect sense.

Locating teams in Europe is a terrible idea.

Californians don't even support or care about the 3 teams they already have. **** putting more teams in that state.

I guess teams could go on, an up to, 4 game road trip

anything to stop the mahomes dynasty

FYP - Southampton Snaggleteeth

Looking forward to drafting 40th every year.

It would be a two game trip when teams go over to Europe.

The West Virginia Mountinqueers

The NFL is trying it’s hardest to kill the golden goose.

In all honesty they should just redo the NFL Europe league, and let every squad have a minor league partner.

If they expand to Istanbul, they can then claim three continents for NFL football. Look for the Istanbul Turks at a stadium near you.

WinslowII missed out on war babies

Not many good free agents will be willing to go play in Europe. Those teams will just end up being practice squads for the real NFL teams.

I don't like most NFL proposals. Seventeen game season, Overseas regular sea son games and now this expansion proposal. The only thing that I see as a positive is the salary cap growing enough to pay Mahomes as well as put quality pieces around him.

Constantinople Byzantine's

Plus, no one is going to watch the Portland Panhandlers get beat 12 or more times a year.

They could put another franchise in Rome and easily generate one of the NFL's most intense rivalries.

Given the number of NFL players from Samoa and Tonga, they should put a couple of franchises in those places.

That's what I was thinking. Mahomes/Reid have shown they can win it without a loaded roster. The rest of the league, not really.

Actually I'm re-thinking this. If the sport legitimately were to take off in Europe, or worse yet worldwide, there could be a big influx of NFL talent that would actually make the league more competitive. So I'm gonna veto this change since we're already winning Super Bowls all the time.

You realize it’s a zero sum game?

So this is after they just added a 2cd Thursday night game for teams. Which is probably heading to 2 bye weeks and another week of regular season games.

The issue is that yes if they do 4 Euro teams they will have to do 4 more closer because you can't have 5 divisions and 4 divisions it has to match up..that probably leads to realignment as well.

But some of these cities are gonna be non starters, the Cowboys and Texans will go apeshit about another team in Texas just like Buffalo wants nothing to do with a team in Toronto.

Mexico City though is basically a lock.

Paris Chickens

The CFL is barely surviving at all anymore as it is. They have no power to object. The NFL would certainly thrive in a city with as much money and prominence as Toronto, though I'm sure the Bills would oppose such expansion.

If they turn the NFL into the NHL with nothing but 75% shitty teams and 80% make the playoffs, I'll be done with the NFL.

Yeah but what are you going to do?

AFC West
AFC East
AFC South
AFC North

NFC West
NFC East
NFC South
NFC North

Overseas Teams

You can't add another division stateside. You could try and have two overseas divisions but then you're shooting for 8 teams over there. That might be spreading things a little thin.

30 is already too much. How much hope is any team going to have when there are 60 teams you have to beat?

They can do whatever they want...it's why there'd be realignment.

As I look at this, what the hell is Front Office Sports and why should we take this "report" at face value?

Basically everyone has known for awhile that the NFL is wanting expansion, it's not a new story.

They would surely then need to eliminate Thursday games altogether.

AND adjust Playoff spots.

Again this would just mean would would win more super bowls

I'll bet you any sum of money that we don't see 40 teams in the NFL in your lifetime.

Ok, so London, Paris, Berlin, & Madrid.

+

Mexico City, Toronto, San Diego, & San Antonio.


Bring back the Concorde and I don't see any problem going international, but 40 teams feels like a lot.

Yuuuuuuuuck.

Those teams would be perennial doormats. They'd struggle to retain FAs and signing them would be next to impossible. They'd just be churning through rookies and after about 5 years when the novelty wears off, their fanbases will wither away to nothing as well.

Just a terrible, terrible idea.

Imagine a group of fanatic soccer football hooligans flying in to visit your stadium for the weekend.

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/AdmiredIll...et-max-1mb.gifc

HEY Patrick you better run. These fans don't like you running up the score.

https://i.gifer.com/Bl2o.gif

The taxes the euro players would pay would SUCK!

This was always coming. It's the only way it makes travel sense. You can't just put one team over there, you need to create an entire division. London, Manchester, Berlin and Munich or something like that. Maybe replace one of them with Frankfurt.

Its always funny when anyone underestimates the greed of the NFL.

I think the NFL will end up having Tuesday night games, Wednesday night games, Friday night games and of course Saturday games at some point.

