Roger Goodell isn’t the kind of commissioner who tips his hand at the line of scrimmage. But Thursday at Fanatics Fest, during a sit-down with Sportico, he gave a pretty clear audible at the mouth.
Asked whether there’s a new country where the NFL wants to stage a regular-season game, Goodell didn’t name just one. “Not one, I got about 10,” he said. Then he called the play: Japan.
“We had a game in Tokyo, but it was a preseason game, so we want to do a regular-season game now,” Goodell said.
Now, some of you younger folks might think the NFL has never crossed the Pacific. That’s not quite right. The league played its first game in Japan in 1976 — Chargers versus Cardinals, back when the St. Louis Cardinals were still a thing and nobody had heard of a spread offense. The old American Bowl series brought preseason football to the Tokyo Dome a dozen times between 1989 and 2005, with stops in Osaka too. But a regular-season game with real standings on the line? That’s never happened. And that’s the mountain Goodell wants to climb.
The league is already going wide this season. Nine international games across seven countries and four continents are on the 2026 schedule, including the NFL’s first regular-season game in Australia — Rams versus 49ers in Melbourne, Week 1. London gets three games. Paris, Madrid, Munich, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro all host. The 49ers, bless their travel coordinator’s soul, will rack up more air miles than any team in league history, bouncing from Australia in Week 1 to Mexico City in Week 11.
But Goodell wants more. He’s said he wants the annual international game cap raised from 10 to 16, with every franchise getting a passport stamp at some point. That cap sits inside the current collective bargaining agreement, which runs through the 2030 season. Getting there means the NFL Players Association has to sign off, and if you’ve ever watched a union negotiate anything, you know that’s not a handshake deal. There’s going to be give-and-take — probably more take than give, if the players have any sense.
As for who’d actually suit up in Tokyo when the time comes, CBS Sports points to a couple of natural fits. The Los Angeles Rams hold Japan marketing rights through the NFL’s Global Markets Program, launched in 2022 to let teams build international fan bases. That makes them a logical front-runner. The Washington Commanders are another intriguing option — Robert Griffin III was born in Okinawa, where his parents were stationed as U.S. Army sergeants, and Jayden Daniels has Japanese ancestry on his mother’s side. Daniels has worn a Japanese flag sticker on his helmet to honor his great-grandmother, who was from Japan.
You don’t need a chalkboard to see what Goodell’s doing here. The World Cup just packed up its tent, and the commissioner sees an open field. Ten countries on the radar, Japan named outright, and a push to nearly double the international schedule before the decade is out. The film doesn’t lie — the NFL is going global, and Tokyo is the next target on the board.