EAGAN, Minn. — The NFL launched an expansion of its global reach this spring. For the first time, a team would face the daunting gauntlet of consecutive international games in different counties.
Which club would the NFL burden with the job? It turned out to be the Minnesota Vikings, whom the league scheduled for a game in Ireland during Week 4 and England in Week 5.
Immediately, Vikings staffers began hearing from their friends around the league.
“A lot of people reached out and said, ‘What did you guys do to the NFL to get this?'” said Vikings vice president of player health and performance Tyler Williams.
Equipment manager Mike Parson laughed and said: “They said we got screwed.”
A 10-day, two-city international trip imposes an unprecedented logistical challenge and runs counter to the instincts of every routine-oriented coach and player. But as those league friends soon found out, the Vikings actually wanted to do it.
Although they are the visiting team in both cases, against the Steelers in Dublin and the Browns in London, the team’s market research and branding efforts have indicated strong local support in both cities. Keisha Wyatt, the Vikings’ director of international marketing, estimated that 40% of the crowd at Dublin’s Croke Park and up to 60% at London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium will be Vikings fans.
Those proportions would effectively neutralize two of the nine road games the Vikings otherwise would have played in 2025. And because they are scheduled in consecutive weeks, the Vikings will remain overseas, making only a 90-minute flight from Dublin to London in between. Owners Zygi and Mark Wilf have aggressively pursued international outreach, having claimed jurisdiction in the United Kingdom as an original participant in the NFL’s Global Markets Program, and they eagerly accepted when the league proposed the possibility during the schedule-making process.
“We’re club first, but we are also very mindful of making sure the league and the sport grows,” Mark Wilf said. “The more the business grows, the more the fandom grows, and it just makes it exciting for everyone. … We’ve spent a lot of time with Tyler [Williams] and the crew making sure our players will be ready. Our players are up to it.”
The Jacksonville Jaguars have played consecutive games in London, but the NFL wanted to test out a European road trip — and found a willing partner in the Vikings.
“They’re certainly a club that has leaned into the international opportunity,” said Peter O’Reilly, the NFL’s executive vice president of club business, international and league events. “And we do learn things. We learn things together with the clubs in terms of the operational components, ensuring that we can continue to get better in terms of the team operations, the experience overall, and in this case, moving between two countries.
“We’re really confident in the plan that we have in place and the work that we’ve done with the Vikings leading up to it, but it’s really about learning as we continue to grow and potentially grow the number of games even further in the future.”
THE VIKINGS HAVE played in London twice since coach Kevin O’Connell was hired in 2022, winning both times while following a routine Williams developed for a late-week arrival and what amounts to temporary time acclimation. On both occasions, they practiced in Minnesota on Wednesday and Thursday before taking an overnight flight to London and arriving Friday morning. Multiple people in the organization said they consider Williams’ skill and approach, as well as their office-wide logistical experience, a competitive advantage for this season’s extended excursion.
Team officials provided players and coaches with melatonin and other sleep aids. Upon arrival, they encourage caffeine intake and sunlight exposure and then head straight to a morning walk-through practice. Within 48 hours, the game has been played, and it’s time to depart. They’ll follow a similar plan this week for the game in Dublin.
“It’s been get in, play the game and get out before your body really feels it,” Williams said.
The difference, of course, is that the Vikings won’t be returning to Minnesota after they play the Steelers. They’ll remain overnight in Dublin, travel to London on Monday afternoon and then follow their normal practice schedule the following week. The transition from Dublin to London, and then the full week there, occupied the bulk of the planning Vikings staffers had to undertake this spring and summer for a travel party that includes roughly 190 players, coaches and football staffers and another 50 from the team’s business operations.
NFL teams have been playing regular-season games in Europe for nearly two decades, beginning with the 2007 season, and over that time have developed reliable systems and processes for efficient travel. Never, however, has a team spent a stretch this long outside of the United States.
Among the responsibilities of Paul Martin, the team’s director of operations, will be to collect, distribute, and collect again the passports for most members of the traveling party. Martin also worked with each of them to acquire electronic travel authorization visas, which England mandates for every traveler into its country.
