Giants sell themselves in Germany — where fans welcome them with open arms (and full mugs)

MUNICH — The chants rang out Thursday night at Hofbräuhaus, one of the world’s most famous beer halls: “Let’s go! Gi-ants!” and “Ziggy, zaggy! Ziggy, zaggy! Oi! Oi! Oi!”

The sprawling beer hall, which dates back to 1589 and boasts Mozart as one of its most famous (and steady) patrons — was packed wall-to-wall with Giants fans, and Germans and Americans alike, for a Munich welcome party. They raised their liters of lager toward the ornately painted, rounded ceiling.

Before sipping, they sang the traditional German toast to health: “Ein Prosit! Ein Prosit! Der Gemütlichkeit!” (A toast! A toast! To friendship!) A five-piece German band, complete with an accordion, played along — the soundtrack to the Giants’ first big night in their new home, as they sell themselves in Germany with a freshly minted nationwide marketing deal.

Giants decals covered almost every pillar in the Hofbräuhaus. Banners hung on the outside. Large stand-up posters of Giants players — defensive end Brian Burns here, quarterback Daniel Jones there — filled the main room’s corners. A Giants sign even hung above the exit, dwarfing a painting of Wilhelm I, a 19th century German king.

As fans stood on their toes to snap photos of former Giants Pro Bowl wide receiver Victor Cruz, a long-time Giants fan walked by, carrying a huge stein, now half full of beer. “I almost pulled my shoulder out!” said Rob Hoffmann, 67, who grew up in West Orange, N.J. He smiled. “But it’s getting lighter!”

As a kid, he sneaked into Giants games at Yankee Stadium. Now, here he was, with his favorite team, not far from the small Austrian town where his late father grew up. His eyes welled with tears as he tried to process it all. “Unbelievable,” he said.

Nearby, Benny Hellbruck marveled at the scene, too. He was one of the first eight members of the Big Blue Germany fan club, which now numbers 336. The Giants hooked him with their 2011 Super Bowl win over the undefeated New England Patriots because he loves underdogs. Now, here he was, so close to Cruz, who caught their first touchdown in that Super Bowl.

“It’s not real!” said Hellbruck, 35. “I have goosebumps. My heart is pumping.”

Thursday night’s scene underscores, in grand fashion, the Giants’ first big overseas mission — marketing themselves in Germany. While it won’t be easy, this country appears ready to welcome the Giants and the NFL with open arms. American football is already popular here, so winning over fans might not be as difficult for the Giants as it would be elsewhere.

The Giants are in Munich this weekend for an underwhelming — except for 2025 draft purposes — matchup Sunday with the Panthers, who are 2-7, just like the Giants. But the Giants’ long-term marketing goals in Germany — and the NFL’s desire to capture eyeballs and dollars — go far beyond just one game.

It’s all part of the league’s broader, years-long plan to aggressively globalize — and monetize — a sport that for years has thrived primarily in America, unlike the NBA, which has a more longstanding worldwide reach.

For it to work, teams like the Giants must win over fans in places like Germany, the United Kingdom and Brazil. That’s where the Giants, Jets and Eagles are playing this season.

Hellbruck, at least, believes the Giants have a great shot in Germany.

“I think they can go really big,” he said. “A lot of German people love New York. That is a dream city.”

This year, the Giants jumped into the NFL’s Global Markets Program for the first time — and landed international marketing rights in Germany. It essentially means they can sell themselves here as they do in their designated tri-state marketing footprint back home. (That’s why you see Giants-branded Miller Lite cans in New Jersey, but not North Carolina.)

The Giants view it as an enticing opportunity at this point in American football’s growth in Germany. It is now the second-most popular sport there, behind soccer, based on television ratings. Two years ago, when the NFL played its first regular-season game in Germany — Giants-Panthers is the fourth — it had passed the U.K. as the NFL’s largest European market.

Professional American football has had an on-and-off presence in Germany for more than 30 years, with teams like the Frankfurt Galaxy and Rhein Fire, teams in the Euopeans League of Football. In 2015, a new German free TV channel, ProSieben Maxx, started showing NFL games — and made the broadcasts fun and interactive, attracting younger fans by leaning into social media participation.

That laid the groundwork for the NFL’s long-awaited arrival with a regular season game in 2022 — and rolled out a welcome mat for the Giants and other NFL teams to market here.

“This is the time to do it,” said Giants practice squad fullback Jakob Johnson, who grew up in Stuttgart. “Germans are different from American fans. German fans are rain, snow, or shine. It doesn’t matter. They’re going to be at the stadium. They’re going to be singing their songs. They’re going to be jumping and putting off pyros [fireworks]. When Germans get excited about something, they take it to the extreme.”

Missionaries for the Giants

Long before taking over the Hofbräuhaus as their designated Munich beer hall for this weekend, the Giants laid an extensive foundation for their German marketing plan.

