The NFL Season Opens on Wednesday With a Super Bowl Rematch and Nine Games Will Be Played Outside America

The 2026 NFL regular season starts on Wednesday 9 September, with the reigning Super Bowl champions Seattle hosting New England in a rematch of Super Bowl LX. The season runs to 10 January.

Nine games will be played outside the United States, a record. San Francisco meet the Los Angeles Rams in Melbourne in week one, the first NFL regular-season game staged in Australia. Pittsburgh play New Orleans in Paris in week six, the first in France. Baltimore play Dallas in Rio de Janeiro in week three, Cincinnati play Atlanta in Madrid in week nine, New England play Detroit in Munich and Minnesota play San Francisco in Mexico City, both in week eleven. London takes three games across weeks three and four, two of them hosted by Jacksonville.

The Melbourne fixture is the one that changes anything for viewers in Southeast Asia. Melbourne is two hours ahead of Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, which puts the game in daytime hours across the region rather than the small hours that domestic American kick-offs occupy.

Four rule changes take effect. Onside kicks may now be attempted at any point in a game rather than only in the fourth quarter, which removes the requirement that a team formally announce its own desperation by waiting. Head coaches may designate a sideline assistant to handle challenge flags. League officials may review flagrant acts for ejection even when no flag was thrown on the field.

The fourth is a repeat-offender provision. Three violations across five specified penalties - hip-drop tackles, horse-collar tackles, launching, hits on defenceless players and blindside blocks - now trigger an automatic one-game suspension. That is a meaningful shift, because it moves the cost of a dangerous technique from the play it occurred on to a player's availability weeks later.