Report: NFLPA 'preparing' for NFL push to make four-team European division

The NFL Players Association is reportedly preparing for the league to make a push for a four-team European division. Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio reported the NFLPA is discussing the pros and cons of putting multiple teams on a completely different continent.

The NFL already has a bunch of international games, which started in London, and are now scattered across Europe, in addition to Brazil and Mexico. Logically speaking, the NFL could put a team or two in Mexico and it would make more sense from a travel standpoint. Those international teams would be on the same continent at least.

Florio pondered the questions of adding non-American teams, ala the NHL, NBA and MLB, which have teams in Toronto as well as throughout Canada (for hockey anyway). But this would be a different beast.

“Will players want to move to London or Germany or Spain or wherever,” Florio wrote. “Living in a different country introduces a host of new issues, starting with the governmental structure and continuing with the taxation system, cost of living, the potential language barrier, and more.

“Then there’s the draft. It’s one thing to tell a 21-year-old who’d prefer to live in his hometown of Pittsburgh that he’s moving to Seattle. It’s another to tell a kid from Phoenix that he’s packing for Frankfurt.”

As Florio pointed out, the NFL showed no signs of expansion into Europe just yet. The focus is squarely on increasing exposure internationally.

“From the league’s perspective, there’s no evidence that a plan is in place to put one or more teams in Europe in the foreseeable future,” Florio wrote. “The goal for now is to expand the number of permissible international games under the Collective Bargaining Agreement from 10 to 16.”

The NFL had a European experiment already. NFL Europe was a league from 1991-2007, under three different names anyway. Initially, it was a league to integrate American and overseas teams, before eventually becoming a European league.

Teams were sprawled throughout the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom. Those locations make sense these days, based on the NFL’s presence with its international schedule. Games this year will take place in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Dublin, Ireland; London, England; Berlin, Germany and Madrid, Spain.

“That said, this year’s decision to give the Vikings consecutive ‘road’ games in Dublin and London is, we’ve previously explained, the first effort to evaluate the impact of a multi-week foreign trip on a U.S.-based team,” Florio wrote. “If/when team(s) are in Europe, that’s how it will go. In lieu of traveling across the Atlantic Ocean twice in a given season, teams will get their European games played during the same trip.”