American Football and Mexico: A Perfect Match?

Zach discusses American Football's rise in popularity in Mexico.

Imagine it is Christmas dinner. All of your relatives are in town and are at your house. When you sit down to eat, one of your uncles sitting next to randomly says: “Did you know that on October 2, 2005, the winless Arizona Cardinals just defeated the 1-2 San Francisco 49ers by a score of 31-14 in front of 103,467 fans, the largest crowd in NFL history at the time?”

You, if you loved your uncle, would likely reply: “Wait, why in the world did 103,467 fans pay money to watch an NFL game between two terrible teams headlined by Tim Rattay and Josh McCown?”

In response, your NFL obsessed uncle says: “Well, it’s because the game was played in Mexico City for the first time ever. Did you know that the NFL’s revenue from Mexico increased year over year from 2016 to 2019? Did you know that a study in 2017 by the NFL found that Mexico City has over 1.45 million NFL fans? And that the NFL has an office in Mexico now?”

You, if you really loved your uncle, and wanted to keep this random conversation going, would reply with: “That’s very interesting! But if Mexicans love American football so much then why has there only been one NFL game in one poorly managed stadium in the past 4 years? Why were the tickets priced so highly (It took nine days of work for a minimum wage earner in Mexico to obtain enough money to buy a seat in the nosebleeds) then? Heck, why isn’t there any expansion team in Mexico City yet? The NBA G-League already has a team in Mexico City!”

Flabbergasted and defeated, your uncle squeaks out: “Actually, I don’t know. Maybe Mexico doesn’t have an appetite for American football after all, but maybe they do! I wish someone could figure this out!” The conversation ends awkwardly as you can’t look anything up at the dinner table, and shrug your shoulders.

To make sure this unfortunate scenario doesn't happen at your dinner this December, it can be proven with many different pieces of evidence that Mexico actually does have an appetite for American football despite some facts taken from their context claiming that the country has turned its back to the sport and has focused on soccer instead.

The first reason as to why Mexico has an appetite for American Football is that the country recently founded its own football league. The Liga de Fútbol Americano Profesional, or LFA in abbreviated terms, was founded on January 12, 2016 to develop young football players and help them earn opportunities in the Canadian Football League (their partner league), and potentially in the NFL after a while. The LFA was also founded because their founder, sports journalist Juan Carlos Vasquez, was attached to the idea of starting up a small league since he was in college (Janowitz). At first launch, the LFA had four teams, all very close to Mexico City. The fans per game average was 1,600 fans in 2016 in the Magdalena Mixhuca Sports City Complex (where the teams played) that had a capacity of 6,000 people (Wikipedia). Attendance was low, money was tight, and overall interest was low in 2016.

Fast forward eight years, and the LFA has grown. The league has now expanded to nine other cities with nine new teams and stadiums, and there were 10,000 people in attendance for Tazón Mexico VII (The LFA’s Super Bowl). The LFA has also partnered with the CFL in a resource sharing agreement, the league generated enough capital to stay afloat during the COVID 19 pandemic, forced another American football league in Mexico, FAL, to fold, and is sponsored by Grupo Caliente, one of the largest sports betting companies in Mexico, a multi million dollar company (Barnes). What an improvement from eight years ago!

One may argue that although the LFA has grown since its inception, its statistics do not show growth anywhere close to the level of growth the NFL has in the US or Canada. They wouldn’t be wrong, however, the reason for the slower growth of the LFA (compared to other international markets) is because of the growth of the NFL itself in Mexico over the last 19 years.

In fact, Mexico City has hosted four NFL games in the last eight years at the 87,523 seat Estadio Azteca, filling up around 90% of the stadium with an average of 77,000 fans attending each game (Statista). Recent NFL contests in Mexico City have resulted in a 45 million dollar impact and benefit to the local and national economy, and the country is statistically the second largest viewing market for American football outside of the US (Dragon). Fans are also buying NFL merchandise from mainly the nine teams that were granted marketing access to the country in 2021: the Cardinals, Cowboys, Broncos, Raiders, Texans, Chiefs, Steelers, and 49ers (the Steelers and Broncos, the only two teams on the list that have not played in Mexico yet, will very likely play each other in the next NFL game in Mexico City in 2025). According to The Dallas Morning News, the Cowboys have the largest fan base among the nine teams, reeling in 15.2 million fans in Mexico (Nudelsejer). Additionally, Mexico’s total audience reach for this year’s Super Bowl was 24.1 million viewers (out of an estimated 42 million NFL fans), up 5% year on year and highest since records began (NFL). Statista, an online statistics platform for market data, reported that Mexico’s revenue in the American Football market is projected to reach $133.90m in 2024 and show an annual growth rate of 3.44% in revenue through 2029. The NFL also sponsors 6,500 youth football programs in 27 Mexican states, including the Federal District that encompasses Mexico City (AP).

