It was a long journey for Brazil to finally receive an NFL game. Decades of development, learning, and absorbing a sport that was never part of the culture, but that has been more and more popular, culminated in the league’s decision to expand their international series to São Paulo in 2024.

“There’s a lot of interest in the NFL. I mean, we saw it. We did a Super Bowl viewing party last year down in Brazil,” NFL executive vice president Peter O’Reilly said on Adam Schefter’s podcast. “It was packed and the energy is there.”

How it got started

If watching football is natural for Americans, it’s a feat for Brazilians. The first NFL broadcasts in Brazil happened in 1969, when CBS used to send game tapes to the defunct TV Tupi. Obviously, there wasn’t access to live games. In the 1980s and 1990s, TV Bandeirantes, a broadcast television channel, covered important games, mostly some editions of the Super Bowl. A Brazilian version of ESPN started broadcasting the NFL with regularity in 1992.

But by the 1990s and early 2000s, cable TV in Brazil was not that popular, and ESPN broadcasted just a few games per week (Sunday and Monday Night Football).

There were, though, two explosions in popularity. One, minor, in the 2000s. And then a big one in the 2010s, making Brazil the third NFL market in the world, just behind the United States and Mexico. The league counts 38 million fans in Brazil.

“Football has been growing significantly here in Brazil, even though it is obviously a country primarily focused on soccer,” said Fernando Ferreira, founder of Pluri Consultoria, a Brazilian consulting firm specializing in sports studies, research, and analysis. “This has a direct relationship with the broadcasts that have been happening for quite some time, especially the Super Bowl, which is a global mega-event and becomes very appealing. The broadcasts play a fundamental role in spreading the sport.”