Aaron Rodgers suggests expanding the NFL's international schedule

Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers said Sunday that the NFL once considered a bold international expansion plan during the 2020 collective bargaining agreement negotiations: dedicating an entire weekend to overseas games, with all 32 teams playing in foreign countries.

Rodgers believes the league should stop thinking small when it comes to expanding its international footprint. 

The NFL has continued its global push across the 2025 and 2026 seasons, bringing games to international markets in Mexico, Brazil, Ireland, England, Spain and Germany. The four-time MVP suggested the league could push even further into new markets, including Canada, another South American country, or Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Aaron Rodgers believes the NFL got its expansion priorities wrong

Rather than spreading international games across the season, Rodgers floated the idea of dedicating an entire week to taking football overseas, a bold move that could accelerate the NFL’s global growth. 

"I think there's great opportunities for expansion and those things," Rodgers said via ESPN. "It'd be awesome to see them have an international week, because I think it's great for the game and the expansion of the game."

Rodgers believes the NFL missed an opportunity to turn its international expansion into a marquee event, arguing that a dedicated week of overseas games could have grown the sport's global audience without adding to the regular-season workload. Instead, he pointed to the league's decision to expand to 17 games as a missed chance to prioritize a more ambitious international vision.

"There was talk about doing a week, an international week, where you had games in 16 different places, and you just added an extra bye week," the Steelers quarterback said via ESPN. "So you play 16 regular-season [weeks], you have two bye weeks; one of those weeks would've been an international week.

"I think it would've been phenomenal for the game. Now, the owners wanted to push for 17 games for the extra revenue and because they care so much about player safety, but it would've been nice." 

Mike Florio challenges the feasibility of an NFL international week

Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk dismissed the proposal as fundamentally unrealistic, pointing to the logistical nightmare of staging 16 games across multiple countries in a four-day span, with no games played on U.S. soil.

"The goal was, and still is, to turn the European games into a TV package, with multiple games starting at 9:30 a.m. ET," Florio wrote via NBC Sports. "Emptying the international tank on one and only one weekend would make no sense.

Florio also argued that concentrating every international matchup into a single weekend would undermine one of the league's biggest opportunities: building a consistent overseas television audience.