Australians love sport – but can the NFL win them over in debut Melbourne match?
An oval ball, in September, in Melbourne usually means just one thing – the business end of the Australian rules football (AFL) season.
But on Friday, at the unsportingly early time of 7am, 100,000 people will begin filing into the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) for a very un-Australian sporting spectacle – American football.
The LA Rams take on the San Francisco 49ers in their opening National Football League (NFL) fixture, the first time the country has hosted a meaningful, non-exhibition regular season game.
The match sold out months ago, with more than half the crowd expected to be people living outside the state of Victoria. On the official ticket resale site, a restricted view seat is priced at more than A$650 (£350/US$470).
“Walking down the street, it’s AFL finals week and you wouldn’t even know,” says Thomas McMillan, host of the NFL podcast Any Given Sunday Australia.
“It’s all NFL everywhere. There are bars that are nothing but 49ers bars or Rams bars. We have a Ram Tram getting around the district. When you’re in Melbourne and AFL isn’t visible, it shows how big this is at the moment.”
Kickoff at 10.35am local time on Friday may not be typical for local fans, but meets the demands of prime time US television schedules and their advertisers.
The league held its first international match in 2007, and over the past two decades the overseas matches have become a long-term strategy to attract supporters and their dollars.
Nine games outside the US are scheduled for the upcoming season, including three in London. But Melbourne is the furthest that players and US-based fans will have to travel.
“Obviously there are question marks when you hear you are playing in Australia,” 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey told a press conference this week.
“But it has been so cool… the food’s incredible, the coffee’s great.”
That caffeine reference was perhaps as much to the time zone, as nod to the city’s famous café culture.
Melbourne is a mind-warping 17 hours ahead of California where both teams are based, and much of the pre-match attention has been on the two teams and their contrasting approaches to trying to “beat” the jet lag.
For the 49ers, who arrived late last week, their players have had time to get over the long journey, adjust to the time zone, acclimatise and practice at a nearby stadium.
Controversially, the LA Rams are taking things to the other extreme, planning to arrive on Thursday morning local time on a charted Qantas A380 superjumbo, play on Friday, and get back to the US west coast shortly afterwards, in theory to prepare for their next match with minimum disruption to the player’s body clocks.
“Definitely it’s a gamble,” says McMillan. “If they don’t quite get things right after the 16-hour flight, you still might have that jet lag, even though you’re trying to avoid it.”
“And not everyone can sleep on planes,” says his co-host Danny Webb. “Whether you’re in first class, business class, whatever it is, you’re still on a plane.”
“And”, adds McMillan: “And they’re six foot six most of them, so it’s going to be even tighter seats”.
Despite it technically being a “home” game for the Rams, who bid for NFL marketing rights in Australia under the leagues Global Markets programme, this all means it is the San Francisco 49ers that have more of a presence around Melbourne this week.
And while most practice sessions have been behind closed doors, there have been player appearances at a rally for fans and an AFL match, while ex-stars turned up at that most Australian of traditions, the weekly fundraising “sausage sizzle” at the country’s most high-profile hardware chain.
American sports journalist Dontay Atkinson predicts this fan engagement will be reflected inside the stadium and that the MCG will be “heavily red” (the 49ers colour), accusing the Rams of doing “exactly jack squat to sell the NFL brand or connect with Australians”.
Writing on X he added: “Fly in, fly out, no contact. I’m sure the Aussies feel great about that snub.”
McMillan says he can understand the approach by the Rams, who are seen as contenders for the 2027 Superbowl.
“They’re looking at this as a game they need to win,” he says.
“We do feel a bit snubbed, and feel the 49ers are doing the right thing,
“But it is their job, so that’s where the Rams coaching staff has gone ‘nah, we’re taking this approach’.
“I just worry that they have missed the boat of ingraining themselves as the Australian team. It leaves it open for others, and the 49ers have really jumped on that.”
The LA Rams insist there has been no snub, though speaking to the BBC, the club’s Head of International Stephanie Cheng dodged the question of whether she would have preferred her players to have been in town this week.
“It’s really a culmination of more than four years of work,” she said. “It’s not just about game week. We have long term rights.”
Cheng says the Rams are the only NFL team with a membership programme for Australian fans, and that it has sent coaches into schools and communities to promote “flag football” – the non-contact version of the sport which will feature in the LA 2028 Olympics.
She also points to regular earlier visits by star players including running back Kyren Williams in March. This week its cheerleaders have visited US military bases in Australia before coming to Melbourne, and the franchise has installed a 22-yard floating football field on Melbourne’s Yarra River serving as a fan zone.
“From day one, when we’ve come to Australia, there’s been incredible enthusiasm,” Cheng said.
While no Australian players will be on the field on Friday, there are dozens playing US college football and a handful in the NFL.
Most are punters, kicking specialists tapped up after showing their prowess playing AFL or rugby league.
But it is the success of Jordan Mailata, an offensive left tackle with the Philadelphia Eagles, who in 2025 became the first Australian to play in, and win, a Superbowl that was a “major turning point in Australia’s fandom of the NFL ” says Webb.
“Seeing an Australian in what we’d called a skilled position and then winning a Superbowl. It doesn’t get better than that”.
Friday’s game is the first of three matches in Melbourne to be held over four years, under a contract between the NFL and the state of Victoria.
The league’s preference, says Gerrit Meier, managing director and head of NFL International, is to have annual games in Australia similar, to the way the game has grown in the UK.
“We’re working off the hypothesis that we need to make a commitment to a market,” he told Reuters.
And while many US-based supporters are not fans of the international fixtures, these games are here to stay, says Webb, and the hype and the sell-out crowd in Australia augurs well for it to become a long-term fixture,
“I had mates four years ago asking why are you doing an NFL podcast? It’s not a big sport here,” he said.
“And now every single one of those mates are asking me for tickets for the game.”
