Is NFL realistically close to adding European division as part of expansion?

Per Nicki Jhabvala of The Athletic, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell confirmed during a February interview with Westwood One that it’s "very possible someday" that the league will eventually add at least one international team as part of expected expansion. 

For his Thursday mailbag, NFL insider Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated suggested the creation of such a franchise isn't imminent. 

NFL "a ways off" from radical expansion ideas? 

"How you’d make it work from a travel standpoint is still a very big question," Breer explained. "One idea, in the past, was to have a London team, with a U.S. hub in America to conduct a lot of football business, and solving that requires some things, as I see them, are out of the NFL’s control. When that bridge is crossed, I do believe another big question will be whether it’s by adding two teams, or perhaps an entire division in Europe. But we’re a ways off from that."

Rumors about the NFL eventually having a four-team European division have hovered over the league for years. Some thought that expansion could be coupled with the league going to an 18-game regular-season format, but that schedule change could be made as soon as next year. 

In October 2022, John Breech of CBS Sports shared how Goodell said at the time that the league was "trying to sort of see" if it could "have multiple locations in Europe where you could have an NFL franchise...because it would be easier as a division." 

American-based teams could be asked to go on the road for multiple weeks at a time to knock games at European opponents off their schedules. That said, fans shouldn't start thinking about multi-week fall-time vacations overseas quite yet. 

Putting at least one team in Europe became "more complicated" than NFL envisioned?

"The NFL had a 15-year plan to accomplish [having a team based in another country] when it established the International Series in 2007, and obviously, it already missed the mark," Breer added. "Why? Logistics, mostly. Air travel hasn’t advanced as much as some anticipated, and other projects, like expanding the regular season and adding midweek games, only made the idea of putting a team in Europe more complicated."

For now, the league's long-term plan seems to be for all 32 existing teams to participate in one international game per season. Perhaps talk about a European division will grow louder once the NFL accomplishes that goal.