Sports

BERLIN — Somewhere around the time that a gentleman from the United Kingdom was explaining to me that he loved the Atlanta Falcons because of Wrestlemania, while we stood in a crowded Berlin sports bar watching Arsenal v. Sunderland and Georgia vs. Mississippi State, eating a reasonable facsimile of American chicken wings … I decided that the NFL’s International Series is a strong concept.

This does not exactly count as a groundbreaking revelation, either to the potential 21 million Germans who consider themselves football fans, or the thousands of Atlanta and Indianapolis tourists who journeyed to Berlin to watch the Colts and Falcons. Still, it’s worth noting that for all the endeavors the NFL pursues to establish itself as a cultural force rather than a sports league — youth athletics, social activism, health and wellness crusades — The Shield’s greatest impact will likely come from hooking entire new continents on its product.

Unification under The Shield

The Colts and the Falcons played Sunday in a game primarily memorable on the field because of Jonathan Taylor’s offensive explosion. But what the game represented and embodied was so much larger, starting with its date: Nov. 9, 2025, exactly 36 years after the gates of the Berlin Wall first flew open to reunite East and West.

American football and Germany have a long shared history, starting with American GIs sharing the sport with the locals in the days after World War II, running through the 17-year World League of American Football, and continuing even to this day with the German Football League. Although Sunday marked the first regular-season game ever played in Berlin, the NFL had a small but fascinating role in the city’s reunification — the Chiefs and Rams played the first of several “American Bowls” in West Berlin in August 1990. (The NFL will tell you that the West Berlin bowls came about in part because of an ambitious young executive named Roger Goodell.)

The fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of communism and crushing Soviet rule in East Germany, utterly transformed the city and the entire nation. A pregame tribute to the moment — a full-on flag-waving singalong to “Wind of Change,” the protest-celebration song by Germany’s Scorpions — was genuinely moving, given the fact that so many of those in the stadium either previously lived under communist rule or knew others who did.

Since the NFL is an American — maybe the American — enterprise, though, branding had to play a key role. Half the stadium Sunday was the red, white and blue of the American flag, the other half was the red, yellow and black of the German one …. and they both met in the south end of the stadium to blend into a massive NFL logo. The symbolism would have been impossible to miss from 10,000 feet up.

That moment marked the culmination of the NFL’s branding efforts in Berlin, which ranged from cute to collectible to “how do you do, fellow kids” cringey. Graffiti is a sacred art form in Berlin, borne out of rage and frustration at the Berlin Wall, and the NFL co-opting it for a pre-printed stickers visible everywhere in the city was both a touch awkward from an aesthetic perspective and an utterly American absorption of local culture. (Also visible everywhere: the green Ampelmänn — "little traffic light man," Berlin's omnipresent crosswalk sign — catching a football.) 

The NFL on every corner

In the shadow of the famous Brandenburg Gate, a thin line of bricks runs across the middle of Ebertstrasse, a key boulevard in the heart of Berlin to commemorate the route of the now-vanished Berlin Wall. A few steps from this route on the western side, President Ronald Reagan made his famous “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” declaration in 1987. And last week, just a few steps from the wall’s route on the eastern side, the NFL set up a miniature field to give Berlin fans a chance to run routes and catch passes beneath the gate’s imposing columns.

The Brandenburg Gate field was the most cinematic of the NFL’s Berlin takeovers, which covered the entire city in events, shops and a massive four-story-high mural. Eleven NFL teams have marketing rights in Germany with the intention of building grassroots fanbases, and all 11 set up “houses” at various pubs, restaurants and other spaces around Berlin.

These “houses,” similar to the national “houses” that show up in Olympic host cities, allowed fans to gather and rally (and, of course, buy merch). The Lions posted up in an Irish pub underneath the S-Bahn railroad tracks where the locals, to be honest, seemed more interested in the soccer (sorry, football) on TV than the Lions’ mascot. The Chiefs took over the entire basement of a soccer-mad pub, giving German fans an introduction to cornhole and an opportunity to don a Chiefs helmet and a Patrick Mahomes uni and catch passes. (Yes, Mahomes throws rather than receives passes. Baby steps here, folks. Baby steps.)

The Packers took over a two-story event space complete with pop-up merch shop and a neon-yellow broadcast studio. The Bucs had the innovative idea of combining the Döner Kebab — a Turkish meat-and-pita pocket that’s a Berlin favorite — with a Cuban sandwich to create the “Döner KeBuc.” (It was delicious.) The Falcons re-created the experience of attending a secretive Berlin rave, complete with entrance through a bouncer-guarded unmarked door, dim red-lit hallways, and a graffiti-laden staircase that led to a full-on ballroom pumping out the beats of Atlanta rap icons.

