American football first reached Real Madrid’s stadium in 1958, when two US Air Force base squads played after a Spanish league match. On Sunday, Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase took over the same address.
The Cincinnati Bengals and Atlanta Falcons met at the Bernabéu on November 8 for the NFL’s second regular-season game in Spain, with kickoff at 9:30 a.m. Eastern and the broadcast on NFL Network. Atlanta was the designated home team, an ocean away from Georgia.
A fast start
The opening exchanges were loud. Michael Penix Jr. found Charlie Woerner for a 1-yard touchdown to cap an 80-yard Atlanta drive, and Burrow answered almost at once with a 47-yard scoring strike to Chase. A Nick Folk field goal put the Falcons back in front before Burrow ran in from a yard out early in the second quarter.
The teams arrived in very different shape, the Bengals at 5-2 and the Falcons at 3-5.
The rare matchup inside the novelty
The NFL pitched this as a star showcase when it announced the game in May, and the history backs it up. Burrow and Chase had faced Atlanta only once before: in Week 7 of 2022, the quarterback piled up 481 passing yards and hit Chase for two of his three scores in a Cincinnati win. Falcons running back Bijan Robinson, the league’s leader in scrimmage yards last season with 2,298, had never played Cincinnati at all.
For the Bengals it was a third international trip after London in 2016 and 2019, and their first to Madrid.
How big was the first one
Last November’s debut gives the only benchmark Madrid has. The Miami Dolphins beat the Washington Commanders 16-13 in overtime in front of 78,610 people. Set against the stadium’s listed capacity of 83,186, that works out like this: 78,610 divided by 83,186 is about 0.945, so the crowd filled roughly 94.5 percent of the number the rebuilt stadium now lists.
The venue is no ordinary conversion job either. The rebuilt Bernabéu has a retractable roof and a €1.76 billion renovation behind it, and it has staged World Cup, European Championship and European Cup finals. It even served as a tennis practice venue this year, when its pitch was temporarily switched off and turned into a clay court during the Madrid Open.
Madrid’s slice of a bigger map
The league’s international slate is larger than it has ever looked to casual fans. Madrid is one of nine international games in 2026 across four continents, seven countries and eight stadiums, with Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro, London, Paris, Munich and Mexico City also on the list.
Ticket buyers in Madrid were capped at six seats per account, and the league moved its international games to all-in pricing this season, meaning fees are shown from the first screen.
The number to beat from last year is 78,610.
Further reading
Illustrative image. Image: Badefa, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
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