Ben Hawkins, the team’s head performance dietician, estimated the Vikings will provide 7,000 meals over the course of the entire trip, including four meals a day for players. NFL teams routinely ship ahead non-perishable food items for international games, from ranch dressing to pancake mix to barbeque sauce, and then mix in locally sourced fresh ingredients for meals at the team hotel or temporary practice facility. But the sheer volume the Vikings need is unprecedented. To mix in local fare, Hawkins said that the team will have food trucks at their hotels and practices facilities.
Much of the unique logistical planning for players and coaches fell on Parson, who will have to set up and tear down practice and locker room facilities at both sites. Part of the process for international NFL travel is to create a list of everything the team is taking, its cost and its country of origin — “down to the screw,” Parson said — to meet separate sets of laws in each country.
For this excursion, the Vikings’ list is well over 100 pages.
Parson’s staff packed two semi-trucks full of supplies — from water to Gatorade to other non-perishables — that met a cargo ship in New York on June 30. Some of it will be waiting for the team in Dublin, where the team will practice at the IRFU High Performance Centre, part of the Sport Ireland campus. The rest will be transferred to Hanbury Manor, their home for the week in London. Some equipment the team needs in Dublin will then be shipped to London by ferry.
Then there is the possibility of a roster move. NFL teams routinely shuffle players midweek, usually on Tuesdays, either for injury replacements or for game-plan purposes. Among other things, new players would need a game jersey. Vikings staffers would normally use tools in the equipment office to stitch a nameplate. If it happens in London, the NFL has offered recommendations for local tailors.
“The planning for this,” Parson said, “it consumes our life until the trip is over. There’s plenty of mornings or nights I wake up and I think about Dublin, and it just is what it is because we want the trip to go perfect. You’re trying to think of everything that could potentially come about and have an answer or solution to that. It was a challenge that we all wanted to take on, especially to be the first team to be able to do it, and we have full confidence that we can all accomplish the task.”
THE TRIP PROVIDES obvious business advantages for team ownership and the league, and it could well provide a net competitive advantage on the field. It’s also not unusual for teams to use temporary practice facilities between road domestic games to limit multiple cross-country flights and time zone changes.
But this trip will also take players and coaches much further away from home, and for a longer duration, than in any other season in NFL history. Many players also gain comfort from having their families at road games, and those who do will face more difficult travel than normal.
When the schedule was first announced, outside linebacker Jonathan Greenard commented “SMH” (shaking my head) below a social media post that carried the news. Greenard later clarified, in an interview the Vikings posted on their website, that he was referring to travel for his family.
“It’ll be an amazing experience,” Greenard said. “It’s just the logistics.”
Team officials have searched for ways to paint the trip in as positive a light as possible.
“You can look at it through a glass half empty or the glass half full and try to make it an advantage,” Williams said. “If you’re going to go over there once and go on that short trip and they want you to have a second game there, I want that second game right away and I want it in two different countries. If you go over to London and stay there for two weeks, guys are going to be like, ‘Hey man, get me home.’ It’s like when all of us go on vacation, you kind of need a vacation for the vacation when you get back because you’re tired from being away from your normal routine. This will be like that. But what’s great about it is you’re in one country for five days and just about the time where you’re like, ‘Oh man, we’ve been here a little bit too long,’ we’ll have a game and then be home.”
The Vikings will get some time to decompress after the trip, with their bye scheduled for the following week.
Ultimately, the Vikings have made a calculated bet that they have the infrastructure and behind-the-scenes talent to support the ambitions of their owners and the NFL at large.
“Knowing that this group not only exists,” O’Connell said, “but how they work together, how each and every decision is made, and then ultimately how I know each and every decision that’s being made is made out of the best interest of our players, that’s what I think makes us the right team to do this. To show that not only it’s possible, but a team can have success both pre, during and post with how you do it. And my confidence level that we’re going to come out of this saying that it not only can be done, but it can be done the right way, is due to these folks.”
