The short answer
Nine 2026 games abroad. Six are played, Paris included: Steelers 16, Saints 10 at Stade de France in front of 78,488. Three left. Next is Bengals-Falcons at the Santiago Bernabéu on Sunday, November 8, on sale at face value from €93.40 all-in. Madrid is the value trip. Stay central, ride Metro line 10, book refundable.
The full slate, confirmed
This is the record year: nine games, seven countries, eight stadiums. The three remaining dates, kickoffs and ticket statuses were re-checked October 25, 2026 against the NFL’s per-city pages and its international-games index. Six are played, which is all three London games plus Paris. No date or kickoff time has moved all year.
| Week | Date (local) | Matchup | Stadium | City |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fri, Sept 11 (Sept 10 ET) | 49ers 27, Rams 7 (played) | Melbourne Cricket Ground | Melbourne |
| 3 | Sun, Sept 27 | Ravens 34, Cowboys 31 (played) | Maracanã | Rio de Janeiro |
| 4 | Sun, Oct 4 | Colts 30, Commanders 13 (played) | Tottenham Hotspur Stadium | London |
| 5 | Sun, Oct 11 | Jaguars 19, Eagles 17 (played) | Tottenham Hotspur Stadium | London |
| 6 | Sun, Oct 18 | Texans 34, Jaguars 31 (played) | Wembley Stadium | London |
| 7 | Sun, Oct 25 | Steelers 16, Saints 10 (played) | Stade de France | Paris |
| 9 | Sun, Nov 8 | Bengals at Falcons | Santiago Bernabéu | Madrid |
| 10 | Sun, Nov 15 | Patriots at Lions | FC Bayern Munich Arena | Munich |
| 11 | Sun, Nov 22 | Vikings at 49ers | Estadio Banorte | Mexico City |
All six European games kick off at 9:30 a.m. ET. In London that was 2:30 p.m. Paris was 2:30 p.m. too, which is what Stade de France’s event page listed: Europe’s clocks went back on the morning of October 25 and U.S. clocks don’t move until November 1, so for that one Sunday the gap ran an hour shorter. Madrid and Munich are 3:30 p.m. local. Five of the six sit on NFL Network, in Weeks 4 through 7 and Week 9, and Munich is part of a FOX tripleheader. Mexico City is NBC’s Sunday Night Football at 8:20 p.m. ET, an evening kickoff in town.
One note on this update’s timing. It went up on Sunday, October 25, hours after the Paris final, so every European row except Madrid is now a result. The Jaguars’ back-to-back London weeks split. They won the first 19-17 at Tottenham on the 11th on Cam Little’s 57-yard field goal on the last play, after Philadelphia had gone ahead on a 48-yarder with eight seconds on the clock. They lost the second 34-31 at Wembley on the 18th, on Ka’imi Fairbairn’s 49-yarder as time expired. If you booked the double, you watched a walk-off kick go each way.
Why the hotel math is different abroad
Domestic NFL weekends are a compression-night story: one stadium, a ring of hotels around it, and revenue managers who close out every discount the day the schedule drops. We’ve covered that machine in the Week 1 booking guide.
International games mostly break that pattern, in your favor. These are giant leisure cities where one football game, even a sold-out one, is a normal weekend. London has more hotel rooms than some NFL states. So the stadium-adjacent premium that eats your budget in Green Bay barely exists in most of these markets. The game is also rarely in a neighborhood you’d want anyway: Stade de France is in Saint-Denis, Tottenham is deep in North London, Estadio Banorte is at the far southern edge of Mexico City. Every one of these stadiums has a train to it.
So the rule for every one of these trips: pick the neighborhood for the other 70 hours, and let rail handle game day. Book refundable. Madrid, Munich and Mexico City run through November, which is free optionality on an international itinerary with more ways to break than a domestic one. The refundable-rate playbook applies unchanged, just mind the cancellation cutoff against your flight dates.
Madrid is the near one: Sunday, November 8. Two weeks out is a comfortable place to be. A refundable rate booked at that range has its whole cancellation window ahead of it, there’s room to re-shop it more than once before the cutoff, and rental cancellation terms for that weekend haven’t closed yet. Munich and Mexico City sit further out again. Paris is played, and its transit and ticket record stays on this page, because London and Paris both get games again.
