MELBOURNE, Sept 1 (Reuters) - The National Football League (NFL) is looking to bring a game to Australia every season as part of its international strategy and sees the nation as a strategic growth market for American football, a senior executive told Reuters on Tuesday.
Australia hosts its first NFL game at the 100,000-seat Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) on September 11 with the LA Rams opening their season against the San Francisco 49ers in the first of a record nine-game international schedule across seven countries.
The MCG game is part of a multi-year contract with Australia's Victoria state, which includes two confirmed games over four years and the option for a third.
The timing of the second one is still to be decided but Gerrit Meier, managing director and head of NFL International, said the league's preference would be for annual games in Australia, much as Britain has had for most of the last two decades.
"I think that would be the plan, right?" Meier said in a video call from New York on Tuesday.
"Overall, we're working off the hypothesis that we need to make a commitment to a market ... We believe that at least one game per year should be something that we should be having in the markets that we commit to.
"And maybe over time, as we have, maybe, greater inventory, then maybe you play two games (per season) or so."
Meier said the longer-term scheduling of NFL games in Australia had to consider the players' experience, whether the clubs saw value in the journey and how satisfied the hosts would be with the economic impact.
"The teams coming back, they need to be healthy. They need to have a great experience. It needs to be a great game because in the end it counts. It's not an exhibition game," he said.
The Victorian government's bid for the NFL games works out to about A$10 million to A$15 million per game, Melbourne newspaper the Age reported this month, citing figures obtained by the newspaper.
Government officials have declined to disclose the cost but see the games as a huge opportunity to showcase the state and expect "significant economic returns" on the investment.
TRAVELLING FANS
The first game in Melbourne will kick off at 10:35 a.m. on a Friday to suit the U.S. TV audience, but the MCG is expected to be packed to near capacity.
Nearly half of the crowd will travel from other Australian states or from overseas, including some 10,000 U.S.-based fans, the NFL estimates.
Meier said the NFL believed the idea of a regular season-opening game in Australia was "very, very special" but would need conversations with the state government's tourism arm Visit Victoria and the Australian Football League (AFL).
The AFL is the governing body for professional Australian rules football, the most popular winter sport in the nation's southern states. Multiple AFL games are played almost every week at the MCG through to the end of September.
"We're going to sit with the larger region and city and (ask) what all of you thought. Was it good? Was it not good? Would you want to have us back?" said Meier.
"And ... we want to see how the grass is holding up. We want to kind of see how the overall setup has been working."
The NFL set up a local office for Australia and New Zealand in 2022 and opened its second international academy on the Gold Coast in 2024, having launched the first in England in 2019.
Australian punters are common in NFL teams, and Philadelphia Eagles offensive tackle Jordan Mailata became the country's first to win a Super Bowl as a participating player last year.
Meier said in a few years operating in Australia, the NFL's perception of the nation's potential had changed.
"It's kind of moved from being an interesting market to actually being a strategic growth market," he said.
"We have a fast-growing fan-base ... The game itself is just a catalyst."
(Reporting by Ian Ransom; Editing by Peter Rutherford)
