Roger Goodell Hints That Tokyo Could Host an NFL Game as Soon as 2027

On the eve of the first-ever NFL Paris Game on Sunday, the league is already looking forward to new destinations in which it could expand its global footprint.

One of those potential locations is in the Far East, as commissioner Roger Goodell teased Tokyo as the possible host of a regular season NFL game. While Japan has been on the league’s radar for quite some time, Goodell wants a game there sooner rather than later as he said it could host a game as soon as the 2027 NFL season.

“Listen, Tokyo is clearly on our list, whether it’s next year or the year after,” Goodell said Friday on the NFL Daily podcast. “It’s coming at some point in the near future.”

The NFL currently has 22 global markets, in which all 32 teams are connected in some way. Some of them, like the United Kingdom, Canada, and Mexico, have hosted regular season games for years. Others, such as Australia in Week 1 and France on Sunday, are newer locales to host regular season contests.

Then there are untapped markets that are part of the league’s 22-country list like Japan, Greece, and Argentina. These have yet to see NFL games played domestically but are places the league has identified as ones with strong NFL followings and where the league would like to eventually head to.

“We’re going to continue to focus on our priority markets, which a lot of them they’ve been in, but there are other cities. This year, we went to Rio rather than São Paulo. Australia was off the charts,” Goodell said of the Week 1 game in Melbourne.

“On a Friday morning at 10:30, to have 100,000 people in the stadium, it was just an incredible experience for us. I think it’s opened up new opportunities for us. The travel is something we think we can manage and do it without impacting negatively on the teams. So, each of these we learned something from and we benefit, and we also open those other doors. So, we’re planning on playing global. That’s where we’re going.”

Each of the 22 global markets have at least one NFL team that has marketing rights in that location. For Japan, the Los Angeles Rams hold the rights, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the Rams are penciled in for the first-ever NFL Tokyo Game. In just a few weeks, the Cincinnati Bengals and Atlanta Falcons will play a game in Madrid, Spain, despite neither of those teams having marketing privileges for Spain, as the Chicago Bears, Kansas City Chiefs, and Miami Dolphins are the three teams with marketing rights in the country.

While neither the city of Tokyo nor the country of Japan have ever hosted a regular season contest, both have hosted numerous preseason matchups. From 1976 to 2005, Japan hosted a total of 14 preseason games, with 13 in Tokyo and one in Osaka. In fact, the 13 games that Tokyo hosted makes it the city that’s hosted the most preseason games without hosting a regular season game. Overall, Tokyo ranks third in terms of foreign cities hosting any type of NFL game, trailing only London (51 games) and Toronto (16 games).

There is one active NFL player who was born in Japan—Patrick Jones II of the Carolina Panthers. He was born in Yokosuka, which is in the Greater Tokyo Area, on a U.S. military base before growing up in the states. In NFL history, there have been 13 Japan-born players, with most of them, such as Jones and Robert Griffin III, being Americans who were born at military bases.

The 2026 NFL season will have a record of nine international games, with ones in Rio de Janeiro, London, and Melbourne, Australia, already having taken place. Future ones include Sunday’s Paris Game, plus Munich, Mexico City, and Madrid.

Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro, and Paris were this year’s new debutantes. Last year saw Madrid and Dublin as new hosts. The 2027 global games have yet to be identified, but Peter O’Reilly, who is the NFL EVP of Club Business, International and League Events, says the league is considering playing 10 international games a year from now, which would be the maximum allowed by the Collective Bargaining Agreement.

The next global game is Sunday’s NFL Paris Game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and New Orleans Saints. Once kickoff occurs, it will make history as the first NFL game—either preseason or regular season—in the country of France, and once Aaron Rodgers takes the field, more history will be made. The four-time MVP played in Dublin last year with the Steelers and in London in 2024 with the Jets. Rodgers will become the first NFL quarterback to play in three international games in three straight seasons in three different countries.