City by city
London (all three played): sleep central, train out, and how to read the closure list
Three London games this year, all played: Colts 30-13 and Jaguars 19-17 at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, then Texans 34-31 at Wembley on October 18. London gets games every year and the stations don’t move, so this section stays as the method. Neither ground has a hotel district you’d choose on purpose.
Wembley’s advantage is that three stations serve it. Wembley Park is on the Metropolitan and Jubilee lines, two stops from Baker Street on the Met, and the stadium tells you to allow ten minutes up Olympic Way to the gates. Wembley Stadium station is one stop from Marylebone on Chiltern Railways, under ten minutes of train. Wembley Central is on the Bakerloo line and on the Lioness line that runs Euston to Watford Junction. So the hotel filter is wide: anything central on the Jubilee, Metropolitan or Bakerloo works, which covers Baker Street, Marylebone, Bond Street, Waterloo and most of the West End. Don’t drive. Wembley’s own guidance is official stadium parking only, booked in advance, and National Express is the official coach supplier with direct services from more than 55 UK locations if you’re coming in from outside London.
How to read game-day transit for a London game, using October 18 as the worked example. TfL publishes a planned-track-closures document for each week, marked “correct at publication” with a date, and the Thursday-before edition is the one to trust. The October 15 edition for the week of October 12 to 18 put nine lines and modes into weekend engineering work, and not one of them was a Wembley line. The Metropolitan, the Jubilee and the Bakerloo were all absent, so Wembley Park and Wembley Central ran a normal Sunday service and Chiltern added its usual extra Wembley Stadium stops from Marylebone. The lines that were shut were the ones that cost you on the way to the airport, not the stadium: the Piccadilly was out to every Heathrow terminal both days, so Heathrow arrivals went in on the Elizabeth line, and our October 11 read had Stansted Express suspended across the weekend for Network Rail work. Weekend airport-link closures are routine in London. Read the airport line off the same list you read the stadium line off.
A correction stays on the record because it was load-bearing. The October 8 edition read, to us, as if Lioness line trains from Watford Junction would terminate at Kilburn High Road on the 18th, and an earlier version of this page routed you around it. The October 15 edition had no such closure; its Lioness entries were November 21 and 22 and January 31. Whether the work was dropped or we took the wrong row, we can’t tell, and we’re not going to guess. Same lesson either way: the later list wins.
Strikes, for the record. Nothing on the Tube touched the 18th. The RMT station-staff walkouts were October 4 and 6, and the RMT train managers’ 24-hour Chiltern strikes fell on Saturday, October 10 and Saturday, October 17, travel days rather than game day, with Chiltern running 93% of services on both and the normal number of trains in and out of Marylebone. The dispute, over whether East West Rail services keep a safety-critical second crew member with control of the doors, was unsettled as of October 17. If you’re planning a 2027 Wembley trip, Chiltern’s RMT dispute is the search to run before you book a Marylebone hotel.
Bag policy is the gotcha that catches American fans at Wembley. Wembley’s house rule is one bag per person no bigger than A4, 297mm by 210mm by 210mm, but for an NFL game the league’s clear-bag policy takes over: a clear plastic or vinyl bag up to 30.5 x 15.25 x 30.5cm, or a one-gallon freezer bag, plus a small clutch. There is no bag storage at the stadium, so a backpack you can’t carry in becomes a problem you solve on the street. The ground is cashless, card or contactless only, at every kiosk.
