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Kalyn Kahler
MADRID — Down a quiet side street near the Plaza de España, where a crew of workers was busy setting up the Miami Dolphins Fan Zone, Alvaro Medrano Medel tended bar and waited tables at Restaurante Sebas, his family’s place. The lunch crowd was rolling in for the hearty menu del dia — 14 euros for three courses and a drink.
Medrano Medel, 34, is the rare Spaniard who calls himself an NFL fan. He’s going to the first NFL game in Spain at Estadio Bernabeu with a group of four friends, who he says became interested in the league about six years ago when they started going to Madrid’s Hard Rock Cafe to watch the Super Bowl. He tries to watch NFL games every Sunday, or at least check the scores afterward.
The Dolphins aren’t his team (he chose the Minnesota Vikings because of their references in the TV show he referred to as «How I Meet Your Mother») but he says he’s impressed with the «giant screen» the club has put up in the plaza nearby. He says Sunday’s game (9:30 a.m. ET, NFL Network) has been talked about a lot in Madrid recently, despite the fact that the majority of his family and friends just don’t get his passion for the NFL.
«They don’t understand because it’s a sport that they have never seen,» he told ESPN, in an interview conducted in Spanish. «They don’t know anything about it.»
The cook at Restaurante Sebas stuck his head out from behind the kitchen wall covered in blue and yellow Spanish tile to add that he also knows nothing about Medrano Medel’s sport, and this opinion turned out to be representative of the average Spanish resident.
At the leafy Plaza de España, a young woman with a dark ponytail and black glasses stopped to take a picture of the large stage decorated with blue and orange Dolphins banners. Trucks beeped and scraped along the pavement as workers unloaded more equipment to build out several smaller platforms. By Thursday, this impressive set would be complete with a three-day schedule of programming to welcome Dolphins and NFL fans.
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«Ellos ganaron?» Did they win? The young woman sent in a text to her friends, along with the photo of the stage. She had never heard of this team from Miami, she didn’t know the game had yet to be played, and she didn’t know much at all about American football.
As Madrileños, tourists and business travelers passed through the plaza, many gazed in confusion at the construction. Five more asked ESPN a similar question. ¿Qué es esto? What is this?
Two jet-lagged Dolphins coaches strolled by with afternoon coffees to survey the setup, and asked themselves the inverse. Is anyone going to know what this is?
«Is this rugby?» asked an older woman passing by with her husband, on their way to see a movie.
The passersby who recognized the brand were in the minority.
Gustavo Herrera, a Dolphins fan from Venezuela who has lived in Madrid for eight years, said it’s difficult to be an NFL fan in Spain because he hasn’t been able to figure out how to watch a game in a long time.
«It’s not very visible here,» he said. «You have to search for the games on different platforms and dedicate yourself to it. And the time change is also difficult.»
¨Remember that Spain is 100% football-mad, it’s all about soccer, soccer and more soccer,¨ said Dolphins fan Alejandro Villarreal, who traveled to Madrid from Monterrey, Mexico, to go to the game.
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«Steve is a big, visionary thinker,» Garfinkel said. «We’re building a pretty robust database right now. We have an international soccer match where Colombia is playing Argentina, and we’re collecting data on people that are attending that event. Then we have a Bad Bunny concert, then we have tennis tournament, with [Spanish tennis player Carlos] Alcaraz playing tennis, then we have a Formula One race, where we have [Spanish driver] Carlos Sainz, and now we’re playing in Madrid, so we’re trying to tie all those things together in a synergistic way.»
Miami started off with rights to Spain, the U.K. and Brazil, and then added Mexico, Argentina and Colombia in 2024. The club now has marketing rights to six different countries, which is second-most in the NFL behind the Kansas City Chiefs and the Los Angeles Rams, who both have seven territories, and both have staked a claim on being the, «World’s Team.» The league average of 2.5 global marketing territories per club is well below the size of Miami’s portfolio;. 14 clubs have only one territory.
Of Miami’s marketing territories, it is the only team with rights in Argentina and Colombia. In the past year, the Dolphins have created two new international roles: a V.P. of international development and a Spain country manager, based in Madrid, and are hiring for two more country manager positions, in Mexico and Brazil.
«Miami is truly a gateway city, a global city, an aspirational city, and from that standpoint, it gives us a unique opportunity internationally that may be different for some other [NFL] markets,» Garfinkel said.
Jacksonville is the only team that receives ticket revenue when it plays abroad because the franchise has its own multiyear deal with the NFL and London’s Wembley Stadium to play games there regularly.
Garfinkel said the Dolphins are interested in entering into a similar deal to play more frequently in one of their global markets (Brazil, Mexico or Spain) and will continue to have conversations about that possibility with the league’s international committee.
«The markets around Latin America that we have in the global markets program, we’re invested into those markets now,» Garfinkel said. «We want to be there consistently, and to play games there is an important element of growing the brand there over time.»
Rafael De los Santos Navarro has only been working in his new role as the NFL’s country manager for Spain for five weeks, but he was already speaking to a room of about 50 members of the Spanish media at an NFL event Tuesday night.
«Let’s start by understanding why Spain was chosen,» De los Santos Navarro told the crowd.
Behind him, a presentation slide said: «Número de aficionados en España: 11.3 Millones» (Number of fans in Spain: 11.3 million).
