The NFL announced on Thursday that the Kansas City Chiefs will play a regular season game in Germany in 2023 after being awarded marketing rights in the country in 2021.
Many of us knew this was coming, but the news on Thursday morning made it official: the Kansas City Chiefs will be playing a game from their 2023 schedule in Germany. The date, time, and opponent will be announced at a later date. This news comes on the heels of the NFL granting International Marketing rights to 18 clubs at the tail end of 2021, with the Chiefs gaining rights to Germany as well as Mexico. These rights were distributed in the league’s continued effort to promote their product worldwide. K.C. previously played a game in Mexico City in 2019, a 24-17 win over the Los Angeles Chargers.
For the Chiefs, this is a huge step in taking their domestically well-known brand of football across the pond. While names like Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and Chris Jones are without question of the household variety in the Kingdom and familiar at worst in the rest of the U.S., in Europe the Chiefs have an opportunity with their star power to become a team of choice.
I was lucky enough to travel to France last summer for a wedding. Beautiful country, wonderful people, but a stunning lack of football familiarity. I know, I know… football is technically soccer there. With the Chiefs now sinking their teeth into the European market, though, maybe they will see things our way. Nevertheless, there is one name that all French (and presumably German) American football followers knew. and it wasn’t Patrick Mahomes.
It was Tom Brady.
Some were familiar with Mahomes and the Chiefs simply from the exposure they had gotten from seeing the Chiefs play in two consecutive Super Bowls in 2020 and 2021. While the name is currently less familiar than Brady, the Mahomes brand is primed for an explosion as the Chiefs gain more traction in European markets. With the Chiefs’ exciting style of play and Mahomes’ nearly unparalleled marketability, there is real potential for him and the Chiefs to benefit from this international marketing campaign similar to Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant’s brands taking over China when the NBA began marketing in that country.
The NFL is full of young, talented quarterbacks, but the folks in Germany could potentially be getting to see the Chiefs coming off of their third Super Bowl appearance in 4 years and the reigning, defending league MVP. This would, without question, make this more of a marquee event than it already is, and could open up massive additional revenue streams for the team as well as revenues streams that could benefit the players in the form of jersey sales and personal branded gear (e.g. Mahomes Adidas gear).
When the NFL announced its first regular season game this past year featuring the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Seattle Seahawks in Munich, Germany went crazy. The game was played at Allianz Stadium, which holds around 75,000 people at capacity. When the presale started for tickets to this game there were 600,000 people waiting to get their hands on 1 of the 75,000 available, and at one time there were more than 800,000 in the queue. Ticketmaster estimated that they could have sold over 3 million tickets to this game. With Patrick Mahomes coming to town, the Chiefs might just break Germany’s internet.