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The NFL International Series will expand into Germany later this year, with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Seattle Seahawks set to face off in Munich in November. To say that fans are already excited about that game would be an understatement.
Not only did the contest at the city’s Allianz Arena sell out within minutes, the league would have been able to fill a lot more seats than the 75,024 available — A LOT more.
According to Alexander Steinforth, head of NFL Germany, three million requests were processed. That would be 40 Allianz Arenas worth of fans.
“We were able to anticipate it a bit in advance due to the approximately 600,000 registrations for the presale in the past weeks,” Steinforth told German news outlet Ran. “At the peak, however, there were about 800,000 people in the virtual queue at the same time.
“Ticketmaster told us afterwards that they could have sold around three million tickets. This level of demand — whether for sporting events or concerts — is usually only seen at the Super Bowl. So, this advance sale for the NFL’s German game has once again exceeded all expectations.”
Steinforth added that the event will possibly go down as the biggest in terms of ticket requests that Germany has seen within the last few decades.
Of course, the hype led to some pretty long waiting times for fans, who started to share their respective spots on the waiting list on social media after the sale began earlier this week. One of those posts in particular seems to confirm Steinforth’s statements that literally hundreds of thousands were interested in the game:
So hab ich mir das vorgestellt ... PS: Symbolbild der Ticketmaster Warteschlange für das erste NFL Regular Season Game in München pic.twitter.com/jFBM2kBXIw— René Bugner (@RNBWCV)
The message shared through this screenshot translates as follows:
You have a spot on the waiting list
As soon as it is your turn, you will be forwarded to ticket selection.
People, who are ahead of you: 1,998,120
“Unfortunately, we couldn’t do anything about the long, virtual queues. That’s more a sign of how much people were looking forward to it,” Steinforth said about the mostly unfulfilled requests.
While a vast majority of fans will not be able to attend the Buccaneers-Seahawks game, they will get more chances in the coming years. The league will hold another regular season game in the city of Frankfurt in 2023 and eventually plans to make international contests in Germany an annual occurrence.
Whether those games will have the same hype remains to be seen. For now, however, the NFL can be quite happy about the early welcome it has received — something that probably cannot be said about the roughly 2,925,000 fans who were unable to buy tickets.
