It’s Super Bowl weekend and the opening of the Winter Olympics, so there’s no better time to talk about this: Is it just me or are American sports really taking over Europe? Last week the National Football League announced games in France and Spain, part of a record nine international games in 2026 for the league. A 2023 New York Times post cites data that 3.6 million Germans say they are “avid NFL fans.”
More than two million Germans watched Super Bowl LV. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has even talked about holding a Super Bowl game in London.
National Basketball Association officials are planning a new European league, and the Memphis Grizzlies and Orlando Magic played regular-season games in Berlin and London last month to begin a three-year slate of NBA games in Europe. Future games will be played in Manchester and Paris in 2027 and in Berlin and Paris in 2028.
The American sport that’s having the most trouble breaking into the Old World is the complicated and multi-dimensional sport that started out here … in England as “rounders.” Slowly but surely, Major League Baseball is making its move as well. The MLB London Series saw rivals New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox play back-to-back games over two days last June, with the locals referring to the daytime games as “matches.” Like they were playing cricket.
Here’s the crazy part: both games sold out, with a total od 120,000 fans attending!
Spectacle
The real way American sports invade the European psyche is, of course, through TV. Last fall, my wife and co-CEO Cheryl and I were sitting in a little café in Den Haag having lunch when I notice the Dutch couple next to us. They’re watching intently an MLB game.
So, I ask a question that’s eating at me: “Do you really understand the game?” A game full of nuances, like changing up pitches for each hitter and sacrifice bunts.
The answer was, “Not really … but the whole thing is such a spectacle.” For me as an American, that’s what European football lacks … spectacle. To Americans, it appears to be all random, with lucky kicks or missed passes playing a far bigger role in matches than American sports, which tend toward analysis and strategy, especially baseball.
It’s not just what happens on the pitch. It’s also what happens inside the stadiums. Soccer attracts aggressive groups of ultra fans cordoned off in the corner of the stadium, singing songs about beating up Jews (or worse), drinking beer and working up an appetite for a street brawl.
We were warned before our first soccer game in the Netherlands to not wear certain colors if we didn’t want to get beat up. And as for attending a Beşiktaş, Galatasaray or Fenerbahçe game when we lived in Turkey, fuggedaboutit. Too dangerous. When a group of British football fans went to Istanbul for the 2000 World Cup, two never made it home.
Fun!
It’s all about the Benjamins
The Americans want two things from Europe – revenue, and talent. Seattle Seahawks defensive coordinator Aden Durde is Britain’s first NFL coach, and his defensive schemes helped win the Super Bowl this year.
A record 135 non-American players from 24 countries play in the NBA alone, including monster stars such as Nikola Jokic from Serbia. More than a third of the clubs in the UK’s top football leagues now have some form of American ownership.
My first recollection of the American takeover of European sports started in 2005 when Malcolm Glazer, an Orthodox Jewish investor from New York, took controlling interest in Manchester United.
Dozens of European teams are owned by Americans, including Wrexham, owned by American movie star Ryan Reynolds and his running buddy, Rob McElhenney. In aggregate, the Americans are spending billions to remake sad, dingy European stadiums in the image of flashy American facilities. You can see the list of teams with full or minority American ownership here, and it’ll blow your mind.
We tried to talk with American sports executives, including Jeff Miller, an NFL communications guy, for the ownership perspective. No replies.
This infiltration of American sports moguls comes at a time when the world is increasingly defined by American technology and popular culture. Most of the top music acts are American. Americans control social media. So, it’s no surprise American sports are starting to dominate. For Europeans, all this investment by Americans is guaranteed to drive up ticket prices for all sports while increasing salaries for players.
Is that good? Is that bad?
The only thing I know for sure is this is the best example I know of proving Marx’s axiom “capitalism remakes the world in its own image,” replacing the traditional world with a monetized world. I guess whether you see this as good or bad depends on whether you’ve bet on the winning team.
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See more about sports here in Dispatches’ archives.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
