Make It Personal: NFL’s International Player Pathway Program

The NFL receives a lot of praise for hosting regular season games abroad.

Global competitions have turned into SuperBowl like events for the host country, a gift for local fans and an opportunity for international travel for those visiting. 

I know because I’ve been to the London Games and the Madrid Game. 

But the NFL’s internationalization plan is marked by a commitment to increasing pathways for international athletes to compete at the collegiate and professional level. 

Because if you wanna go global, you gotta make it personal.

Let’s walk.

Last week, the National Football League announced its International Player Pathway (IPP) Class of 2026, featuring 13 athletes representing 10 countries around the world. Founded in 2017, the International Player Pathway program identifies global talent and prepares them to compete for an opportunity to earn an NFL roster spot as a free agent or through the NFL Draft. For many IPP players, the journey starts on a club's practice squad.

"The IPP program is a key component of the growth of our game globally, providing a pathway for these elite athletes, a number of whom have gone on to achieve tremendous success in the NFL and beyond. We wish the Class of 2026 the very best of luck as they get to work next month and look forward to following their progress in the new year." - NFL Director of International Football Development Patrick Long.

On the surface, the IPP is worth celebrating. It reflects the continued globalization of American football and the growing visibility of international athletes on one of sport’s biggest stages. 

The geographic composition of the cohort is particularly telling. 

Five athletes are from Nigeria, while four come from Australia, Samoa, and New Zealand. These regions are increasingly central to the NFL’s international strategy. 

In 2024, the NFL Africa program expanded to Nigeria. In 2026, the NFL will host a regular-season game in Melbourne after recently opening the NFL Academy: Asia-Pacific. Nigeria , Australia, and New Zealand are also part of the NFL's Global Markets Program. Together, these moves point to a coordinated approach to talent development, market expansion, and athlete mobility.

The IPP has produced measurable results. Since its launch in 2017, 70 international players have signed with NFL teams, including 22 IPP athletes who are currently on NFL rosters. Just last week, Kicker Charlie Smyth (IPP alum) signed a new three-year deal with the New Orleans Saints. For IPP athletes, the program represents access, opportunity, and the realization of dreams otherwise deferred. 

Charlie Smyth - IPP Alum and current New Orleans Saints Kicker

Their successes matter and they deserve recognition.

But success at the top of the pathway often obscures what happens along the way.

As such, the IPP invites deeper examination.

The program functions as more than a standalone initiative. The IPP is part of a coordinated mobility system that links global scouting networks, centralized training, immigration sponsorship, labor rules, and roster mechanisms to determine who can move, for how long, and under what conditions. 

Internationalization is operational, governed, and highly structured.

This reality raises important questions. 

1. What happens to athletes who do not make an NFL roster or practice squad? 

2. How are NFL player development and support staff positioned to guide international athletes’ transitions beyond securing housing and performance evaluation?

3. Who ultimately bears the risk of the IPP pathway?

   
   

I ask these questions as an educator-entrepreneur and PhD candidate who believes internationalization should be rooted in justice, reciprocity, and care. Mobility is never just about movement. It is shaped by institutions, timelines, policies, and people who enable and constrain who gets to move, for how long, and toward what outcomes.

While the league benefits from global reach, new markets, and expanded fan bases, the personal and professional risk is absorbed almost entirely by the athlete. 

Immigration status, sponsorship timelines, and eligibility to remain in the United States function as quiet but powerful forms of control. These dynamics are not unique to the NFL. They are familiar to anyone working with international students and athletes across higher education and college sport.

The racial dimensions of this mobility also warrant attention.

The concentration of African athletes in the IPP reflects long-standing patterns in global sport, where Black bodies are highly valued for performance while often navigating systems with fewer protections and less long-term security. These dynamics are intensified for Black international athletes, who often navigate U.S. sport systems with fewer institutional protections, less familiarity with immigration structures, and limited access to long-term security. These realities are seldom named in celebratory announcements, but they shape lived experience and career outcomes nonetheless.

These dynamics do not stop at the professional level.

College sport operates within the same global mobility ecosystem.

The IPP is part of a broader reorganization of global sport pathways, one that colleges are already embedded in. The recent partnership between the Big 12 Conference and the NFL, which explicitly cites global growth, athlete mobility, and international markets, makes that connection abundantly clear. 

Because the NCAA is one of the most relied-upon entry points as a pathway to professional sport.

Yet many NCAA programs depend on informal and decentralized infrastructure, leaving international college athletes to navigate immigration rules, career transitions, and post-competition futures on their own. This raises the question whether our institutions have a clearly articulated support system for international athletes beyond recruitment and eligibility. 

The IPP does offer an important contrast. 

The IPP shows what internationalization looks like when mobility is deliberately integrated into institutional structures. NCAA programs do not need to replicate the NFL’s model. However, they do need to reckon with the reality it exposes for its existing structure – a structure that is not ready nor sustainable for the proliferation of international athletes who will enter U.S. higher education in the near and distant future.

For institutions committed to internationalization through sport, I offer the following reflection questions: 

• What systems and structures are you building? 

• Who bears the risk within them? How do you know?

• Who truly benefits when your sport goes global?

  
  

Similar moves across professional sport, including recent NBA-FIBA developments, reinforce that global pathways are becoming more formalized.

Walk With TFB partners with institutions to design and implement equity-centered international athlete development models across both professional and collegiate sport.

The future of sport is global.

It’s happening. We walking! 

TFB