As NFL heads to Munich, interest in American football creates ‘crazy’ demand

As NFL heads to Munich, interest in American football creates ‘crazy’ demand

Greg Auman
Nov 9, 2022

David Bada appreciates how much it means for the NFL to play in his hometown of Munich, Germany.

The 27-year-old defensive tackle, born and raised in Munich, won’t be there Sunday when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Seattle Seahawks play at Allianz Arena, but he has a good excuse, busy in his work as a member of the Washington Commanders practice squad.

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“I know how many times I watched Super Bowls at home and said, ‘If they played here, they would go crazy,'” said Bada, now in his third season on Washington’s practice squad, still seeking his first snaps in a regular-season NFL game.

Bada remembers how completely normal it was for NFL fans in Munich — six hours ahead of the Eastern Time Zone — to wake up at 2:30 a.m. just to watch a Monday Night Football game. “And afterwards, they go to work,” he said. “They love American football. People get married wearing their jerseys.”

Like many German fans, Bada’s brother, Christian, logged on the day tickets for the Bucs-Seahawks game were made available, with three laptops open, each hoping to land the golden ticket of American football.

“In not even two minutes, all the tickets were gone,” Bada said. “People were reselling them for thousands, like 10K (Euro). I was able to get him tickets. He cried after he got the tickets, he was so excited.”

The demand for tickets to see American football reached insane numbers this spring. The NFL said more than 3 million fans requested tickets for a stadium that seats about 70,000, and when tickets were first available online, more than 800,000 fans were queued up trying to get in.

“Crazy number, but also kind of a reaffirmation for us going into the market,” said Alex Steinforth, who joined the NFL as the league’s general manager for Germany in December. “We already had a sense of that, from TV viewership and consumer products, but I’ve never experienced so much interest in one event before. The amount of messages I got for tickets was crazy.”

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On a European resale site such as viagogo.com, tickets are more readily available now, though less than 1 percent of the seats are available there, starting around $350 U.S. for upper-level seats, with the best lower-level seats drawing $2,000 or more.

The game is just the centerpiece this weekend of the NFL taking over Munich, which is just settling down from the excitement of Oktoberfest. The city is dressed in NFL colors and signage. Munich will also host the German national flag football finals as part of the festivities, and Germany’s national women’s flag football team will compete on the same field during halftime of the Seahawks-Bucs game.

The NFL Network is broadcasting its “Good Morning Football” and “Total Access” shows live from Munich all week, with fan events scheduled throughout building up to Sunday’s game, which has a 3:30 p.m. local time kickoff (9:30 a.m. in Tampa, 6:30 a.m. in Seattle).

A fan zone is set up at Odeonsplatz, one of the central city squares in Munich, with large helmets for all 32 NFL teams on display and giant photo frames where fans can take NFL selfies. Starting Thursday, there will be 16 different breweries and pubs across Munich designated as team pubs. The Bucs’ center is at Hofbrauhaus, while the Seahawks’ hub is at Augustiner Braustuben.

Two ex-players — former Bucs RB Mike Alstott and former Seahawks RB Shaun Alexander — will be guest coaches at the USAA Salute to Service boot camp at the U.S. Army Garrison Bavaria, leading military members through football drills in a friendly competition as part of the large U.S. military presence in Germany, which is part of the strong local interest in the game.

Seattle will arrive on Thursday and the Bucs on Friday, with both teams then having practices at the facilities at FC Bayern (or Bayern Munich), a popular club in the Bundesliga, the top tier of German soccer. FC Bayern’s American Twitter account has 2.5 million followers, roughly the same as the Seahawks and double that of the Bucs.

When Tom Brady announced in March he was coming out of his brief retirement, FC Bayern star Thomas Muller — who has 4.6 million Twitter followers, well more than Brady’s 2.9 million — tweeted that he would see him in Munich, with the hashtag #immerweiter, meaning “keep going.”

The partnership between the NFL and Germany has been decades in the works, from annual preseason “American Bowl” games played in Berlin from 1990 to ’94 to Germany becoming the center of NFL Europe in its later years, with five of six franchises in the league’s final season (2007) calling Germany home.

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John Beake, a longtime NFL coach and general manager with the Denver Broncos who became the NFL’s managing director for NFL Europe in 2000, said Germany has long been ready to host a regular-season NFL game.

“I thought that was the best thing they could do,” Beake said. “The people really have grown to love American football. When we first went over (to Europe), everything came out of London. We had an office there and everything, but then we started to build our teams in Germany. Frankfurt became the action center. We really got to know the people and their work ethic, and it was an exciting time. We went into Bavaria, and from the time we were there, we had our eye on Munich.”

Germany is building its own American football league — the European League of Football, or ELF, now plays with 12 teams, including the Munich Ravens and other teams located in Germany, Poland, Spain, Austria and Turkey, with plans to expand to 24 teams in 2025. Former NFL and college assistant John Shoop is Munich’s head coach, and former 49ers coach Jim Tomsula, who coached in NFL Europe, is back in Germany as the Rhein Fire’s head coach. The league’s championship was played in Hamburg in late September, won by the Vienna Vikings.

“It has grown tremendously,” said Peter Vaas, a longtime college assistant who coached the Berlin Thunder to two World Bowl championships. “(Having a game in Germany) doesn’t surprise me, and in fact, I’d almost go to the point of saying, ‘Gosh, it’s about time.’ American football in Europe has its foundation in Germany.”

It has been 15 years since an NFL-affiliated game was played in Germany, and Beake can remember the disappointment locally when the league decided to fold NFL Europe after the World Bowl in 2007, now more than 15 years ago.

“People were crying and sad and maybe angry,” Beake said.

The NFL has based much of its international presence out of London, which just played host to its 32nd regular-season game, on a yearly schedule of four games played between Wembley Stadium and the home of the Tottenham Hotspurs. The league has committed to playing four games in Germany, two in Munich and two in Frankfurt.

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Carsten Neubauer, a huge Bucs fan who lives in Germany and runs the “Buccaneers Germany” Twitter account of their “krewe” of fans there, said there has been a buildup of excitement for this game since it was first announced in March.

“It is special, and you can feel it here in Germany already,” Neubauer said last week. “Football has exploded in the last couple of years in Germany. There’s such an enormous group of people enjoying the NFL, and they’ve been eagerly awaiting something to happen in Germany. It could be Eagles, Cowboys, Packers, and it will be a very big party, no matter where you look at it.”

German fans can now routinely watch three or more NFL games on television each weekend, the single biggest obstacle being the time difference — the early-window games start at 7 p.m. in Germany, but later games bring out overnight viewing for fans.

“If you had done this 10 years ago, it would not be as exciting as it is now,” Neubauer said of the impact that easy TV access has had in growing the game’s reach with sports fans as a second option to soccer.

The game was announced during the small 40-day window when Brady had retired, so fans were excited just to have a real NFL game in their home country. Russell Wilson was traded to Denver, but getting Brady back from retirement was a huge bonus, as fans in Germany have been watching and cheering for him for two decades, just like the rest of the world.

“If this would be (Kyle) Trask vs. Geno Smith, yes, it would still be exciting because it’s an NFL game, but Brady puts a completely different demand on it,” Neubauer said. “Absolutely, it’s a different story.”

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photos: Alexander Hassenstein, Mike Ehrmann, Rob Carr / Getty Images)

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