Tickets stopped being the hard part in London this year, which is new. The Jaguars ran the Wembley game themselves and were still selling it on October 17, the day before kickoff: adult seats £70 to £297 on the Level 2 sideline, £51 for under-16s. A face-value seat available the day before an NFL game in London would have been a strange sentence to write five years ago. AP, writing in the first week of October, had thousands of Wembley seats still unsold three weeks out. The October 4 game is the clearer tell. The NFL cut its remaining Colts-Commanders seats to £79, down from as much as £245, inside the last ten days, and the announced crowd still came in at 60,907 against a 62,850 NFL configuration. Eagles-Jaguars on the 11th went the other way and sold out fast, which AP credits to the Eagles. Matchup decides a London sellout now. The Jaguars have been coming here for a decade and carry the closest thing to a local fanbase, but an AFC South game a week after an Eagles sellout was a harder sell, and the ticket page showed it. Wembley still announced 82,497, a number the day-after recaps didn’t print but Pro Football Reference’s boxscore carries.
London is the expensive market and the soft one. PwC’s 2026 forecast, re-checked October 11, has London ADR (average daily rate, the industry’s price benchmark) at £193.50 with occupancy at 81.6%. PwC’s stated reason for that modest growth is the useful part if you’re booking: supply growth, “fewer event-linked compression nights” and travellers who push back on price. Compression is the trade’s word for a night when a whole market fills and revenue managers, the people who actually set hotel rates, stop discounting and start fencing. Even 82,497 at Wembley doesn’t compress London. The city absorbs these games. That’s how hotel pricing works on a sold-out sports weekend and why London is the exception to it. The 2:30 p.m. kickoffs help too. You’re back central by dinner with no late-night transit scramble.
Paris (played): Steelers 16, Saints 10, and why RER B was the route
The first regular-season NFL game in France went to Pittsburgh. Steelers 16, Saints 10 at Stade de France on Sunday, October 25, announced crowd 78,488. New Orleans were the designated home team, so they lost a home game in Paris, which is the sort of sentence this schedule produces. Aaron Rodgers threw the only touchdown, four yards to Darnell Washington. Chris Boswell kicked three field goals and Jaylen Warren ran for 101 yards. Pittsburgh went to 5-2, New Orleans to 2-5. The ticket side is the part worth filing: the NFL’s Paris page had the game on sale at face value into game week, nine adult categories from €91.22 (category 9) to €425.75 (category 1), child prices in categories 5, 6 and 8 from €55.80, all-in with fees. Paris sold like London did this year, face value still there in game week.
Stade de France sits in Saint-Denis, north of the city proper, and the stadium’s access page gives four rail options with its own timings. RER B to La Plaine–Stade de France: 4 minutes from Gare du Nord, 8 from Châtelet. RER D to Stade de France–Saint-Denis: 5 minutes from Gare du Nord, 9 from Châtelet. Métro line 13 to Saint-Denis–Porte de Paris: 16 to 25 minutes from the big central stations. And line 14, extended for the Olympics, to Stade de France–Pleyel: 10 minutes from Saint-Lazare, 18 from Gare de Lyon. The stadium sells no parking on event days and listed none at all for the NFL game, so there was no driving version of that trip.
What the lists said for Sunday, October 25. The RER B line’s own works page showed no daytime work on Saturday the 24th or Sunday the 25th between Gare du Nord and the stadium, which made RER B the call. RER D was the one to avoid from the north: Sortiraparis’s works bulletin for October 19 to 25 had it suspended between Creil and Stade de France–Saint-Denis on both days, the stretch beyond the stadium, so a fan coming in from Chantilly or the Creil side rode a replacement or changed to RER B. The bulletin listed nothing for line 13 that Sunday and carried no strike notice for the weekend. Two gaps, stated plainly: RATP’s own traffic page and Île-de-France Mobilités’ works page both refused our requests on October 19, so we read the bulletin and the RER B page rather than the operators’ lists, and no post-game service report has come our way to confirm or contradict it. The clocks went back at 3 a.m. that same morning, which is why a 9:30 a.m. ET kickoff landed at 2:30 p.m. in Paris rather than 3:30. That one is the trap to carry forward. Your phone handles the change; a pre-booked Monday airport transfer might not, so check that the time on that booking is local.