«Many of you have asked me, are there really 11.3 million fans,» de los Santos Navarro said in Spanish, getting ahead of the elephant in the room, a giant number of supposed NFL fans that nobody in the Spanish media seemed to be buying.
«There are 11.3 million people that at some point have shown an interest in the NFL,» De los Santos Navarro continued. «Whether that is following the NFL directly, or watching the Super Bowl halftime show, everything that there is.»
This year’s halftime act, Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny, who raps in Spanish, was Spotify’s top-streamed artist for three straight years (2021-23) and was the third-most-streamed artist in 2024.
Per the NFL’s data, 1.3 million of the 11.3 million Spanish NFL fans are defined as «avid» NFL fans. Mexico, in comparison, the league’s biggest international market, has 39.9 million fans and 11.5 million avid fans.
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Meier said that Spain had three qualities the league seeks in a market: «High sports affinity, high media consumption, and a young base of socially engaged audiences.»
In October, the league entered into an agreement with a new ¨free to air¨ broadcast partner, Mediaset España, so Herrera should have an easier time watching NFL games, and the NFL is now building a Madrid office, for which de los Santos is hiring a team of three more staffers.
His love for football began when he had to play emergency kicker for his high school team in Bend, Oregon, while studying there as an exchange student in 1990. His first NFL game in person was a Dolphins game in the early 2000s and he never thought then that he’d be working for the league one day in Spain.
After the league’s presentation, Dolphins cheerleaders and mascot paraded through the crowd and servers passed out buffalo wings , mini hot dogs and tacos decorated with American flag toothpicks — and a Dolphins-colored cocktail, bright turquoise with orange salt on the rim. The league handed out custom jackets printed with the NFL’s shield and «2025 MADRID GAME.»
«There’s a lot of uncertainty and curiosity about what will happen, given that it’s a relatively unknown sport with little visibility,» said Manuel Merinero, editor for Spanish newspaper ABC and skeptical attendee at the NFL’s Spanish press event. «This game and this event will show us if it marks a turning point for growth.»
De los Santos Navarro said the broad base of Spanish NFL fans watch the Super Bowl halftime show once a year, and, «evidentemente aquí tenemos mucha room for improvement.»
Despite not having won a playoff game since 2000, the Dolphins were the sixth-most searched NFL team by people outside of the United States during the 2023 and 2024 NFL seasons.
Miami (3-7) caught a break in Week 10 and flew to Madrid on a victory Monday after beating the powerhouse Buffalo Bills, 30-13, a week after general manager Chris Grier and the Dolphins made a mutual decision to separate.
In three of their six global marketing territories (Spain, Mexico and the U.K), the Dolphins are battling to be the NFL team of choice with none other than the dynasty-building Chiefs, who have played in five of the last six Super Bowls, and won three of them.
And Kansas City was the only team this season that was eligible to market itself– and did — in the full slate of international games (Brazil-Ireland-United Kingdom-Germany-Spain) because they hold rights to five of the six markets, and played in the game in Brazil.
«In Mexico, no one rooted for Kansas City for years and now there are Chiefs events,» Lopez, the Dolphins fan from Mexico says. «Before that, it was the Patriots. Now, nobody cheers for the Patriots in Mexico, and so it goes. The team that is winning gets the most fans. But a team that keeps losing, losing, losing, it’s difficult to get new fans.»
«I like the big teams,» says Rivas, the NFL RedZone viewer from Barcelona. «Bills, Chiefs, Niners. When you see Titans, Panthers, the level goes down and it’s not as fun anymore.»
Dolphins V.P. for international development Felipe Formiga and Garfinkel both emphasized that the first priority is to win this game in Madrid, but said that the team’s disappointing recent performance hasn’t affected their marketability in Spain.
«The way the international market reacts to a season or to a game is very, very different,» Formiga says. «It’s a truly American football celebration moment. So it’s a moment for all the fans of the NFL to have the opportunity to experience, in this case, for the first time ever, an American football game in their country.»
Formiga describes his job as «a lot of firsts,» like holding the first Dolphins youth flag football clinic in Spain this past summer (they will host two more flag football clinics this week in Madrid). He said the biggest hurdle to growing the team’s brand in Spain is «the education process that’s involved in every single conversation» with potential international partners. «When you try to pitch something and people do not understand exactly the value or the proportion or size of what you’re representing,» he says.
Meier said the league will have a long-term presence in Spain, but «there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know.»
«This is not a marketing program that has been around for 10 or 15 years,» Meier said. «So you go in, you have a certain expectation. Some stuff works, some stuff doesn’t, and the clubs are going through the same learning processes.»
The NFL hasn’t announced a further commitment to playing games in Spain but Meier and O’Reilly both said they expect the market to grow like the U.K. and Germany did.
«When we first went into the U.K. many years ago, you’ve seen the maturation of the fan base, and I think you’ll see that even more quickly within Spain,» O’Reilly said.
But for now, at the Plaza de España, NFL fans like Martin Rivas, from Girona, Spain, said he watches RedZone every week. Sometimes his youngest daughter will watch with him for a bit, but «the games are long,» he said.
Rivas doesn’t have any friends or family who are interested in the NFL. «Soy único,» he said. I’m the only one.
