About 60 die-hard National Football League fans piled into the party space at Der Player, a fancy restaurant, on a cold evening in Hamburg, Germany, last month. Wearing jerseys and hoodies from teams like the Chicago Bears, Kansas City Chiefs and Las Vegas Raiders, they grabbed seats to watch a taping of “Prime Time Football Live,” which draws thousands of viewers on YouTube.
At 7pm, Patrick Esume, former coach and current commissioner of the semipro European League of Football, warmed up the crowd before leading them into a countdown: “Drei, zwei, eins, Football Bromance!” He then introduced his entries: former coach Andreas Nommensen. Mika Kaul, TV commentator. and Kasim Edebali, who played six seasons in the NFL
For the next 90 minutes, they reviewed recent games, peppered the crowd with questions like whether Patrick Mahomes is one of the five greatest quarterbacks of all time, and broke down the four-game suspension of Denver Broncos cornerback Kareem Jackson . Phrases like “bang-bang game,” “hard-nosed linebacker” and “court possession” were thrown around with ease.
Esome kept the show light and emotional and leaned on Edebali for his linebacker expertise. At some points, they stood together to demonstrate legal coping techniques and talked in detail about how to study opposing offenses. The audience then crowded around the participants and took a group photo.
“Sitting next to them while we’re talking about football, it’s so interactive,” said Jenni Gayk, who wore a Chiefs jersey and has been watching NFL games on German TV since 2015. “You can feel that the NFL is becoming much more popular . “
Long the biggest league in the United States with more than $20 billion in revenue annually, the NFL is looking for new ways to grow, including overseas. And nowhere is the league growing faster than in Germany.
The audience’s knowledge and enthusiasm for the taping — some traveled from as far away as Austria — was a sign of the NFL’s rise in a country whose sports landscape is dominated by football. Soccer remains far behind as the national sport, but 3.6 million Germans say they are die-hard NFL fans – that’s 25 percent more than in Britain, which has hosted regular-season games since 2007.
Interest grew last year when the NFL played its first regular season game in Germany. Tickets sold out in minutes, as they did this year for the two games on back-to-back weekends in Frankfurt, starting Sunday when Kansas City takes on the Miami Dolphins.
Ben Hensler, who has followed Kansas City since Joe Montana led the team in the early 1990s, tried to buy tickets online but found there were more than a million people ahead of him. Desperate, he paid 3,000 euros, or $3,175, for VIP tickets for him and his two teenage godfathers, who sold the PS5 games console to raise money.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, because we’re not going to go to Kansas City to watch a game,” he said. “Years ago, nobody would have known who the Chiefs were and now they are the biggest team in Germany.”
Hensler’s godparents, he said, are typical of the younger generation of fans who grew up on video games and social media and enjoy the high-octane entertainment of the NFL. Football seems slow and traditional to them, while soccer “seems to be a modern sport and, despite the breaks in the action, it seems faster, 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 awarded 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-language 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, team owner. The team has two employees who work full time and find new sponsorships in Germany.
Kansas City started in Germany because its owner, Clark Hunt, also owns a soccer team, FC Dallas, which had a player development partnership with FC Bayern, Germany’s top soccer team. Kansas City expects to generate more than 1 million euros ($1.05 million) in revenue this year from sponsorships and other deals in Germany.
“Obviously, it’s a very small piece of the total revenue, but the rate of growth is exponential,” said Kansas City President Mark Donovan. “Taking advantage of that timing is what will pay off decades from now.”
After years of rapid growth, the question now is whether the NFL can live up to its own hype. The excitement around the games in Munich and now in Frankfurt is real. But like the annual games in London, they can become routine.
This season, the league’s new media partner RTL will show more than 170 regular-season games, though its ratings so far have been 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 less than in recent years.
Football was introduced to Germany by American soldiers after World War II, and the first semi-collegiate league began play in 1979. The country was home to some of the strongest teams in the NFL’s European league before it folded in 2007.
The arc of Edebali’s journey has largely paralleled the development of football in Germany since then. 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 impossible vow: to make it to the NFL At 15, he joined the Hamburg Huskies’ tackle team when he realized how much harder he needed to work.
Bjorn Werner, who would become the first German player ever to be drafted in the first round, spoke to Edebali about USA Football’s International Student Program, which placed him at a high school in New Hampshire.
“I thought I had won the lottery,” Edebali said.
After receiving a scholarship to play at Boston College, he was signed as an undrafted free agent by the New Orleans Saints. After three seasons there, he spent parts of the next three years with the Broncos, Detroit Lions, Cincinnati Bengals and Raiders.
As 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 soccer fans, who saw him as a trailblazer who made it to the NFL.
“He was able to find his way in a world where there wasn’t really an obvious path for international players to enter the league,” said Alexander Steinforth, the NFL’s director of operations in Germany.
With the NFL ramping up its operations in Germany and fans hungry for more content about the league, Edebali drew on his experience and went to work as a commentator for ProSieben, which had the rights to show NFL games.
Edebali also joined Werner, Esume and other football veterans in 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 in an event called Bromania.
“It’s almost like football is a language,” Edebali said. “Obviously, native speakers speak it better, but in Germany we speak it too.”
For all the fervor about the league, however, the NFL is far from putting a team in Europe. The logistics of moving players and equipment between continents is a huge hurdle. Even sell-out games in England and Germany lose millions of dollars.
Still, the NFL appears to be a long way off. In 2015, the league mapped out a strategy to find new fans in Germany with German-language websites, newsletters and social media. He created a partnership with ProSieben, which helped attract “legacy” fans rooted in the NFL’s European league in the 1990s. The league introduced Game Pass, which allows fans to watch multiple games each Sunday.
The NFL has succeeded in attracting a younger, well-educated audience that advertisers want to reach. Marcel Schwarzkopf, who manages sports sponsorships for DKB, an online bank that is the presenting sponsor of NFL games in Germany, said the NFL had a fresher, more digital approach to mixing entertainment with sports since ” King Soccer”.
League fans are “exactly what we’re targeting 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 turn Esume, Edebali, Werner and other former footballers into celebrities that younger fans recognize.
The NFL knows that getting kids to play football will increase the likelihood that they will remain fans as they grow older. The league sponsors flag football leagues, which has helped boost participation in tackle football. There are more than 350 soccer clubs in Germany with about 50,000 players, up from 30,000 in 2006, according to Fuad Merdanovic, the president of Germany’s American Soccer Association.
“People here want to be a part of something big,” Edebali said, “and once you see that others are interested as well, you want to be a part of it.”