Where to sleep, for whenever France gets the next one. Stay central near an RER B stop. The Gare du Nord and Châtelet corridors are the direct shots, and the 10th and the Marais sit on both. Line 14 opens Saint-Lazare and the Opéra end as a second corridor. Saint-Denis itself is not a neighborhood to build a trip around, and almost nobody did; treat the stadium as a 20-minute errand. One gotcha the stadium publishes that Wembley doesn’t: Stade de France runs a free left-luggage point to the right of each gate for items that can’t go in, so a backpack is a solvable problem here rather than a street problem. Read the prohibited-items list before you pack it anyway.
Budget honestly for the next one. Paris was running the hottest hotel market on this list; CoStar data showed the city posting a record March 2026 ADR over €350 during event weeks, and while a regular October Sunday wouldn’t price like that, central Paris rarely dips cheap in fall conference season. Paris was the splurge trip of the nine. Of the three cities still to come, Madrid is the cheapest bed by a distance.
Madrid (Nov 8): the value play in Europe
Madrid proved itself last November: 78,610 at the Bernabéu for Dolphins-Commanders, the first NFL game in Spain, a bigger crowd than the Clásico drew three weeks earlier. The 2026 edition, Bengals at Falcons on Sunday, November 8, has been on general sale since July 9, and the NFL’s Madrid page still said tickets on sale now when we re-checked it on October 25, as did the league’s international-games index. Ten adult categories, €93.40 up to €438.75, all-in with fees, plus child seats at €66.15 in category 8 and €47.08 in category 10. With Paris played, Madrid is the only trip left you can buy into at face value: Munich’s page says unavailable and Mexico City went in an hour.
Here’s what makes Madrid the best European value. The Bernabéu isn’t in a remote stadium zone, it’s on the Paseo de la Castellana with its own Metro line 10 station, ten-ish minutes from the city center. And the market is cheap for a European capital: Spain’s national hotel ADR averaged a record €166 in 2025, with Madrid’s baseline months sitting lower still, roughly half of what central Paris charges. Stay in Sol, Chamberí, or Salamanca and everything, stadium included, is a short metro ride. Late-week flights, tapas at 11 p.m. after a 3:30 kickoff, and a hotel bill that won’t scare you.
Munich (Nov 15): sold out since July, so the edge is the calendar
Patriots at Lions at FC Bayern Munich Arena, better known as Allianz Arena. Game-day transit is a Munich classic: U6 toward Garching, off at Fröttmaning, about 16 minutes from Marienplatz, then the walk to the arena with 60,000 other people. Stay in the Altstadt around Marienplatz or in Schwabing and you’re on the U-Bahn spine already.
Munich’s hotel market is spiky in a specific, predictable way: it compresses violently for trade fairs (April 2025’s Bauma fair pushed city ADR up 59% to €190, per STR data) and settles back to a moderate baseline between them. Mid-November, weeks after Oktoberfest ends, is baseline season.
Correcting our own earlier read on this game: we previously called Munich the one city where tickets hadn’t gone on sale. That was wrong. The general sale opened July 10, and the NFL’s Munich page, re-checked October 25, still says tickets “are currently unavailable”, with the published adult bands having run €83.59 to €413.75. Kickoff is confirmed on the same page at 3:30 CET, 9:30 a.m. ET. The fan wave here dates to July. If you don’t have a ticket, the honest routes are official resale and the travel packages.
What still makes Munich workable is the calendar, and there’s one date every guide to this trip is missing. Electronica, the world’s biggest electronics trade fair, runs November 10–13 at Messe München, the same week as the game. Those dates are off electronica’s own site, re-checked October 25, and the same site counts more than 80,000 visitors from around the world at the 2024 edition. It is exactly the kind of event that puts minimum-stay controls and closed-out discount rates across the whole city. It ends Friday the 13th. The NFL crowd checks in as the electronics crowd checks out. So the play is specific: arrive Friday or Saturday, not midweek. A Monday-to-Thursday stay that week prices like a trade-fair room because it is one. Book the Saturday and Sunday nights refundable, keep them, and let the fair have the front half of the week.