The reason that the NFL has only played one game in the past four years in Mexico City is because a) the COVID-19 pandemic, and b) Estadio Azteca, the biggest stadium in Mexico City and host to all NFL events in Mexico, started renovations in 2023 and will not finish renovations until 2025 or 2026 (according to 365 Scores, Mexico, the stadium renovations are running behind schedule). The news outlet BBC claims that the downfall of the historic Estadio Azteca is due to a poor decision in 2018 to change the pitch to a hybrid mix between natural and fake grass, combined with unusual rain in Mexico City that year, which ruined the pitch entirely and caused the NFL to move their game that year to Los Angeles (it was the classic game between the Chiefs and Rams where the Rams won 54-51), as well as the stadium’s old age and failed VIP section renovation in 2016 that limited the visibility of the field for one of the main stands. The owner of the stadium, Televisa (a massive TV company in the country), owns a professional soccer team that also plays there, and they fired the longtime groundskeeper earlier that summer, and they hosted 4 teams in the stadium that fall, and improperly overused the field solely to make money off of ticket sales, debunking any claim that the stadium was in bad condition because the country didn’t care very much about American football.

In regards to a potential expansion team from Mexico City joining the league in the future, this is unlikely as the NFL thinks that Mexico City may not be a profitable base because of the regarded status of Mexico as a semi- developed country, which brings in questions about the financial benefit of adding a team in the city. Mexico City’s inner metro area GDP is around $30,000 per capita, which is over twice as less as the GDP per capita of Jacksonville ($61,897), the city with the lowest GDP per capita that has an NFL team. This is exactly why Duncan Tucker wrote an article for The Guardian about Mexico and the NFL in 2016 with the title “An upper-class picnic: the Mexican elite’s curious love affair with NFL”. However, after a left wing government led by the Morena party replaced the PRI in 2018 (two years after the article was published), despite a middling economy, former president Obrador did bring the value of the Mexican Peso to all time highs in the following years he took office (MacroTrends).

With the claim of Mexico’s interest in the sport and in the NFL proven above, this provokes a deeper question into the trend: Why? Why does Mexico support a sport and/or a league that will very likely never field a team on their land?

This also poses the question of why in the world is the NFL so interested in Mexico? Why is expanding only the reach of the league internationally so important to them?

For the country of Mexico, American football is an example of an element of culture that has spread south of the border as the sport was introduced in the country in 1896 by Mexican students returning home from U.S. colleges (AP). These students eventually spread the sport around the country and in the 1920s, a youth/college football league was formed, and there is one today named the ONEFA. ONEFA has 33 college football teams in their Major League division and has 67 teams in three youth divisions (high school/small undergrads, middle school, and elementary school). Games are streamed on local television, and for many Mexican college students, watching football gives them a sense of identity and pride in their university (Gomez). Football is also a sport that shares all the values many Mexicans hold: teamwork, toughness, glory and hard work (McConnell). Mexicans also watch the LFA and NFL for the same reasons. Tony Alcalá, a professor at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in Mexico, summed it up best by saying the physical nature of the game is an attraction, as well as the salary cap: “‘the salary cap [which] makes it very competitive, so you don’t have the same teams always at the top like in soccer worldwide.” (Thelmadatter).

Additionally, Mexico benefits from the NFL economically. The 2016 game in Mexico City provided an incremental $45 million boost to the overall economy, and was estimated to have supported around 2,840 jobs and generated tax revenues of MXN $67 million. The NFL also helps the tourism industry in Mexico, as international visitors to the game in 2016 spent an average of 5.5 days in Mexico as a whole, and 90% of these visitors stated in a survey that they would recommend Mexico to others (72% of all visitors surveyed were likely to return, too). Furthermore, mentions of the game on digital, social, and traditional media in the US drew a $250 million PR value. (Gregory). The most popular sport in Mexico, futbol, or soccer, has been a means of social mobility for many Mexicans, and there is a growing belief in the country that American football might present that opportunity for the country in the future as the game spreads. The average monthly wage for any employee working in the sports sector is slightly higher than the national average of the entire employed population in Mexico (Guerra).

The NFL is interested in Mexico as it is a market that is interested in the game of American football and it is a place where the NFL (a league that made ($18.6 billion in 2022, $20.2 billion in 2023) can expand its brand, build its fanbase, and make money. Geographically, Mexico is connected to three states that have an NFL team. Mexico is only one piece of the pie in the NFL’s quest to expand their reach internationally, in a plan that will allow the NFL to “‘be able to gross $50 billion in a year’” according to the owner of the Indianapolis Colts, Jim Irsay (Maaddi).

Additionally, like any other sport, football has the potential to shape the future and provide something that is constant in a society that is changing frequently, as well as unite people. In Mexico, a country that is ranked 3rd on The Organized Crime Index (a tool funded by the EU and the US government), the growth of another sport that puts differences aside and has the potential to cut crime (UC Berkeley) would benefit the country and its citizens greatly. After over 50 people were killed in July in Ciudad Juarez in 2023, ​​a rector at the local university in the city explained to the El Paso Times that culture, the arts and sports were “powerful tools to prevent violence, particularly in the vulnerable areas of our city” (Borunda).

In conclusion, Mexico has an appetite for American football that has been proven through the growth of the LFA, NFL, and ONEFA in the country, and the sport is significant in the country because of the massive economic, nationalistic, and societal benefits it brings.