You gotta have that 7 day coverage, corporate did a study that says fans want to see a game every night or something.

I'm surprised that it hasn't happened already. That would take the NFL from a special event to a mundane routine, but I'm still surprised it hasn't happened.

The truth is all of this will be angled for 2030/31 because that is when all of the TV rights and stream deals are up.

If the NFL can tell the networks they are adding teams 8 teams plus 2 byes ads weeks and games to the schedule which means they will ask for a significant increase of pay from the networks.

The NFL has actually tried pretty hard to not overlap with college football because they like having a minor league system that is free to them.

I honestly think they'd have to adjust the salary cap on a team by team basis if they did this.

You can't expect teams that are subject to EU levels of withholding to be able to keep players at the same figures teams in the US can. And then what? How far do you go? Do you 'balance' for teams in Texas and Florida with no state income tax? California teams get a buffer because it has a high tax rate?

Shit, why not start talking about cost of living while you're at it...

It's all a terrible idea and it's designed to do nothing but make more money at the expense of the product. I would be righteously pissed.

Can't have Friday or Saturday games due to their anti-trust exemption.

What has the NFL ever done to tell you it isn't all about profit.

Seriously, circling back - why hasn't the NFL set up a true minor/developmental league? I know they scrapped NFL Europe, but that always seemed half-assed, and the world was different then.

Imagine if there were 32 international minor teams, populated with "not major leaguers" in 8 divisions:

UK/Irish Division [London, Dublin, Birmingham, Glasgow]
German Division [Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt]
Rest of Europe Division [Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona]
Oceania Division [Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Auckland]

Asian Division [Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Manila]
Latin American Division [Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Rio De Janiero, Buenos Aires]
African Division [Cairo, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Nairobi]
US Division [Salt Lake City, Portland, Central TX (ATX/SA), Omaha]

- Each program would be assigned to an NFL team, and could even rotate cities every 2 years to get each team more global exposure.

- Expand the NFL Draft to 14 rounds, where the last day of the draft is 7 rounds, lightning fast

- Each team participates in training camp, and after final cutdowns, teams could pick keepers and then have a minor league re-draft.

- Division games played for the first 8 weeks, then travel to the other division cities the other weeks, rotate home and away.


Pros
- Exposes the rest of the world to American Football, increasing eyeballs and merch sales.
- Allows mid-level players the ability to continue playing if they don't make the big leagues.
- Helps develop young talent, and widens the future talent pool once youth leagues pop up globally. This would also help the NCAA with international talent.

Cons
- Cost of doing business

A plane would crash killing the players

Madrid Matadors

Berlin Stormtroopers

Dublin Leprechauns

Copenhagen Dips

Agree.

Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. This is pure greed.

You just feel the NFL can't stop tinkering and will wind up ****ing it up in the end.

They are banking on the massive popularity of the NFL cannot be harmed, no matter what they change.

Yea it never really made sense to me 1 or 2 teams but this proposal be it a good one or bad one at least makes sense.

London/Berlin/Paris/Amsterdam or Madrid.

Those whole countries could adopt those teams as their own not just the city. I think too much is being made about players wanting to go. Players would get over and settle in just fine. If players can enjoy Buffalo and Cincy then they can enjoy some of the greatest cities in the world. They will make the money work.

Traveling for games in division would be easy. It is an interesting idea I wonder what they would want to do stadium wise. Wembley is easy for London. I don't know if clubs like Bayern Munich or PSG in France are interested in sharing their stadiums full time...that is different than a one off game and they share seasons with the NFL. Olympiastadion in Berlin is pretty damn old. Imagining an NFL team trying to make Camp Nou home in Barcelona. ROFL

accurate.

Goodell is so desperate to leave a legacy, that legacy is going to end up being damaging the NFL and it's brand.

The NFLPA needs to become stronger, so they can control things like extra Thursday games and playing overseas, and expansion. Or at least have more control than they have now.

This is ridiculous.

You don’t see any of the major soccer leagues in Europe (which is their equivalent to the NFL in America in terms of popularity) expanding with teams in the US.

Of course you don't. EPL teams have 38 match days and player each other each home and away that is not even counting domestic competition cups.

They also have an entire relegation\promotion pyramid.

Even if you put that aside it is easier to establish yourself in Europe than the other way around. United States while filled with sports fans has infinitely more sports, teams, and leagues dividing that attention compared to countries in Europe.

Nothing about your comparison makes sense.