We confirmed rooms for the Saturday and Sunday nights on October 26 at three places on the U6, the line that runs straight to Fröttmaning. AMERON München Motorworld in Freimann, a 9.0 on Booking from 3,379 reviews and two stops from the arena, had flex rates in the middle band that cancel free until 6 p.m. on arrival day, and the same hotel listed its electronica nights well above the game weekend. The ibis München Garching at Garching-Hochbrück, one stop north of the arena with the U-Bahn at the door, was the cheapest bed we would send you to, an 8.1 from 1,489 reviews in the budget band, and you get what you pay for, so read the recent reviews before booking. At the top, Hotel Bayerischer Hof in the Altstadt had suites only, while Rosewood, Mandarin Oriental and the Kempinski all showed no availability for those nights.
Mexico City (Nov 22): the reopening, and the shortest flights
The NFL returns to Mexico City for the first time since 2022, and it’s the debut event era of Estadio Banorte, the renovated stadium formerly called Estadio Azteca, fresh off hosting the 2026 World Cup. Vikings at 49ers, Sunday, November 22, 8:20 p.m. ET on NBC; NFL México’s ticket article lists it at 7:15 p.m. in the city.
Tickets are the problem now. General sale opened September 22 and El Financiero reported the game sold out inside an hour, with Ticketmaster’s queue telling buyers no seats were left. The NFL has no Mexico City page we could reach on October 25, and Ticketmaster México’s own help article for the game refused our request the same day, so that September 22 report is still the latest status we can stand behind. Face value had run from 2,108 to 11,656 pesos. The first presale, for American Express cardholders on September 14, put more than 300,000 people in the virtual queue. If you don’t hold a ticket you’re shopping resale, so price that before you price a flight.
The stadium is far south in the city. The transit play is Metro Line 2 to Tasqueña, then the Tren Ligero light rail to its Estadio Azteca station, five minutes from the entrance, all for pocket change on a rechargeable MI card. Tasqueña gets slammed on event days, so leave early. Stay where every first-timer should: Roma or Condesa for restaurants and walkability, Polanco for the upscale version, Coyoacán if you want to be closer to the stadium side of town. This is not a market that runs full. The city’s hotel association reported 56.5% occupancy for June 2026, a World Cup month, down from 58.5% the June before. For a U.S. fan this is also the cheapest flight of the nine by a mile, and the evening kickoff means one caution: have your ride home planned, because the post-game Tren Ligero crush and rideshare scrum are both real.
Rio de Janeiro (played): 72,792, and the beach filled
Ravens 34, Cowboys 31. Brandon Aubrey’s 23-yard field goal tied it at 31 with seven seconds left. Lamar Jackson hit Zay Flowers for 27 yards, got a timeout called with one second showing, and Tyler Loop made a 56-yarder as time ran out. The announced crowd was 72,792, which Diário do Rio called the biggest for any sporting event in Brazil this year. The NFL’s two São Paulo games each drew a little over 47,000.
The hotel read comes from HotéisRIO, the city’s hotel association, which published its game-weekend survey on September 24, three days before kickoff.
| Area | Occupancy |
|---|---|
| Leme and Copacabana | 95.72% |
| Ipanema and Leblon | 94.24% |
| Glória to Botafogo | 92.77% |
| Centro | 69.31% |
| Barra, Recreio, São Conrado | 60.09% |
| Citywide | 77.90% |
Citywide had been 73.58% in the association’s September 14 survey, so the last ten days added 4.32 points. These are pre-game booking figures. Re-searched October 29: the post-game coverage (Diário do Rio, September 28: 72,792 at the Maracanã, the biggest crowd at a sporting event in Brazil in 2026, and more than 10,000 foreign visitors from 67 countries by the mayor’s count) still quotes the September 24 survey, so there is still no post-game occupancy number and no published room-rate data for the weekend, and no price in this section.
We called Rio the same experiment as Melbourne and said the beach had the depth to stay cheap. Half of that held up. The city as a whole never compressed. In that survey more than one room in five was still open citywide. The beach is another matter. At 95%, the neighborhoods we told you to book were close to full, and a hotel that full has no reason to discount. Our read that depth would keep Copacabana cheap was too confident, and without rate data we can’t say by how much.
The crowd was mostly local, which explains some of the split. Diário do Rio reported that 88.3% of tickets were bought by Brazilians, and ClickBus saw searches for bus tickets to Rio run 200% above the week before. The visitors who did need a bed wanted the same strip of sand.
