The NFL Can Fill a Stadium. Can It Build a Fan?
The NFL played its first regular-season game in Australia this week, drawing 100,021 people to the Melbourne Cricket Ground to watch the San Francisco 49ers defeat the Los Angeles Rams. It was a major spectacle, supported by fan events, merchandise, entertainment, and an atmosphere designed to capture attention far beyond the stadium.
What interests me is what happens after the spectacle. The NFL seems to understand something many brands forget: attention can be created in a moment, but attachment usually takes repetition.
Australia is one stop in the league’s largest international season to date. Nine regular-season games are being played outside the United States in 2026 across seven countries, and NFL owners have already approved up to 10 international games in future seasons. Commissioner Roger Goodell has said the eventual goal is 16.
The business case is obvious. The NFL wants more fans, stronger media value, new partnerships and a much larger international footprint. But a useful consumer-behavior lesson underlies that strategy: exposure is not the same as fandom.
A sold-out stadium proves that people are interested enough to show up once. It does not automatically create the person who watches the following week again, learns the players, chooses a team, and starts organizing part of their weekend around the sport. Fandom is behavioral, social, and emotional, and those layers develop over time.
London is probably the clearest example. The NFL launched its International Series there in 2007 and kept returning rather than treating the first game as a successful activation and moving on. London is hosting three regular-season games in 2026 alone, giving fans repeated opportunities to watch, attend and build familiarity with the league.
The NFL has been unusually direct about that approach. When owners approved additional international games, league executive Peter O’Reilly said the goal was to avoid a one-and-done strategy and continue returning to the markets the NFL enters.
Brands could learn from that. Marketing often places enormous value on the launch moment, but a launch answers only one question: did people notice? The harder question is whether the experience gave them enough reason to come back.
This is important, especially when a company is introducing something that is not already part of consumers’ everyday behavior. The first experience may come from curiosity. The second requires enough value to repeat it. Over time, familiarity and social connection can do some of the work marketing initially had to do.
The NFL’s strategy in Australia already extends beyond the game itself. The league supported the event with a three-day festival featuring interactive experiences, flag football, watch parties, retail pop-ups and appearances by players and NFL legends. It has also said it plans to develop the sport throughout the year across Australia and the wider Asia-Pacific region.
That surrounding activity matters because building a market requires more than importing the finished product. Someone attending the game, a child trying flag football and a family visiting a fan festival are having different experiences, but each one creates another opportunity for the sport to become familiar.
From a consumer-behavior perspective, repetition starts to change the meaning of the experience. Someone may begin by saying, I went to an NFL game, and eventually reach the point where they say, I’m a 49ers fan. The first describes something they did once. The second says something about who they are.
The same principle applies far beyond sports. A beauty brand may not have built loyalty just because someone tried its serum after seeing it on TikTok. A restaurant hasn't created a regular customer because opening week was full, and a fitness studio doesn't have a community because its first class sold out. The initial response proves that the business can generate interest; repeat behavior reveals whether it created lasting value.
This is something I keep coming back to in my own consumer-behavior research. Repetition can change an experience from a deliberate choice into something familiar, integrated, and eventually expected. Sports demonstrate that especially well because fandom is built through seasons, rituals, memories, and shared experiences that accumulate over time.
That is why the NFL’s international strategy is more sophisticated than just taking American football around the world. The games will generate crowds and headlines, but the real test comes next.
Does someone who attended the Melbourne game watch the following week again? Does a child who tried flag football continue playing? Does someone who bought a jersey begin following the team whose name is on it? Most importantly, does the NFL return often enough that it stops feeling like an American event visiting Australia and starts feeling like part of the local sports calendar?
Those outcomes are harder to create than a sold-out stadium, but they are also much more valuable. One game can create a crowd. Building a fan requires giving that crowd a reason to come back.
Dania Khalife
