The NFL Is Set To Fill The Bernabéu, But Madrid Has No Team Of Its Own

Cincinnati Bengals head coach Zac Taylor was candid about the crowd his team will face in Madrid on Sunday. “I’m not quite sure how much they know about our game yet,” he told reporters this week.

The NFL is confident in its own answer, saying Spain has 11 million fans, and around 80,000 of them will fill Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu for the Atlanta Falcons against the Bengals, the second regular-season game played in the city.

A short drive across town, Estadio de Vallehermoso tells a different story as the home of the Madrid Bravos, the capital’s professional football team, did not play a down in 2026. Owner Jaime Martín told me that the club’s operating companies are being wound down while it restructures to keep its assets and leave the project on standby.

Sunday will look like another success, and on its own terms it will be one. The harder question for the NFL is what happens in Spain on the other 364 days of the year. The league has shown it can fill the most famous stadium in world soccer and put Spain on its map, but the challenge lies in the ecosystem required for a local professional team needs to survive, and the Bravos’ story shows how fragile that ecosystem is, and how little Sunday’s crowd figures say about it.

The first Madrid game, in November 2025, drew 78,610 fans as the Miami Dolphins beat the Washington Commanders 16-13 in overtime. According to NFL figures, it averaged 5.9 million viewers across TV and digital platforms worldwide, peaking at 8 million in the final minutes. Madrid City Council put the economic impact at €70 million ($79.1 million) and counted 42,000 international visitors.

The visiting teams are buying in. Falcons head coach Kevin Stefanski described the trip as “a huge undertaking to take your football team across the pond” and thanked the league for the work behind it. Falcons wide receiver Drake London admitted he had never really watched soccer but still knew who Real Madrid were.

For the players, the game is about the standings first as Falcons running back Bijan Robinson said that Sunday could be a “culture changer” for a team sitting at 3-5. Tight end Mike Gesicki pointed out that international crowds cheer almost everything, to the point where players can celebrate a six-yard catch, a perfect atmosphere for a showpiece, but also a sign of an audience still learning the game.

Part of NFL’s international game strategy

Madrid is one of a record nine international games in 2026 and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has said he expects 16 a year within five years, and one estimate reported by BNN Bloomberg puts the media value of that plan at $880 million a year.

Television is the engine with Mediaset España set to show at least 50 games free-to-air from the 2026-27 season, and DAZN reported a 24% year-on-year rise in NFL Game Pass subscriptions.

The league is also leaning on star power. Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow, who publicly lobbied to play in Madrid, has said he hopes the Bengals can do for American football what Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls did for basketball. Coach Taylor said this week he hopes the trip builds the Bengals’ following in Spain.

The game is not a purely private venture as Madrid City Council contributes €1.5 million ($1.7 million) per game, according to municipal documents. The Comunidad de Madrid approved a further €1.5 million ($1.7 million) for this year’s game, under a deal that includes a third game in 2027.

The commercial picture has a quirk this year. Through the NFL’s Global Markets Program, the Chicago Bears, Kansas City Chiefs and Dolphins hold marketing rights in Spain. The Falcons, the designated home team on Sunday, hold rights only in Germany. That means that, technically, the franchise staging Madrid’s showpiece has no commercial stake in building a Spanish fanbase.

The struggles of local football franchises in Europe

While the spectacle of an NFL game surpassed expectations, football is yet to secure a sustainable long-term future. Madrid Bravos were not a product of the NFL’s arrival, as Martín started shaping the project in March 2021, and the European League of Football (ELF) announced Madrid as an expansion franchise in May 2023, before any NFL game in Spain had been confirmed.

The plan was a semi-professional team that would professionalise as its revenues grew. The plan seemed to be working as the Bravos averaged around 1,200 fans per game in their first season and about 3,300 in their second, Martín said, nearly tripling in a year, reaching the playoffs both times.

That growth came before the NFL’s first Madrid game, but Martín credits the league with adding visibility. “We were always clear that building a sustainable team here required our own effort and a long-term commitment,” he said.

The relationship with the NFL did deepen. Commanders head coach Dan Quinn wore a Bravos No. 12 jersey to his first news conference in Madrid last year. After their second season the Bravos signed a collaboration agreement with the Dolphins covering coaching, medical support, player development and joint marketing, and former Bravos players worked at the Dolphins’ fan zone.

The club projected around 5,500 fans per game for a third season and Martín saw potential for 15,000 to 20,000 within four or five years if the project continued. He is realistic about the NFL’s headline number. “The 11 million fans the NFL cites across Spain do not automatically become regular spectators for a team in Madrid,” he said.

The third season never came. The ELF collapsed amid financial and governance disputes after 2025, and its teams split into two rival competitions, the European Football Alliance (EFA) and the AFLE, and in March 2026, the Bravos withdrew. Martín said the club was financially prepared to keep going for several more years, but the problem was the clubs around it. He said organizations in both leagues did not offer enough clarity about their funding, commitments or intentions for the Bravos to judge the risk of sharing a competition with them.

“You can be meeting your plan and be willing to keep investing, but if other participants create instability, the risk of the whole competition changes, and with it the risk of your own project,” he said.

Growing the game from the bottom up

The NFL’s answer to the grassroots question is flag football, the non-contact version that debuts at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. NFL Flag launched in Spain in 2024 and runs in schools in Madrid, Barcelona and Zaragoza, in partnership with the Federación Española de Fútbol Americano (FEFA).

The Bears are running Spanish flag clinics for a fourth straight year, and Spain’s women’s flag team has twice ranked in the world’s top ten. Flag builds participation and familiarity with the sport, even if it does little for the professional tier that the Bravos were trying to sustain.

When the NFL extended its Madrid deal in February, NFL Spain country manager Rafa de los Santos said the commitment would let the league invest long-term in NFL Flag and youth participation, but it was clear that professional club football was not part of the pitch.

Jim Tomsula, the former San Francisco 49ers head coach who now runs the American Football League Europe (AFLE), sai the NFL is not involved in Europe’s leagues but is watching them closely.

Martín sees room for more of the kind of partnership the Bravos had with the Dolphins, with local clubs supporting the work NFL franchises want to do in Spain and gaining expertise and reach in return. The Bravos’ main public support came from municipal agreements that gave them access to facilities, which he points to as the most concrete way institutions can help.

The league has been here before. It ran its own European development league, NFL Europe, and shut it down in 2007.

The future of football in Europe

Martín has not ruled out a return for the Bravos, but a relaunch would need a European competition whose members can sustain several seasons of investment and are clear about what they are committing.

“In Madrid we saw a response from the public that encouraged us to continue,” he said. “What we need is for the risk of taking part in a European competition to be compatible with the project we want to build.”

The NFL will be back at the Bernabéu in 2027. Taylor’s question about how much Spain knows the game will get a loud answer for one afternoon on Sunday as Joe Burrow, Drake London and others take to the field. The harder test for the league is whether the visibility it brings has anywhere to land for the rest of the year.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com