Rams to host 2026 international game in Australia – San Bernardino Sun

The Rams will be going down under in 2026, hosting an international game in Melbourne, Australia, the NFL announced Wednesday.

The game, which will be the NFL’s first played in Australia, will take place at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, which can hold over 100,000 spectators.

Speaking at a press conference Wednesday in New Orleans ahead of the Super Bowl, NFL Executive Vice President of Club Business and League Events Peter O’Reilly said that, while scheduling still needs to be finalized, the expectation is the Melbourne game will be played in Week 1 of the 2026 season. This would allow teams an extra week to make the flight to Australia and adjust to the time difference – 19 hours ahead of Los Angeles.

“Australia is a really important market for the NFL globally,” O’Reilly added. “It’s a passionate nation of sporting fans, a passionate sporting culture with nearly seven million fans of the NFL.”

The Rams’ opponent for the game has yet to be announced.

The Rams have been building toward a potential home game in Australia since 2022, when the NFL awarded international territories to different teams as home markets to build fan engagement with marketing and commercialization. The Rams were the lone team assigned to Australia at the time, though the Philadelphia Eagles have since been granted the same rights in the country.

“As soon as this opportunity came about, we were the first to raise our hands and say, ‘We want to play in that first game in Australia,’” Rams president Kevin Demoff said Wednesday. “We’ve always wanted to be the team of Australia, the team of the Asia-Pacific continent. … This was always a vision of how we can go play abroad in a meaningful way and really go open the doors in the next country.”