NFL, looking for growth, finds open arms in Germany

About 60 hardcore National Football League fans gathered in the party room of Der Player, an upscale eatery, on a cold evening last month in Hamburg, Germany. Wearing jerseys and hoodies from teams like the Chicago Bears, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Las Vegas Raiders, they grabbed seats to watch a taping of “Prime Time Football Live,” which draws thousands of viewers on YouTube.

At 7 p.m., Patrick Esume, former coach and now commissioner of the semi-pro European League of Football, warmed up the crowd before counting down: “Threi, zwei, eins, Football Bromance!” He then introduced his panelists: former coach Andreas Nommensen; Mika Kaul, a television commentator; and Kasim Edebali, who played six seasons in the NFL

For the next 90 minutes, they discussed the latest games, bombarded the audience with questions like whether Patrick Mahomes is one of the five best quarterbacks of all time, and dissected a four-game suspension handed down to Denver Broncos cornerback Kareem Jackson. Phrases like “bang-bang play,” “tough linebacker” and “field possession” were thrown around with ease.

Esume kept the show light and moving, and he leaned on Edebali for his expertise as a linebacker. Occasionally they stood together to demonstrate legal approach techniques, and they spoke in detail about how to study opposing offenses. The audience then gathered around the panelists and took a group photo.

“To sit next to them while we talk about football, it’s so interactive,” said Jenni Gayk, who wore a Chiefs jersey and has been watching NFL games on German television since 2015. “You feel that the NFL is becoming much more popular. ”

The NFL has long been the largest league in the United States with revenues of more than $20 billion annually and is looking for new ways to grow, including abroad. And nowhere is the competition growing faster than in Germany.

The knowledge and enthusiasm of the audience at the taping – some traveled from as far away as Austria – was a sign of the NFL’s rising stature in a country whose sporting landscape is ruled by football. Football lags far behind the national sport, but 3.6 million Germans say they are avid NFL fans – that’s 25 percent more than in Britain, which has hosted regular games since 2007.

Interest soared last year when the NFL played its first regular season in Germany. Tickets sold out in minutes, as they did this year for the two games played on consecutive weekends in Frankfort, starting on Sunday when Kansas City meets the Miami Dolphins.

Ben Hensler, who has followed Kansas City since Joe Montana managed the team in the early 1990s, tried to buy tickets online but found there were more than a million people ahead of him. In desperation, he paid 3,000 euros, or $3,175, for VIP tickets for him and his two teenage godsons, who sold their PS5 gaming console to raise money.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing because we don’t go to Kansas City to watch a game,” he said. “Years ago no one knew who the Chiefs were and now they are the biggest team in Germany.”

Hensler’s godsons, he said, are typical of the younger generation of fans who grew up with video games and social media and enjoy the NFL’s exciting entertainment. Football feels slow and traditional to them, while soccer “seems to be a modern sport and seems faster despite all the breaks in the action, especially on social media,” he said.

The NFL is trying to capitalize on that interest. In October, the league opened an office in Dusseldorf and five NFL teams were given exclusive marketing rights in the country.

One of those clubs, the New England Patriots hired Sebastian Vollmer and Markus Kuhn, two Germans who had played for the team, to work as German-speaking commentators. Their time as Patriots is a big reason the team has 13 fan clubs in Germany and several more in Austria and Switzerland, said Robert Kraft, the team’s owner. The team has two employees who work full-time on finding new sponsorships in Germany.

Kansas City got off to a flying start in Germany because its owner, Clark Hunt, also owns a soccer team, FC Dallas, which has a player development partnership with FC Bayern, the best football team in Germany. Kansas City expects to generate more than €1 million in revenue from sponsorships and other deals in Germany this year.

“It’s obviously a very small portion of total revenue, but the growth rate is exponential,” said Mark Donovan, president of Kansas City. “Taking advantage of this timing is what will pay off decades from now.”