Transit ran differently from the usual matchday advice, and it’s worth keeping for the next one. MetrôRio ran 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. with extra trains, and Line 2 ran through from Pavuna to General Osório, which put Ipanema on the same line as the stadium. The city assigned stations by gate: Maracanã on Line 2 for gates A and B, São Francisco Xavier on Line 1 for gate C, São Cristóvão on Line 2 for gates D and E. The fare was R$7.90 each way.
The NFL’s agreement with Rio is for at least three regular-season games over five years, starting with this one.
Melbourne (played): 100,021
San Francisco 27, Los Angeles 7. Brock Purdy went 25 of 34 for 205 and three touchdowns. The Rams got stopped on the goal line in the third quarter and the 49ers answered with a 99-yard drive that finished in Deebo Samuel’s hands, which was the game. Stafford, 15 of 25 for 155, didn’t finish it.
The number to carry forward is the crowd: 100,021, the seventh-largest for a regular-season game in NFL history. The MCG sits in Yarra Park on the edge of the CBD, so Jolimont station is five minutes on foot, Richmond about 850 meters, and Flinders Street a 20-minute walk along the river. Every hotel in the CBD was a walk-to-the-game hotel, and they filled accordingly.
What the market actually did is the useful part. Early September is late winter in Melbourne, normally an off-peak shoulder with CBD averages near $128 a night. Visit Victoria had game-night CBD occupancy running 39 percentage points above its own earlier forecast, accommodation searches for September 10 to 12 up 90% year over year, bookings four times last year’s, and US flight searches for Melbourne up 150% for early September. The state put the whole thing at roughly $300 million.
The NFL calls Australia a long-term commitment and says it wants to be back at the MCG. No 2027 date is set. NFL.com reported that the AFL finals have the ground in early September next year and that the AFL declined to make room the way it did this time.
What three nights costs: the benchmarks we can source
An earlier version of this table printed a dollar range for each city. Those were our planning estimates and we can’t source them line by line, so they’re gone. Below is the published benchmark for each of the five hotel markets this schedule touches, in local currency, with where it came from. ADR is the average rate paid across every hotel class in a market, so a central three-star will often come in under it and a four-star on a busy weekend over it. Checked September 29, 2026, with the London row re-checked against PwC on October 11. The other rows still carry their September attributions and their original source dates. None of the October 17, October 19 or October 25 updates re-pulled any of these sources, so every number here is as of the date next to it.
| City | Benchmark ADR | What it measures | Three nights at that rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| London | £193.50 | PwC forecast, full-year 2026 | £580.50 |
| Paris | €351.64 | CoStar, March 2026, a Fashion Week month | €1,054.92 |
| Madrid | €143 | INE, Madrid province, March 2026 | €429 |
| Munich | €190.71 | CoStar, April 2025, the Bauma trade-fair month | €572.13 |
| Mexico City | none we could verify | Hotel association: 56.5% occupancy in June 2026 | n/a |
Paris and Munich are read from busy months, so treat both as the high side. Munich’s April 2025 figure was up 59.3% on the April before, which is what a trade fair does to that city and why the electronica dates above matter. Rio and Melbourne never got rows; the table was built on September 29 for the cities still to come. London and Paris have since been played, and their rows stay because both cities get NFL games again. The three you can still book a trip around are Madrid, Munich and Mexico City.
Split a double and the lodging line for a whole international NFL trip can undercut a domestic marquee weekend, where hotel-plus-ticket alone runs $1,400 or more per person. The flight is what you’re really buying.
Rentals: where they beat the hotel
Mexico City is an apartment-rental market as much as a hotel one. Inside Airbnb counts 26,294 Airbnb listings in the city, and CBC reported that almost half sit in Cuauhtémoc, the borough that holds Roma and Condesa. That is deep supply in exactly the neighborhoods you want. In London and Paris, a flat starts winning for groups of four-plus or stays of four nights and up, once cleaning fees stop dominating the per-night math. One caveat that applies to every European game on this list: rent central, not local. Wembley Park and Saint-Denis are both places where a flat by the stadium saves you one train ride on one afternoon, then charges you that ride back every other time you leave the door. Central Paris near an RER B stop, or London Zone 1 or 2 near a Jubilee, Metropolitan or Bakerloo stop, does both jobs.
