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.
"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.
The Dolphins and the NFL know American football will never supplant the popularity of soccer in Spain, but the club hopes to be the NFL team of choice and to reach the average ambivalent Spaniard. They've held marketing rights in Spain since 2022, and have been hosting events there since. Spain was the first of the team's now league-leading four Spanish-speaking marketing territories, and the country is a key part of Miami's unique international growth vision: to be the NFL team for the Spanish-speaking world.
A Tuesday afternoon during their Madrid game week suggests the Dolphins have their work cut out for making sure that Medrano Medel and Herrera are no longer in the overwhelming minority.
The Dolphins are in Spain this week because Dolphins team president Tom Garfinkel made known to the league office two years ago that they were willing to sacrifice a home game to play internationally in 2025, and were specifically interested in Spain.
Garfinkel said the team first defined its international vision to be the team of the Spanish-speaking world when the league introduced its Global Markets Program (GMP) in 2022, which gave clubs the opportunity to apply for marketing rights to an international territory.
"Look, if we're going to do it, let's not put our toe in the water," Garfinkel told ESPN, describing the team's internal conversations at the time. "Let's go all-in and think about what this means long term to the brand and the game. Miami is a booming growth market. A lot of people are moving to Miami from Europe, from other places in the United States, from Latin America. That growth coupled with the international opportunity, it just made sense."
Some NFL teams map out a geographic area, others focus on just one country, but Gerrit Meier, the NFL's head of international, told ESPN that the Dolphins' vision is unique. "We haven't had [a team] say, "I'm committing to a language," Meier says.
With 486 million native speakers, Spanish is the second-most-spoken language in the world, and in Miami-Dade County, 66% of residents reported speaking Spanish at home on the 2024 American Community Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The league office doesn't sell the global marketing rights to clubs. It grants them based on the club's pitch on why it is interested in that particular market and how it plans to build brand awareness through fan engagement, events, commercial opportunities and NFL Flag development.
There are no limitations on where in the world teams can apply for rights, no limit to how many clubs can be in the same market (11 teams are in Germany, 10 in Mexico and nine in the U.K.), nor strict specifications for what the club is required to do in the market to be granted the five-year term.
By now, if you're thinking this whole conceit feels nebulous and a bit made-up, like the sale of air rights, it's because it kind of is. The GMP is mapping out hypothetical parameters for a dream world that doesn't exist yet, a future fiefdom of international football markets.
Meier said the league does have one concern: It wants clubs to invest similarly across each market "so they don't start diluting themselves or shifting money from one market to another,¨ Meier says, but that spending amount differs per club and market.
Going "all-in" in international development, as Garfinkel put it, is not a popular strategy leaguewide. Why would an owner invest in an undeveloped market with no clear or immediate payoff, especially when all 32 clubs share the international revenue generated from games played abroad?
Nineteen teams applied for territories in the first year of the GMP, but it wasn't until this year that all 32 clubs became participants in the program.
Garfinkel declined to share the specific dollar amount that the Dolphins have invested into their six GMP territories. "I can say it's in the millions annually," he said. "It's not a couple hundred thousand and it's not a million dollars. It's millions annually.
"It's a long-term investment. We believe this is something that is going to require some patience. It's going to require some vision, and it's going to require some consistency."
Dolphins owner Stephen Ross sits on the NFL's international committee, and under his stewardship, the team has a long history of playing in international games. Miami played in the league's first international series game in London in 2007, and has since played there four more times and in Germany in 2023.
Ross has several sports business ventures that cross continents, so taking his football team international has been a no-brainer. Ross owns Hard Rock Stadium, which will host the 2026 World Cup and has hosted international sporting events and concerts, and he owns two other international sporting events that occur on the Hard Rock Stadium property: the F1 Miami Grand Prix and the Miami Open tennis tournament. He is also the chairman and co-founder of Relevent, which brokers commercial rights for soccer brands worldwide.
"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.
According to the American Community Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2024, 55.3% of Miami-Dade County residents were foreign-born, with 92.8% of them from Latin America. Spanish was spoken at home by 67% of people at least 5 years old.
Garfinkel said the team's largest international fan base is in Mexico, a veteran international market that has hosted five games.
"México is a market that the NFL has already dominated," said Dolphins fan Edgar Lopez, who traveled to Madrid from Saltillo Coahuila, Mexico for the game. ¨There are so many fans, and here in Europe I think what makes it a little difficult is the schedule. ... I've spoken with [Spanish] people and many aren't very well informed. "
Meier knows the NFL is not a top-three sport in most international markets, and he describes the league's international goal in humble terms.
"There's no expectation that we will come in and break the ranks of the most endemic sport that we have, whether that's soccer, basketball, cricket, rugby," Meier said. "But we do believe that in a lot of markets, we have a fair chance to become the best-performing non-endemic sport."
In 2023, NFL owners voted to increase the slate of international games from four to up to eight per season, which requires each club to host an international game once every four seasons, an increase from once every eight seasons. When clubs play international games, they sacrifice a home game and lose that ticket revenue. All 32 clubs share equally in the international game profits, so the current setup doesn't reward internationally minded clubs like Miami to actually play abroad more often.
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.
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.