After years of rapid growth, the question now is whether the NFL can keep up with its own hype. The excitement surrounding the games in Munich and now Frankfurt is real. But like the annual London games, they can become routine.

This season, the competition’s new media partner, RTL, however, will show more than 170 regular season games the reviews so far are mixed. According to Fanatics, Germany is the largest market for NFL licensed merchandise outside of North America, but the 10 percent increase in sales this year is smaller than in recent years.

Football was introduced to Germany by American soldiers after World War II, with the first semipro league starting in 1979. The country was home to some of the strongest teams in the NFL’s European league before it went bankrupt in 2007.

Edebali’s trajectory since then has largely paralleled the growth of football in Germany. Edebali, 34, joined a flag football team in Hamburg as a 9-year-old and fell in love with the energy, strategy and camaraderie of the game.

He made a simple but seemingly unlikely vow: to make it to the NFL. At the age of 15, he joined the Hamburg Huskies tackle team, and that’s when he realized how much harder he had to work.

Bjorn Werner, who would become the first German player ever drafted in the first round, told Edebali about USA Football’s International Student Program, which landed him at a high school in New Hampshire.

“I thought I won the lottery,” Edebali said.

After receiving a scholarship to play at Boston College, he was signed by the New Orleans Saints as an undrafted free agent. After three seasons there, he spent parts of the next three years with the Broncos, the Detroit Lions, the Cincinnati Bengals and the Raiders.

As happens with many players, NFL teams stopped calling, so Edebali returned to Hamburg in 2021 to play for the Hamburg Sea Devils in the newly formed European League of Football. He realized he was something of a folk hero to German football fans, who considered him a pioneer for reaching the NFL

“He managed to find his way in a world where there wasn’t really an obvious path for international players to get into the league,” said Alexander Steinforth, the manager of the NFL’s operations in Germany.

With the NFL ramping up its operations in Germany and fans hungry for more content about the league, Edebali leaned on his experience and started working as a commentator for ProSieben, which had the rights to show NFL games.

Edebali also joined Werner, Esume and other football veterans at Football Bromance, a content company that promotes the league and the game. The group’s sponsor has rented a 5,000-seat theater in Frankfurt for the Friday before the Indianapolis Colts and Patriots play so they can interact with fans at an event called Bromania.

“It’s almost like football is a language,” Edebali said. “Of course, native speakers speak it best, but in Germany we speak it too.”

However, despite all the enthusiasm for the league, the NFL is still a long way from establishing a team in Europe. The logistics of moving players and equipment between continents is a huge hurdle. Even the games that sell out in England and Germany lose millions of dollars.

Still, the NFL seems to have a long way to go. In 2015, the league set out a strategy to find new fans in Germany with German-language websites, newsletters and social media. It formed a partnership with ProSieben, which helped attract “legacy” fans who had expressed support for the NFL’s European competition in the 1990s. The league introduced Game Pass, which allows fans to watch multiple games every Sunday.

The NFL has been successful in attracting a younger, educated audience that advertisers want to reach. Marcel Schwarzkopf, who manages sports sponsorships for DKB, an online bank that is the presenting sponsor of the NFL’s games in Germany, said the NFL had a fresher, more digital approach to combining entertainment with sports than “King Soccer.”

The league’s fans are “exactly the target we are approaching with our retail group: high purchasing power and an above-average interest in finance compared to football fans,” he said.

DKB is also a partner of Football Bromance, which has helped Esume, Edebali, Werner and other former football players become celebrities that younger fans recognize.

The NFL knows that when kids start playing football, they are more likely to remain fans as they get older. The league sponsors flag football competitions, which has helped increase participation in tackle football. There are more than 350 football clubs in Germany with around 50,000 players, up from 30,000 in 2006, according to Fuad Merdanovic, the president of the American Football Association of Germany.

“People here want to be part of something big,” Edebali said, “and once you see others are interested, you want to join in.”