Booking inside the last week changes the math, and none of the three games left is inside it yet. Madrid at two weeks is the nearest, which is the window where a rental is still a real option: free-cancellation terms for a November 7 arrival are open, so a flat and a refundable hotel room are genuinely comparable and you can hold one of each while the group makes up its mind. Around the start of game week that stops being true. Paris was the worked example of the other side. Most hosts’ windows for an October 24 arrival had already shut by the time the last week started, so a Paris flat booked after October 19 was effectively a non-refundable room while a refundable hotel rate still moved with your flight. Munich and Mexico City have more room again. One or two travellers, take the hotel every time. A crew of six splitting a flat in Chamberí or Salamanca, a few stops from the Bernabéu on line 10, is a different question and probably the better buy. Read the terms before you compare prices.
The usual caveats travel with you: add the cleaning fee before comparing, and read the cancellation terms, which are almost always stricter than a refundable hotel rate on an international trip with more ways for plans to break. Vrbo listings route through our partner rails; in Mexico City a lot of the inventory is Airbnb-only, and if that’s the honest pick for your crew, book it there.
When the fan wave hits each city
Hotel demand for these games moves in a wave, and the wave starts at ticket on-sale. The 2026 general-sale dates, re-verified September 29: Melbourne April 8, Wembley May 29, Rio June 9, Tottenham July 7, Madrid July 9, Munich July 10, Paris July 16, Mexico City September 22. Every on-sale converts thousands of maybes into fans who now need beds, and they book in the days right after.
Every city is now past its on-sale. What’s left to get ahead of is each city’s own calendar. The two debut markets show the range. Melbourne filled a 100,000-seat stadium and a CBD where every hotel was a walk to the gate. Rio drew 72,792 and filled the beach while Centro and Barra had room. London’s October ran all three ways at once. The NFL discounted its way to 60,907 on the 4th, the 11th sold out on day one, and Wembley on the 18th still had face-value seats the day before kickoff and announced 82,497 anyway. Paris landed where Wembley did: on sale at face value into game week, 78,488 through the gates. Mexico City is the newest wave, dating to September 22. Munich’s fans booked in July, but its trade-fair calendar matters more than its fanbase does, as above.
One more 2026 change worth knowing when you buy: the NFL moved its international games to all-in ticket pricing this year, so the price you see on Ticketmaster includes all fees. Budgeting got slightly less annoying.
The value verdicts
Best value in Europe: Madrid. INE’s €143 against CoStar’s €351.64 for Paris, a stadium with its own metro station, tickets still listed on sale on October 25, and last year’s 78,610 says the atmosphere is proven.
The one you can still walk into: Madrid, November 8. The NFL’s Madrid page listed tickets on sale on October 25, ten adult categories from €93.40 to €438.75 with fees in, and child seats down to €47.08 in category 10. It’s the only one of the three left where that sentence is true. Metro line 10 has a station at the Bernabéu, roughly ten minutes from the center, so the hotel filter is any central neighborhood on or near that line. Two weeks is enough runway to book refundable and re-shop it twice.
Changed since we first wrote this: Mexico City. It was our best-value pick when tickets were still to come. They sold out in an hour on September 22. Price the resale ticket first, because it now decides whether the trip is a value at all.
The splurge was Paris, for the hotel bill, and it will be again whenever France gets another one. If you bleed Jaguars teal, London was a two-week residency this year: a 57-yard walk-off kick won the first week, a 49-yard one lost the second.
Whichever city, the play doesn’t change. Refundable room, central neighborhood, train to the game. Munich sold out in July, so there the edge is the calendar: land Friday, after electronica clears on the 13th. Madrid was still selling on October 25, and that room can be re-shopped right up to the cancellation cutoff. Madrid’s is the nearest cutoff left on the list.
