The Kansas City Chiefs are actively seeking a game in Madrid this season, where they'd meet the Atlanta Falcons
We all know the NFL is a cash-making juggernauts, and the schedule-makers can be especially merciless when it comes to setting up international games. The league wants to extend its money-making tentacles into every viable market, which always draws a wide array of entertaining reactions from the various teams that actually have to play the games.
The Kansas City Chiefs are a part of this, but not in a way you’d necessarily expect. According to Josh Alper of Pro Football Talk, the Chiefs are actively lobbying to play in Madrid against the Atlanta Falcons this fall.
Why? As is often the case with the NFL, this is a “follow the money” story. The Chiefs are one of three teams that was granted marketing rights in Spain, according to Alper, and the Chicago Bears and Miami Dolphins are also on the list.
Alper cited Sam McDowell of the Kansas City Star as his source, with McDowell quoting Chiefs president Mark Donovan.
“We’ve been very open and aggressive with the league with the league — as we have been since the beginning — that we want to play in Spain this year,” Donovan said. “We think it would be a great market, game [and] matchup.”
There’s good reason to be aggressive with this sort of thing. It takes time for the NFL to establish each new international market, but nearly all of them are lucrative if the marketing is done right, and getting in quickly on the ground floor is important.
The Falcons will be the home team, and the Bears are also on the list of Atlanta’s home opponents for the 2026 season, according to Alper. That means there will be plenty of verbal jousting and back and forth to get that key slot before the NFL’s schedule announcement, which is tentatively set for mid-May.
The flip side of this is that it’s not always good for the teams themselves when it comes to the product on the field. The Chiefs have been all over the map, literally and figuratively, in their scheduling, and at times this has stressed players to the breaking point. Not that the league really cares all that much about that.
The latest example of this is coach Kyle Shanahan of the San Francisco 49ers, who has a beef with being scheduled for a game in Australia this year. Shanahan’s complaints were met with a massive shrug by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, and it will be interesting to see if the Chiefs still have enough of their championship luster to get this particular game.