Dallas Cowboys<\/a> 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, \u201cThis is what is going to happen and this is how it ties together \u2026 and the money we get from it will keep labor peace.\u201d<\/p>\nAdvertisement<\/p>\n
That\u2019s 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\u2019t 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 \u2014 and other cornerstone positions won\u2019t be be far behind \u2014 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 \u201cwe have to expand elsewhere to find more new money, and the players have to come to that conclusion with us.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"TAMPA,](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/0a2962e6-2899-44a1-ae4b-2dc9e2fea775.jpeg\"\/)
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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)<\/p>\n
(Perry Knotts via Getty Images)<\/p>\n
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: \u201cWe haven\u2019t talked about it yet, and it certainly is not inevitable and should not be presented as such.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Yet, Kraft sounded certain in his confidence that it\u2019s going to happen \u2014 especially for a team owner who has been through multiple collective bargaining negotiations and the longest player lockout in NFL history. He isn\u2019t 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\u2019s compensation committee, which ultimately sets Goodell\u2019s extremely high salary. Among the league\u2019s powerful, he\u2019s one of the senior partners. All of which is to say his words carry weight with everyone.<\/p>\n
From a revenue standpoint, Kraft\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve seen what it has done for the NBA\u2019s coffers, and long admired the worldwide popularity (and television contracts) of the English Premier League. Not to mention the EPL\u2019s audiences, which is approaching nearly 2 billion viewers on a weekly basis.<\/p>\n
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Those are the numbers the league\u2019s elites are chasing \u2014 even if it takes decades. To get there would mean explosive revenue growth. That\u2019s why deepening the NFL\u2019s foothold is so vital when it comes to the international horizon. It\u2019s 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\u2019t that far off, already having played seven international games during the 2025 season.<\/p>\n
This is the league\u2019s 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\u2019s a vehicle that can open the possibility for new television contracts, new media rights deals, new licensing and merchandising possibilities, new sponsorships \u2014 and maybe someday, a new frontier of international NFL teams that call countries outside of the United States their home.<\/p>\n
As Goodell told \u201cGood Morning Football\u201d in September of 2024: \u201cWe feel like this game is destined to be global. We expect to be in Asia soon. We expect to be in Australia soon. We\u2019re going to make sure that our game is available around the globe. And I think the ownership has been great on that. They\u2019ve passed a resolution where every team is obligated to play [internationally]. We\u2019re 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\u2019ll be playing 16.\u201d<\/p>\n
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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 \u2014 all until the team owners decide it won\u2019t be a negotiation at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every NFL team will go to an 18-game regular-season schedule. And every team, every year, will play an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":692909,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[53640,7,15985,13627,101106,2883,249,6,837,1902],"class_list":{"0":"post-692908","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-exhibition-games","9":"tag-football","10":"tag-international-game","11":"tag-international-games","12":"tag-international-slate","13":"tag-jerry-jones","14":"tag-new-england-patriots","15":"tag-nfl","16":"tag-robert-kraft","17":"tag-roger-goodell"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115931324435229077","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/692909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}