Each of the houses was packed with fans, but more than that, NFL fans were visible everywhere in Berlin, from Bäckerei to Biergarten. The U-Bahn and S-Bahn train platforms, particularly on Sunday, saw a Pro Bowl’s worth of jerseys. Early Sunday morning, two Colts-scarved fans took a museum dedicated to the last standing section of the Berlin Wall in silence. All in all, I spotted every single one of the NFL’s 32 jerseys, plus a few “NFL” generic ones, too. Aside from the Colts and Falcons, the most popular were clearly the Chiefs and Packers; I only spotted one lone Titans fan all weekend. Sorry, Tennessee.

How do Germans choose their NFL teams?

Which brings up a question: How, exactly, does a German fan choose an NFL team to follow? Sometimes, it’s the team’s outreach efforts; Colts owner Carlie Irsay-Gordon created an entire pub’s worth of new fans when she bought a round for the house. Others favored stars like Mahomes and Tom Brady. And still others developed their fandom through more arcane routes.

That, in turn, brings us back to the Berlin sports bar. Called Belushi’s, and serving as an official Falcon fan outpost, the joint on Alexanderplatz did a fine job of emulating an American burgers-and-wings sports bar … even if the chicken wings were doused in sauce sticky enough to fuse bricks together.

I had to know what makes someone willingly become a Falcons fan given the franchise’s maddening tendency to raise hopes only to crush them, (See: Pretty much every Falcons loss, including Sunday.) Me, I didn’t have a choice; I was raised in Atlanta. But what would make someone willingly choose to subject themselves to the torture of an NFL fandom? One lad I met named Liam said he raised birds of prey and his favorite breeds were falcons. (This may or may not have been true. Fact-checking is not encouraged in sports bars, regardless of the continent.)

And then there was Ollie, who fell in love with the Georgia Dome while watching Wrestlemania XXVII — John Cena vs. The Rock vs. The Miz, for the wrestling purists — held in the Dome. He transferred that love to the Dome’s primary tenant, and here we are 14 years later comparing Falcons notes. He told me his story as Georgia was running up the score on Mississippi State; the Dawgs fans’ woofing confused the hell out of the Arsenal fans in the house.

Soccer fandom helps explain a lot of how German fans approach the NFL. European soccer fans have a joyful fatalism about themselves and their team — aside from the obvious pressing real-world concerns, they must deal with the prospect that their team will get booted out of the league entirely and relegated to a lower division. As bad as the Jets are, they’re never going to get sent down to the ACC, after all. Plus, parity in soccer can be elusive at best. In the Bundesliga, Germany’s top soccer league, Bayern Munich have won 12 of the last 13 titles. Suddenly the Chiefs winning three of the last six Super Bowls doesn’t seem so bad.

In the stadium, where soccer met NFL

The gleeful, communal soccer mentality carried over into Sunday night’s game. Soccer fans are an essential part of a match experience, chants and songs carrying on throughout the run of play. The NFL, with its every-down stops and frequent timeouts, doesn’t generally allow for that kind of continuous fan involvement, but European fans just blew right on through the broadcast- and rules-enforced breaks. They sang “Country Roads” and “Mr. Brightside” and “Livin’ On a Prayer” right on through the snap of the ball. They bellowed out soccer chants, they started multiple waves at once.

There had been some grumbling in Berlin about the cost of the tickets — getting into the game cost the Euro equivalent of $200 to start, and there were still scattered seats available just an hour before kickoff. But that’s a reality everywhere now; being a sports fan is a costly venture no matter what continent you’re on.

Every so often, the German fans were just a beat or two off on understanding the nuances of gameplay, but that was what the “MACHT LARM” (“Make noise!”) video-screen exhortations were for. The result was a jubilant explosion of noise and song, reveling in the joy of being a fan around other fans. You don’t need to share a common language to explode over an 83-yard touchdown run.

Long after the Sunday game had wrapped and the 72,000 in attendance at Olympiastadion had dispersed back into the Berlin night, I was in my hotel room working up what would become this article. At 10:25 in the evening, a local German station began broadcasting the Lions-Commanders game — the afternoon slot in the United States — and the German broadcasters’ excitement spilled out of the screen with every touchdown. Except for the fact that I couldn’t understand a word they were saying aside from the players’ names, it was just like home.

The NFL knows that football-as-lifestyle plays a whole lot better than just football-as-game. The league has thus tapped into a primal sports fan need — the desire for community amid the competition — and that translates into any language. Sure, there are elements that haven’t yet crossed over — it’s tough to tailgate when you’re taking a train or a bike to the stadium, for instance, and heaven only knows what international audiences would think of the Bills Mafia — but the foundations for a successful NFL expansion are already in place.

Now, if we can just teach them how to grill chicken wings properly, Germany will be good to go.