The NFL Goes MrBeast Mode
The first international The match of the national season of the Football League, an inclination of Friday evening between the heads of Kansas City and Los Angeles Loaders in São Paulo, is celebrated on the field by the pump and the usual circumstances.
There are photoatons and mercilegus tents that are aimed at local fans, samba dancers in feathered heads entertaining the subsequent American paddles traveling through the equator, and a press conference where the quarterrier of chiefs Patrick Mahomes must go back after having called football of the association (that is to say the genre that is always the most popular in Brazil) “Soccer”. “But fans listening at home are greeted by a different and a little more disturbing spectacle: the news than Youtuber, creator of prolific content and Impresario in milk infused with Jimmy” MRBEAST “Donaldson proteins bought the NFL.
In an avant -match overview broadcast on YouTube – which, for the first time, broadcasts a game of the NFL of the regular season, and for the free – the most precious creator of the platform appears the commissioner of the League in front Roger GOODELL, in a “sketch” of MRBEAST, allegedly comical to the editors of MRBEAST. A post-match sees Donaldson assigning a hardcore fan a ticket for Super Bowl LX and drawing another from a human cannon. Not everyone welcomes the new Zillennial suzerain of the NFL. “MRBEAST on my television invading my beautiful sport,” publishes a fan on X. A friend (a football fan for life in the middle of the forties) who sent me an SMS during the match says that all the production, “seems incredibly Gen Z”.
Which is of course the point. The São Paulo game, exclusive to YouTube, September 5 (the platform covered my travel costs to attend), Fetails two of the main NFL priorities, distributing both international and intergenerational football. “I fully understand that all fans and the public will not welcome the change,” writes Donaldson in a statement to Wired. “We hope that over time, they will recognize that we approach everything we do with admiration and respect and that we want to be able to share something as unique and special as the NFL with our fans.”
If the NFL fails to establish American football abroad, both with the Z generation – whose sports fandom, has shown studies, the lowest class among generational cohorts – and with the unusual international public with a clearly American hobby, it will not be for lack of trying. Since 2005, the League has been organizing regular season games abroad. The first was Mexico. Then London. Then Germany. Then Brazil. This season will see additional international matches in Berlin, Madrid and Dublin. Penetration on the South American market seems both incredibly daring and completely sensible. Sensitive, because players and fans do not have to fight against the annoying realities of time zones. And daring because, perhaps even more than the United Kingdom or continental Europe, South America has its own distinct and passionate football culture that has nothing to do with its North American cousin.
The Brazilian operation in 2025 of the NFL offers a good match to further test the viability of the South American market. Due to their long and somewhat difficult history in Southern California, the charges have an important Latin fans base, which calls them Los Bols. And the chiefs (despite the humiliating dismantling in the Super Bowl of last season) remain a world brand. The chiefs have also benefited from the fame of list A of some of their players, in particular Mahomas, and the winger tight Travis Kelce, whose recent commitment of the pop star Taylor Swift de facto One of the most famous human beings on the planet. Like James Brighton, a fan of the loaders and a native of California who went to Brazil for the match, growls for me before the game, “Mahomes is easily marketable … Kelce and Taylor Swift is the romance that the world wants to see, I suppose. They are the face of the NFL at the moment.” The League into account. But for the second NFL Brazil game, they take no risk.
“There is no A better platform than YouTube, “explains the veteran radediffuser Rich Eisen, his head literally framed by a YouTube logo while he lounges in the marked green room YouTube in the depths of the concrete floods of the Broadcast Arena of São Paulo and the reading of the Play-Play,” there is no more powerful distribution. Nourish an insatiable desire for people to take content. »»
Eisen talks about experience. At 56, it can be a generation or three withdrawn from the domain dominated by the generation of the creation of professional content. Nevertheless, he was able to transform his success as a long -standing journalist and former sports of Sportscent and NFL Network in an increasingly wide audience, broadcasting his daily program nominated at Emmy Emmy and three hours The rich Eisen spectacle On YouTube, among other platforms. “The world has changed and you have to be part of it,” he told Wired. “I mean, the NFL commissioner did not make a video on the game of Brazil with Me. And I have been his employee for 23 years! He did it with MRBEAST.
