It’s hard for Bernhard Seikovits to pinpoint exactly how much American football has grown in popularity across his native Austria over the past decade, but the former Arizona Cardinals practice squad player has observed quite the shift. “I do feel like no matter where you go, especially in Central Europe, people know about the NFL and certain players,” he said.
Now, Seikovits is eager to find out just how much people care about the sport in another part of the world. After finishing a championship-winning season with his professional club—the Vienna Vikings in the American Football League of Europe—on Sunday, the 29-year-old tight end is headed East to join the IBM Big Blue team in Japan’s X-League for the second half of their season.
“That’s going to be interesting and exciting,” he said. “The level of professionalism over there is probably better than in Europe. I don’t know yet, but I will see.”
Japan has long been familiar with American football. Paul Rusch, an Indiana-born missionary working as a teacher at a Tokyo university, is widely credited for introducing the sport to the East Asian nation in 1934. Japan founded its own professional league in 1971, and the NFL arrived in the Pacific five years later, staging its first game outside of North America—a preseason matchup between the St. Louis Cardinals and San Diego Chargers—in Japan’s capital city in 1976.
The league would hold 13 more exhibition games in the country through 2005, yet it hasn’t been back since. Nineteen years after the NFL launched the International Series in 2007, an initiative that brings regular-season football overseas on an annual basis, the league has visited markets like Germany, Mexico, Spain, the U.K. and Brazil, with more than 80% of those games taking place in Europe. This season, the NFL kicking off its most ambitious global state to date—nine international matchups across seven countries, starting with the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams in Melbourne, Australia, on Thursday—and speculation has run rampant as to where the league could go next.
And given that Roger Goodell told Sportico in July that the NFL wants to do a regular-season game in Tokyo, a return could be in the cards.
“We used to be in Japan, and Japan was a great market for us,” Gerrit Meier, the NFL’s head of international, said. “They do have a professional league, and it’s very interesting from a Pacific Rim perspective for West Coast teams and some others. So why wouldn’t we look at Japan?”
The opportunity could be immense. Japan had the world’s fourth-largest economy in 2025, generating a gross domestic product of roughly $4.4 trillion, according to data from World Bank Group. (Only the U.S., China and Germany ranked higher.) The country is also home to a slew of multi-national corporations, some of which already are already league sponsors with the NFL, like Sony and Toyota.
There’s perhaps no better example of just how much upside Japan’s interest in sports presents, especially in the U.S., than the Los Angeles Dodgers. After signing two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani and top pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto in 2023 and later adding other top Japanese pitcher Roki Sasaki, the club’s popularity has skyrocketed in the Far East. The Dodgers became the first MLB franchise to generate more than $200 million in annual sponsorship revenue last season thanks to a portfolio of brands that included 20 Japanese companies, according to SponsorUnited. Uniqlo, for example, agreed to shell out $125 million over five years for the field naming rights at Dodger Stadium.
Meanwhile, Ohtani has been able to score himself massive paydays from his home country. He earns an estimated $125 million annually off the field from a collection of mostly Japanese sponsors, making him the most successful pitchman in any sport. Tennis star Naomi Osaka, born in Japan and raised in the U.S., also tapped that gold mine, posting an estimated $52 million in off the court earnings for 2022, according to Sportico data. The same went for Kei Nishikori, who Forbes estimated in 2019 collected $33 million from endorsements annually.
To be fair, baseball is Japan’s national sport and tennis has sustained its own audience across the local population for more than a century. It’s not as if the NFL could tap into that enthusiasm from the market overnight, and there’s no Ohtani or Osaka-type Japanese star for the league to promote.
But the NFL isn’t pushing its product across the globe for quick returns. In fact, Meier said that if each International Series game was focused on optimizing revenue, “you start going in a very different direction,” which could resemble a pay-for-play arrangement. The league foots a costly bill to turn most foreign stadiums NFL-ready, while gameday upside is relatively capped with ticket prices held to reasonable standards.
Instead, the NFL has taken a long-term approach on how it measures the return on investment for its global endeavors, with growing its fanbase at the center. The actual games are merely “one tactical element as part of a larger year-round plan,” Meier said. When reviewing proposals for international markets, the league heavily considers what it can “leave behind,” like educational programs or grassroots leagues, in both traditional and flag football.
“The ultimate goal [of the International Series] is to have American football in multiple forms—that includes flag football as well as the NFL—be relevant in most, if not all major markets in the world,” Marc Ganis, the president of consulting firm Sportscorp and a longtime advisor to the NFL and Goodell, said. “Now, relevant doesn’t mean No. 1 or even No. 2. But it does mean not No. 9 or 10.”
That’s why the league has been so insistent on returning to the same markets each year. London, for example, will have hosted 45 games by the end of 2026, the most of any market to participate in the International Series thus far. Ganis added that the “continuity” the league has created, with the U.K. games typically falling in October, is one reason why it has been successful across the pond. The deeper the NFL can penetrate a market’s culture, the larger the opportunity for eventual monetization through merchandise sales and broadcast deals.
If the NFL does bring Japan into the fold, those repeat trips present one specific challenge, though—scheduling, and not just from a time zone standpoint. The league’s collective bargaining agreement only allows for a maximum of 10 international games per season. Goodell has spoken publicly about the NFL’s goal to reach 16 each campaign, with every team participating. But there’s no official timeline for that to bear out.
Still, Ganis expects the league not to wait too long to weave Japan into its plans. “Sooner rather than later,” he said.
