With the caption “Bolting up in São Paulo”Los Angeles Chargers announced five days ago watch party This Thursday and Friday in two bars of Vila Madalena, Bohemian neighborhood and hipster of São Paulo.
The expression used in the profile of NFL Brasil on Instagram refers to aggressive expansion, something that the US League has done in the country. The second Sao Paulo Game, including Charges and Kansas City Chiefs, at Arena Corinthians, marked the apex of a digital work for a decade ago.
In 2015, when Effect Sport became NFL’s official agency in the country, 400,000 Brazilians followed the league’s global Facebook page. Still, organic engagement went from one million, placing Brazil in the top 5 global considering this metric.
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The following year, the first profiles in Portuguese on Instagram and X (former Twitter) emerged. Then came Tiktok and Youtube, raising the digital base to 5 million fans and 10,000 annual posts. During this period, Brazilian Instagram was the first outside the US to beat 1 million followers.
This impulse via social networks and the formation of digital communities created a multiplier effect. In an interview with the column, Pedro Rego Monteiro, CEO of Effect, said the base should jump from 38 million in 2024 to 45 million in 2025. Ten years ago, it was only 3 million.
The study by Ibope Repacom last year already showed that 35% of the Brazilian population was a fan of football (considering both interested and very interested), which equivalent to 41 million people. This number reflects a significant growth of 310% compared to 2014, indicating that the sport has gained 31 million new fans in the last decade.
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Local partnership as an expansion engine
In 2024, The Athletic published a harmful and detailed explaining how the NFL strategy in Brazil depended on the intentional cultivation of a hitherto marginal scenario, capitalizing a niche passion that few saw as an opportunity.
The article clipped up to analyze the League’s decision to hire Effect Sport precisely to develop and methodically expand the fan base in the country.
Sport’s nationalization strategy supported by a local partner in the third largest global NFL market consolidates the league’s globalization plan.
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One helps illustrate this logic. Leaked excerpt from Ken Belson’s book, reporter for New York Timeshe quotes a speech by Commissioner Roger Goodell after the LVIII Super Bowl.
“We are not competing with NBA or MLB. Our competitors are Apple and Google.”
The phrase synthesizes the unlavod war between traditional alloys and technology giants, which see sports as the last border of emotional connection in a fragmented attention scenario. Protecting these territories has become an existential question.
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From this year, NFL officially established an office in Brazil, with an initial team of four professionals.
At the same time, the League has expanded its global market markets program. In the Brazilian scenario, Detroit Lions and Philadelphia Eagles-this last protagonist of the first league game in the national territory-joined Miami Dolphins and New England Patriots as franchises with trade rights to develop brand operations and direct engagement with local fans.
Fan activations and experience
With the local presence strengthened and a growing fan base, the game week in Sao Paulo requires special attention to the fan’s real experience.
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In addition to the Watch Party of Chargers, Effect Sport is promoting the game with activations and satellite events. The opponent, for example, will have Chiefs House, a 500sqm two -story space in high pines that will host events on Thursday and Friday. The place offers an immersive experience in the team’s history.
The agency also conducts OOH media campaigns and all the creative of social networks for NFL Shop, which installed one at Morumbi mall. In addition, Effect connected artist Kobra to the League to produce a gable in the state capital.
In Rio de Janeiro, the patriots installed a Field Goal open to the public between Tuesday and Wednesday at Barra da Tijuca beach.
These activations materialize what Marcelo Paiva, director of content and media at EFFECT, defines how “Bring the teams as a spearhead of expansion”. In an interview with the column, he pointed out:
“It’s a movement that puts the franchises on the front line. The fact that they are more present strengthens the link with the fan and helps push it into the funnel.”
Local sponsors on the rise
Today, the NFL mark in Brazil talks to a high purchasing audience: A/B classes represent almost 50% of fans, while ABC reaches 90%. It is exactly this profile that attracts the seven regional sponsors closed by Effect in the last two years.
Unpublished data from the Ibope Repacom, released last week, show that football fans in the country are the ones who trust the most sponsor brands among all sports: 79% declare confidence, 27 points above the national average.
In 2023, XP paved the way by closing the first NFL regional agreement in the country. For Monteiro, it was a crucial movement to signal other players than Brazil, though less mature than markets like Mexico or the United Kingdom, had real potential.
Then came BRF, Refit, Mars, KFC/Pizza Hut and RAM from Brazil.
“When we started in 2015, it was almost impossible to set up a meeting with brands,” recalls Monteiro.
Earlier this month, Jack Daniel’s entered the group, and now adds to an ecosystem that includes Globo as a media partner.
Most contracts last three years and include rights to NFL intellectual properties: use of images of players, teams, super bowl, points of sale, internal activations and preference in media partnerships.
Globo enters the game
Last Tuesday, the homepage of Globo Esporte stamped the engagement of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift. The announcement took over the networks a few hours after Globo confirmed its new contract with NFL, which includes Friday’s duel in Itaquera.
Under the new agreement, Sunday Night Football will be shown on SporTV and GE TV. The station also secured both Sunday afternoon games, the Thursday Night Football and the seven international matches of the season and the national conference playoffs. The Super Bowl will be alternated with ESPN, which has lost three of Sunday’s five games.
Negotiations occurred directly between Globo and the NFL summit in New York. Effect has acted as a facilitator, providing strategic insights about the Brazilian market in recent months.
Until then, the agency had brokered the first agreement between League and GloboEsporte in 2022: a content focused on content, not transmission.
As at the beginning of the month, Globo takes up a fragmentary strategy that dates back to 2006, when Bandsports and ESPN divided NFL rights in the country. The difference now is timing: the league comes along with the launch of GE TV, accelerating one that uses YouTube as a free showcase and the Globo ecosystem as a distribution and monetization hub.
The goal is to saturate all channels.
Youtube and global logic
If in Brazil Globo will steal the spotlight, in the world this role will fit the YouTube.
Adam Kelly, president of IMG, told August that we lived a “golden age of sport”, driven by Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google.
“These are the places where you want the sport to be in the next five to ten years,” he said.
According to Kelly, Sao Paulo Game will be the NFL game with the largest audience in history, “because it will attract a global audience never seen before.”
For its first exclusive NFL broadcast, YouTube climbed creator Destroying, a former university player with 6.3 million followers, as a side reporter. He will be next to Rich Eisen and Kurt Warner, while Kay Adams, Cam Newton and other names make up the studio.
According to The Athletic, the idea of Youtube is to have a pre-game in a “dynamic podcast format.”
Next Frontier: Global Audience
As pointed out in the study by Two Circles, the NFL moves alone US $ 23 billion annually, leading a select group of sports properties that concentrates 96% of the $ 170 billion generated by the sector in 2024. The data reinforces what I already pointed out: the power of intellectual property (IP) as an economic engine of sports.
Two Circles also reveals that in aggregate rights (centered in the league, not clubs), NFL dominates in isolation. The American model of centralization and collective monetization reaches its apex in the football league, which extracts value not only from the world’s ripe domestic market, but from a strategy that aims Dan Naylor called ““ an overall ecosystem of digitally native fans.
Transmitting the game in Brazil through YouTube is a piece of this logic. The platform has over 2.5 billion monthly active users and reduces geographical, economic and cultural frictions that other formats still impose.
The future of sports as a business – and as a media – will not only take place in ticket sales or marketing shirts. The game is now about building owner and global audience, turning passive spectators into engaged superfan.
In this scenario, Brazil can be both showcase and inflection point.
