Berlin to Host First NFL Regular-Season Game in 2025

Football is king. America’s pastime keeps getting bigger and bigger. Commissioner Roger Goodell and the NFL announced its latest expansion in Germany.

After the league’s recent games in Munich and Frankfurt, respectively, the NFL will host a regular-season game in Berlin for the first time in 2025. The game will be played at the Olympic Stadium. From 1990 to 1994, the NFL played five American Bowl games at the Stadium, and the arena was also home to the Berlin Thunder of NFL Europe from 2003 to 2007.

The NFL’s latest move reflects on the popularity and growth of the game internationally, as the league branches out to new cities and bolsters the size of its international catalog.

“We first held a preseason game at the Olympic Stadium 34 years ago, before it was home to NFL Europe’s Berlin Thunder in the early 2000s,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said Wednesday morning in a statement. “Now, with almost 20 million NFL fans in Germany, we’ll make a historic return to the city playing a regular season game for the first time as we open the next chapter in our relationship with Berlin.”

The NFL’s efforts to put money and resources in flag football in Berlin will also continue.

In recent years, the NFL has played four international games in addition to the Jacksonville Jaguars’ annual contest at Wembley Stadium in London. The league passed a resolution in December 2023 allowing schedule-makers to increase the international slate from four to a maximum of eight games beginning in 2025.

Expectations were that the inventory increase would be moderate. There could be just five games alongside the Wembley match in 2025. As of Tuesday, a person with knowledge of the schedule expected the inventory to expand further already in 2025.

The NFL will also play its first regular-season game in Madrid in 2025 at Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu Stadium.

So far, the NFL’s announced 2025 international schedule will include games in Berlin, Madrid and London. London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium will host not one but two games in 2025, which means double the fun.