The NFL is expanding into a world in which “football” doesn’t always meet the league’s definition, but where international partners like DAZN connect with fans through every sense of the word.
In 2022, the National Football League (NFL) launched its International Home Marketing Areas (IHMA) program, allowing NFL teams to promote themselves and build partnerships in different countries. Today, the renamed Global Markets Program (GMP) has given all 32 NFL teams access to 21 international markets around the globe.
While the teams can build sponsorship agreements, youth academies, and flag football programs, they also earn rights to the league’s slate of international games, which has expanded to seven 2025 regular-season matchups in São Paulo, Dublin, Madrid, Berlin, and London. In each market, however, the NFL and its teams still need a way to broadcast games and tell the stories around them.
“We also want to build strategic partnerships with media companies and want to work with those companies that are committed to and invested in the success of the NFL,” said Sameer Pabari, who’s spent the last six years as the NFL’s managing director of international media, based out of London. “Those broadcasters and media companies that are going to get behind us from a marketing standpoint or a production standpoint to help localize and explain the sport to fans in a particular country where the NFL and American sports of American football may not be endemic.”
Just after the NFL’s international marketing debut, it entered a 10-year deal with DAZN in 2023 to bring the league’s NFL Game Pass to 250 different territories. Fans in DAZN’s coverage area can stream every live NFL game from the preseason to the Super Bowl while getting access to NFL RedZone, NFL Network, NFL Originals, and regionally specific DAZN programming and documentaries.
In its first year with DAZN, the NFL saw international Super Bowl viewership on Game Pass increase 61% from the previous year, with big audience boosts in the United Kingdom (16%), Germany (13%), and Australia (26%). YouGov found that the NFL was the most popular U.S. sports league in the U.K., with 9% of respondents saying they enjoyed it, nearly double the second-place NBA (5%). In Brazil, meanwhile, the NFL’s 22% favorability rating exceeds the NFL’s 21% global average.
