The Jaguars Play Two Home Games in London This Month. For TV, They Never Left Jacksonville.
On Sunday, Oct. 11, the Philadelphia Eagles play the Jacksonville Jaguars at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London. A week later, on Oct. 18, the Jaguars are back in London to face the Houston Texans at Wembley. In both games, Jacksonville is the designated home team. Renovation work cuts the capacity of its own stadium to 42,507 this season, so the team is playing back-to-back “home” games more than 4,000 miles from home.
The stadium is in London. The broadcast logic is not. Where a fan can watch these games depends far more on where the fan is, and on which rules apply there, than on where the ball is kicked.
In the US, a London game is a local game
For American viewers, the European games sit in an early window: 9:30 a.m. Eastern, 6:30 a.m. on the West Coast. Most of them are on NFL Network, a national cable channel. This season that covers all three London games, Paris and Madrid. The Munich game on Nov. 15 is the exception and goes to FOX, a broadcast network.
What does not change is the home-market rule. The game still belongs to the two teams’ local audiences. When the Colts played the Commanders in London on Oct. 4, the game aired on NFL Network nationally and on WRTV, the local over-the-air station in Indianapolis. The season opener in Melbourne made the point even more clearly. It streamed on Netflix, the only international game this season that was streaming-only, and it was still shown over the air in the two teams’ home markets, including on KNBC in Los Angeles.
And the package built for out-of-market fans does not help. YouTube TV’s help page for NFL Sunday Ticket says it does not include “preseason, postseason, select regular season, digital exclusive, locally televised, or national games, including international games.”
So a game played in north London is, for US broadcast purposes, a national cable game with a local over-the-air carve-out for two cities, and it is outside the one product most out-of-market fans pay for.
In Europe, the same game follows a different rulebook in every market
For a viewer in Europe, the venue being nearby changes nothing about how rights work. The game simply becomes part of each country’s own NFL deal.
In the UK, Sky Sports holds all regular-season London and European games, and Channel 5 is the NFL’s first regular free-to-air partner in about 20 years. The Oct. 4 London game was on both. In Germany, RTL shows every international game on free TV this season, with Sky Sport as the pay option for more games, while a season of NFL Game Pass on DAZN costs from €199.99 and comes with English commentary only. In France, France Télévisions has the Paris game on Oct. 25 free to air and the three London games on its francetv sport platform.
Three neighboring markets, three different combinations of free TV, pay TV and streaming, for games played a short flight away. None of them is decided by the stadium.
The clock moves too
Even kickoff time is not a fixed fact. The European games start at 9:30 a.m. Eastern, which is 3:30 p.m. in Germany for the October London games and Madrid and Munich in November. The Paris game on Oct. 25 is different: Europe leaves summer time that morning and the US does not until Nov. 1, so for that one week the gap is five hours and kickoff in Paris is 2:30 p.m. local time.
A schedule stored in a single time zone, or with a fixed offset, gets that wrong for one week of the year, which happens to be the week of the Paris game.
The audience is not where the stadium is
The numbers show who these games are really for. The Ravens’ win over the Cowboys in Rio drew an average of 24.9 million US viewers on CBS, the most-watched NFL international game on record. The Melbourne opener averaged 18.5 million US viewers on Netflix. Played abroad, watched at home.
That is why the US broadcast follows the teams and not the venue. The two home markets keep their local broadcast whether the game is in Jacksonville, London or Melbourne, and the European markets layer their own rights on top for their own audiences.
What this means for “where to watch” data
It is tempting to treat the venue as a useful field. For broadcast purposes it answers almost nothing. The same London game is a national cable game in most of the US, an over-the-air local game in two US cities, outside Sunday Ticket everywhere, a free-to-air or pay game in the UK depending on the channel, a free-TV game in Germany and a streaming game in France.
The lookup key is (game, viewer’s country, viewer’s territory, package). The venue is not part of it.
We made the same point about the NHL’s games in Germany in part 2 of our US Blackout Series: a game played in Düsseldorf is, for US television, a Chicago local game. The NFL works the same way, and it is about to play six games in Europe.
If your platform needs to answer “where can I watch this” for fans on both sides of the Atlantic, game by game and market by market, that is the dataset we maintain. Get in touch.