Every NFL team will go to an 18-game regular-season schedule.
And every team, every year, will play an international game.
That’s the league’s looming future mandate for NFL players and their union, relayed in unambiguous terms by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft during a Tuesday appearance with the team’s flagship radio network, 98.5 The Sports Hub.
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Speaking in the most assertive tone we’ve heard to date from a league power broker, Kraft married the expected push for an 18th game to the NFL’s quest to expand revenue through international growth. Everyone plays an 18th game — and that game is used to put every NFL franchise into an international game every season. Kraft’s belief is that the two-pronged push — expansion of the regular season and international slate — will draw more global interest in the league, resulting in more money for everyone.
Kraft even delivered an implied threat behind it: “So long as we can keep growing revenue, we can keep long-term labor peace.”
“We’re gonna push like the dickens now, to make international [exposure] more important with us,” Kraft said in the interview. “Every team will go to 18 [games] and two [exhibition games] and eliminate one of the preseason games. Every team every year will play one game overseas. Part of the reason is so we can continue to grow the cap and keep our labor happy. Because we’re sort of getting near the top here, you know, with the [domestic] coverage.”
“Ninety-three of the top 100 programs on television are NFL games,” Kraft continued. “Think about that. It’s really amazing. … You know, we had that Amazon game on Thursday a couple weeks ago — 31 million people streamed in. So as long as we can keep growing revenue, we can keep long-term labor peace.”
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Folks, that’s a lot of messaging packed in a fairly brief statement. And it adds some sharpened clarity to a future negotiation that has been spoken about in largely broad, uncertain terms. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has mused to the media about the addition of an 18th game as a logical next step for the league’s future and international play. And Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has spoken publicly about being supportive of putting an 18th game on the negotiating table down the line. Neither has effectively said, “This is what is going to happen and this is how it ties together … and the money we get from it will keep labor peace.”
That’s the important prism to focus through now: Labor peace. To keep it, NFL franchise owners are going to want that 18-game season. And if they can’t get it, there will be a rising likelihood of a lockout when the current collective bargaining agreement with the NFL Players Association expires in early 2031. If NFL quarterbacks are going to be paid $70, $80, $90 million a season in the coming decades — and other cornerstone positions won’t be be far behind — the league is going to have to find a lot of money in the future to make that happen. And Tuesday was Kraft effectively saying “we have to expand elsewhere to find more new money, and the players have to come to that conclusion with us.”
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, pictured with head coach Mike Vrabel in November, made the case for more regular-season football. (Photo by Perry Knotts/Getty Images)
(Perry Knotts via Getty Images)
To date, the NFLPA has pushed back on adding another game, citing health and safety concerns. As recently as September, the interim executive director for the union, David White, said of an 18th game: “We haven’t talked about it yet, and it certainly is not inevitable and should not be presented as such.”
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Yet, Kraft sounded certain in his confidence that it’s going to happen — especially for a team owner who has been through multiple collective bargaining negotiations and the longest player lockout in NFL history. He isn’t just any club owner. Not only is he more measured than Jones when he makes public statements, he has also played key roles in the NFL’s compensation committee, which ultimately sets Goodell’s extremely high salary. Among the league’s powerful, he’s one of the senior partners. All of which is to say his words carry weight with everyone.
From a revenue standpoint, Kraft’s tying together of the international slate and the 18th game make sense. Even with the most popular sports product in the United States, there is only so much money that can be squeezed out of the domestic entertainment landscape. To date, the NFL has been very good at getting to that ceiling, from embracing every possible delivery platform for its games, to an about-face on gambling that opened new frontiers in revenue, to molding a year-round content circus that has churned out a multitude of tentpoles: the annual scouting combine, free agency, a traveling on-site draft, the schedule release, minicamps and molecular levels of coverage in training camp.
Through it all, for decades, has been the undercurrent of global expansion. From the introduction of the NFL International Series in 2007, team owners like Kraft and Jones have been in alignment with each other and Goodell on the reach for global popularization. They’ve seen what it has done for the NBA’s coffers, and long admired the worldwide popularity (and television contracts) of the English Premier League. Not to mention the EPL’s audiences, which is approaching nearly 2 billion viewers on a weekly basis.
Those are the numbers the league’s elites are chasing — even if it takes decades. To get there would mean explosive revenue growth. That’s why deepening the NFL’s foothold is so vital when it comes to the international horizon. It’s not enough to just have a handful of games played by a handful of teams. Owners like Jones and Kraft believe you have to build an international NFL team in the aggregate, which you effectively do if you play 16 international games a season that bundle up every single one of the 32 franchises. And the NFL isn’t that far off, already having played seven international games during the 2025 season.
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This is the league’s international answer to an NFL Blue Chip Fund: one-game slices of all 32 teams, packaged together and sold to the international market every single season. It’s a vehicle that can open the possibility for new television contracts, new media rights deals, new licensing and merchandising possibilities, new sponsorships — and maybe someday, a new frontier of international NFL teams that call countries outside of the United States their home.
As Goodell told “Good Morning Football” in September of 2024: “We feel like this game is destined to be global. We expect to be in Asia soon. We expect to be in Australia soon. We’re going to make sure that our game is available around the globe. And I think the ownership has been great on that. They’ve passed a resolution where every team is obligated to play [internationally]. We’re going to have eight games [outside of the U.S.] a year, minimum. And if we do get to an 18 [game regular season] and two game [preseason], we likely will see even more international games. And I hope someday we’ll be playing 16.”
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Kraft went one step further Tuesday, definitively tying the two together. Now comes the ticking clock and what looks likely to be a very difficult negotiation — all until the team owners decide it won’t be a negotiation at all.
