Guide to the new NFL season

The summer holidays are over, and in America that means only one thing: the return of the NFL. The season kicking off this week promises to be yet another great one for the professional American football league, the most popular sport in the United States. The NFL is expanding, with revenues in 2025 expected to be in the region of 23 billion dollars. This is why Commissioner Roger Goodell’s contract has recently been extended until 2030.

The opening kick-off is scheduled for Thursday at 2.00 pm Italian time and will see the reigning champions, the Seattle Seahawks, take on the New England Patriots in a repeat of the last Super Bowl. The following day, Friday, at 2.35 am Italian time, the Los Angeles Rams will face the Seattle Seahawks and the San Francisco 49ers. The venue for this second early fixture of the first weekend of the season will be rather special. The match will in fact be played at the Cricket Ground in Melbourne, Australia – one of the markets the NFL is strongly targeting.

To reach that destination, some 8,000 miles from home, the two Californian teams had to endure a 15-hour flight. The two franchises adopted different strategies. San Francisco departed on 2 September, affording the squad a week to acclimatise to the time difference. The Rams, on the other hand, are setting off the day before, convinced they can overcome jet lag simply by pretending it doesn’t exist. 

This is not the first time that two NFL teams have travelled to Australia. On the previous occasion, however, the Broncos and the Chargers travelled to the land of the kangaroos for a pre-season match. This time, however, it is a regular-season match – the first of nine scheduled to be played outside the US this season. The others will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Paris, Madrid, Munich and London (three).

This internationalisation goes hand in hand with the explosion in popularity of flag football, a sport that will feature at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics and which serves as a further driving force for the league in making American-style football an increasingly global sport.

On the sporting front, however, the race is on in Seattle. Among the favourites for the title are the aforementioned Rams, who have bolstered an already strong defence with the sensational return of Aaron Donald, who has come out of retirement to don his helmet and shoulder pads once more.

The controversy from ten years ago, when Colin Kaepernick first took a knee during the national anthem in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, seems like a distant memory. And never mind that there is still a legal case pending between the NFL and Brian Flores, the former head coach of the Miami Dolphins who accused the league of failing to comply with the rules designed to protect minorities when it comes to appointing a head coach, a coordinator or a general manager, or that, this season, there will be only three African-American coaches out of thirty-two. The NFL remains as vibrant as ever.