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Germany is gearing up for the gridiron as American football returns to the country this month.
The Kansas City Chiefs will play the Miami Dolphins in the first of two games in Frankfurt in November. For Chiefs’ star quarterback Patrick Mahomes, the visit will be a first but for the NFL team that has won two of the last four Super Bowls the trip to Germany marks an historic return.
In August 1990, just ten months after the fall of the Berlin Wall but a couple of months before the official reunification of Germany, the Chiefs played the Los Angeles Rams in the Olympiastadion in West Berlin.
It was the ninth edition of the now defunct pre-season international series called the American Bowl and the first ever NFL game in Germany. The game was originally supposed to take place in Frankfurt, the western city with a far larger US business and military presence, but the historic political developments forced a change of plan.
“We decided to do the game here after the political events developed so quickly,” NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue told the LA Times at the time. “Everyone urged us to do it in Berlin as a way of celebrating the freedom that came to Central Europe in the last year.”
The Chiefs lost that first ever game in Germany 19-3 to the Rams, but for those of the 55,429 fans in attendance who weren’t American service personnel who had been given free tickets and trips from various military bases across Europe, this was about much more than just watching a confusing, new sport.
Cheerleaders, tailgating and the Beach Boys being played on the tannoy system offered a chance to sample American life, especially for those who, just months before, had been on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
Indeed, German journalist Irina Prass, who had grown up in East Berlin and went on to become the editor-in-chief of the Berliner Zeitung, is quoted in The Washington Post at the time as saying: “I’m totally blown away. Such a spectacle. So many things. So American.”
Trip of a lifetime
Christian Okoye played just four minutes that day, as is customary for starters during preseason, but the Nigerian running back remembers it well.
“I don’t think they [the fans] quite understood it but they were excited the game was there,” Okoye tells DW.
“It was such a different time. The Wall had just came down and there was a big buzz about that. We all took home souvenirs, pieces of the Wall. I remember coming home with a Soviet officers hat.”
Inspired by Jesse Owens
Okoye’s NFL story is a fairytale. Originally a discus thrower, among other disciplines, he was surprisingly left out of the Nigerian track and field team for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
And so Okoye turned to American football and, despite having never played the game before he was 23, the running back arrived in Berlin off the back of an NFL-best 12-touchdown, 1,480-yard season.
The man nicknamed “the Nigerian nightmare” was truly a pioneer for African players. Now a Chiefs’ ambassador, he still gets calls today from players coming through from Nigeria and other African nations thanking him for opening the door.
Beyond bringing American football to Germany, Okoye also took great pride in playing in the Olympiastadion.
“The most important thing for me, because of my track and field background, was remembering Jesse Owens won four golds in that stadium,” Okoye says.
“It was an historic moment to play where Owens set all those records and where Hitler was in the stands when he did. It was one of the moments I took with me forever.”
Three decades later
Okoye famously said at the game in Berlin that it would take many years for American football to establish itself in Germany.
Today, however, every NFL team has played at least once internationally since 2011 and Europe’s largest economy is a logical match for the world’s most lucrative sports league in the world.
Thanks to NFL Europe and a long-lasting domestic league, Germany’s NFL fan base has always been a sleeping giant.
Last year, Brett Gosper, NFL Head of Europe, told The Associated Press (AP) that Germany had more casual fans (17 million) than the UK. That number has only risen in the last twelve months, with tickets for the Chiefs vs. Dolphins game selling out in just 15 minutes.
The NFL has risen too. The league’s revenue in 1990 was reportedly around $1.3 billion (although that was disputed at the time as being less than the real number). Today, Sportico reports that the league’s revenue is roughly $19 billion.
‘What’s not to like?’
Chiefs President Mark Donovan told AP the team have spent $1 million on preparation and fan events for the game in Frankfurt, including a Chiefs-themed boat on the Main river where fans can take a selfie with the Super Bowl trophy.
This may seem a lot, but looking at the numbers from last year’s game between Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Seattle Seahawks in Munich where nearly 70,000 fans attended and fan merchandise sales on game day at the Allianz Arena stadium were reportedly the highest ever for an NFL game outside of the US, the Chiefs investment is no surprise.
Add to that the fact this team has the fastest-growing Instagram account and TikTok engagement in the country among NFL teams, and it’s clear how different a trip to Germany to play a game is today.
But it’s on the field where the real reasons lie, and however pivotal that game in Berlin in 1990 was, it’s today’s success that has helped the Chiefs go from a symbol of American life to one of the most popular US sports teams in the world.
“When you win and you’re doing good, people love you, and we have the best quarterback in the world,” Okoye says, referring to Mahomes. “What’s not to like about the Chiefs?”
Edited by Matt Ford
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