RIO DE JANEIRO — Sitting at home in this sun-soaked Brazilian metropolis, Flavia Ponce de Leon was daydreaming again of that distant, magical place.
Ponce de Leon — who has covered the walls of her living room in green and gold Packers gear, tattooed the team’s G logo on her arm and named her cat for former linebacker Clay Matthews — is far from the traditional Cheesehead. She doesn’t speak any English. She has no history in Wisconsin. And she was born, raised and lives in Brazil, the nation that gave the world Pelé and his Beautiful Game, that has won five World Cup soccer titles, where families welcome newborns with infant-sized soccer jerseys and the only football most anyone has ever loved is futebol.
But now, Latin America’s largest country is falling for another football — the American variety — and, in the process, reorienting its longtime sports identity.
In the past decade, the number of Brazilians who consider themselves fans of the National Football League has quadrupled from 10 million to more than 41 million, according to national survey data released this month by the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics. Competitive American football teams have sprouted across the country, even in remote corners of the Amazon rainforest. There are football YouTube channels, NFL sports blogs, fan sites, incessant commentary and analysis — all in Portuguese.
Even the familiar marital spat, once heard only in North American households, is now surfacing here, too.
“My wife doesn’t understand it and doesn’t like it,” Rômulo Haubrick, 32, another Packers fan, said with a sigh. “It’s a fight every Sunday. She says, ‘You’re going to spend the entire day in front of the TV watching football?’”
Brazil, now the NFL’s largest market outside North America, is eager to broadcast its new and growing love for American football to the world. On Friday, it will become the first country in South America to host a regular season NFL game, a matchup between the Packers and the Philadelphia Eagles at 48,000-seat Neo Química Arena in São Paulo. Tickets for the event sold out in just two hours.
The NFL has already played games in London, Mexico City, Munich and Frankfurt, Germany. But “the next market” is Brazil, NFL executive Peter O’Reilly said.
“You see this passion for the game there — the level of knowledge, the affinity for the game, the social media conversations going on,” he said. “We are seeing growth around the world, but Brazil is a shining example.”
The NFL, O’Reilly said, is making a long-term commitment to Brazil: “This is not just one game for us.”
How American football wooed this soccer-mad nation is a story of social change in a globalized and interconnected world where sporting interests are less bound by nationality and geography. ESPN Brasil seeded interest here in 1991, when it started airing NFL games, and boosted it in 2007, with “The Book Is on the Table,” a program to help demystify what can seem a confounding game of arcane rules and customs. Then social media provided niche online communities to fans.
An additional factor? The man known here as “Gisele’s husband.”
“Tom Brady married [Brazilian model] Gisele [Bündchen], and suddenly there were all of these stories about them,” said Pedro Monteiro, whose agency Effect Sport represents the NFL in Brazil. That marriage, he said, before it ended in 2022, drew many Brazilians to the NFL. “Brady was a star, and Giselle was one of the most important figures in Brazil.”
From there, said Marcel Dantas, who runs the Brazilian League of American Football, it was “social contagion.”
“They started to root for the Eagles or the Packers or the Kansas City Chiefs,” he said. “But how many of them have been to Kansas City? Almost none.”
No team is more popular in Brazil than the Packers. According to a study performed by Effect Sport, they have attracted the support of 12 percent of all NFL fans in Brazil — netting more fans here than perhaps in Wisconsin.
“Love at first sight,” said Haubrick, who lives in Rio. “I’ve never been to Wisconsin. I want to go next year. … I also love the Milwaukee Bucks and the Milwaukee Brewers.”
His father, he said, an ardent fan of Rio’s Flamengo soccer club, has professed only confusion at his son’s passion.
“He said it’s very difficult to understand, just a lot of people hitting each other, and too many commercial breaks,” he said. “He always changes the channel.”
For Brazil’s Packers zealots, the rapture comes Friday.
Paulo Chagas, 34, who lives in the oceanside city of Recife, learned of American football as a teenager through the Madden video game series. What won him over to the Packers, he said, was first the quarterbacking majesty of longtime Packer Aaron Rodgers. Then he started reading about Wisconsin — the “opposite” of everything he grew up with: rural, cold, far from the ocean.
It sounded incredible.
“It’s my dream to visit,” he said.
But most of all, he was enamored by the team’s organizational structure. Alone among NFL teams, the Packers are a publicly held nonprofit owned by a half-million shareholders. The structure is unique in North American major league sports — but not in Brazil’s soccer culture. Flamengo, arguably Brazil’s most famous club, has a similar setup.
“The Brazilian people like collectives,” Chagas said.
That sealed it: “Amor sem volta,” he said. Love of no return.
He never imagined the NFL would play here. Or that the game would feature his Packers. And if that lightning struck, would he get tickets? No way.
But somehow, it’s all happening. When he secured his tickets, he said, he “became emotional. … I got goose bumps.”
Ponce de Leon bought two tickets from a friend for about $600. She’s expecting a religious experience. After years of interacting with other fans only online, she said, she will finally be able to unite with “my people.” She expected a large and boisterous reception for the green and gold.
“The NFL is now seeing us,” she said.
