The Bengals are looking into going international

Katie Blackburn says the team could have an international home at some point.

Bengals fans might have to share their team with another country pretty soon.

Katie Blackburn, the VP of the team, recently shared that the Cincinnati Bengals could have an international home at some point, saying, “We have not applied for an international market yet, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been looking into things.”

So what does that mean?

As Kelsey Conway of The Cincinnati Enquirer writes, it means that the Bengals would join the NFL’s global markets program and have at least a five-year term in which they own the rights to pursuing activities in a particular international market. What they do there would be similar to what they can currently do in their home market.

Right now, there are 14 international markets used by NFL teams. They are located in: Austria, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ghana, Mexico, New Zealand, Republic of Ireland, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

And there are 22 teams that have rights in those 14 countries. Naturally, the Pittsburgh Steelers have rights in two markets: Mexico and the United Kingdom.

Meanwhile, regardless of whether they have an international home or not, the Bengals will be playing abroad at some point in the next few years. They could face the Carolina Panthers in Munich, Germany this year, as the Panthers have a game scheduled there. We won’t know, though, until NFL schedules are released in May.

If the Bengals don’t play the Panthers in Germany this year, then the Bengals’ next international game will come in either 2025 or 2027.

This is because every NFL team must play an international “home” game once every eight years. And the last time the Bengals played a home game abroad was in 2019, when Andy Dalton and company were trounced by Jared Goff and the Los Angeles Rams. The loss dropped the Bengals to 0-8, and Zac Taylor benched Dalton two days later, on his 32nd birthday.