They set up German-language social media accounts — and posted splashy content with a heavy emphasis on star players like defensive tackle Dexter Lawrence and rookie receiver Malik Nabers since German fans surely aren’t interested in minutiae like the game-day inactive list.

They hired Markus Kuhn, their German former defensive tackle, as brand ambassador. They partnered with the famed Bayern Munich soccer club — whose stadium will host Giants-Panthers — and sent Kuhn to Oktoberfest in Munich. He shot video while squeezing into lederhosen, mingling with fans in one of the massive tents and drinking beer from a giant stein.

They saw a natural fashion connection between Germany and New York, so they invited five German fashion influencers/models to the opener against the Vikings. They attended the Giants’ season-launching fan fest, toured Manhattan and sat in a suite at the game. The influencers/models posted social media content from the trip that totaled 17.3 million views.

They launched a partnership with Starter in Germany to roll out a special Munich collection of attire that is available exclusively in the country.

The Giants even got a recurring spot on Germany’s biggest TV network, RTL — and not just because they worked out a deal for the channel to broadcast their opener.

RTL, the NFL’s German TV home, has an instructional football show aimed at kids — TOGGO Touchdown. The Giants got a segment on the show during which Kuhn hosts Football 101 clips filmed at the Giants’ training facility — how to run through drills, how the equipment and weight rooms work. Plenty of Giants logos made their way into the shots.

German kids — a key demographic for the NFL’s growth — might not have an Instagram account or be in an Oktoberfest tent. TOGGO Touchdown — which also airs on RTL’s YouTube account — lets the Giants reach them.

“No team had done that, where you’re getting in with a broadcaster and feeding them content at the ground level,” said Nilay Shah, the Giants’ senior vice president for marketing and brand strategy. “At the lowest [age] level, if you’re just a casual fan and you start seeing that NY logo, you start to build affinity.”

That’s the goal, for the Giants and the NFL, because more passionate fans — especially at a young age — eventually means more money.

The NFL launched its Global Markets Program in 2022. As of this season, 25 teams participate across 19 countries. Germany has 10 teams, tied with Mexico for the most.

“A lot of people are seeing the same things we’re seeing, in terms of the value that Germany has in growing the NFL — and how popular it’s getting,” said Russell Scibetti, the Giants’ vice president for strategy and business intelligence. “Yeah, there are 10 different teams, but a market of that size, I think every team is going to be able to carve out their niche.”

The U.K. and Austria are second, with six teams each. This year, four teams jumped into Germany along with the Giants — the Lions, Colts, Steelers, and Seahawks. They joined the Patriots, Falcons, Panthers, Chiefs, and Buccaneers there.

While there is plenty of demand for Germany, other teams are taking advantage of natural geographic and cultural connections. The Dolphins are in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and Spain. The Rams are in China, Japan and South Korea.

As for the Jets, they’re in the U.K. and Ireland. The Eagles — who have Australian standout left tackle Jordan Mailata — are in Australia, New Zealand and (oddly enough) Ghana.

Teams with international marketing rights have them for at least five years — and they almost entirely fund overseas marketing on their own, without help from the NFL.

During that time, they can operate just like they do in the United States, where the NFL prohibits teams from marketing outside their designated areas. The Giants have some overlap (with the Eagles in South Jersey and the Patriots in Connecticut), but they aren’t allowed in, say, Minnesota.

Now, the Giants can treat everywhere in Germany — from Munich to Hamburg — like the tri-state area.

So why Germany for the Giants?

Well, it’s the most populated European Union country — 84.7 million people, about 16.5 million more than France and the U.K. (which is no longer in the EU).

But it’s another number that really caught the Giants marketing team’s eye: Of Germany’s 35 million sports fans, 19.6 million identify as at least a casual NFL fan. That’s a “strong” and alluring ratio, Scibetti said.

Even in 2022 — before the Seahawks played the Bucs in the NFL’s first German regular season game — the country gravitated toward American football. Ticket demand for that game was so high that “we could have sold more than three million,” NFL Germany chief Alexander Steinforth said at the time. “Germany is our No. 1 growth market.”

The Giants see all these German NFL fans, many of whom don’t yet root for a team.

“How many of them can we convert to specifically have the Giants as their team?” Scibetti said.

That, ultimately, is what will help the NFL take off — and cash in — overseas.

“A league can come in somewhere and say, ‘We want to grow the game.’ And that’s great,” Scibetti said. “But they know that people ultimately are fans of teams. You need to empower clubs to build that affinity — because that really is what gets people into the game.”

So does seeing an actual game in person. That’s why the Giants were so thrilled to get this “road” game against the Panthers in Munich, just after landing German marketing rights.

“You can do all these events, which we’ll continue to do,” Shah said. “But the ability to have our players on the ground there in a formal capacity, it had the stars align. There’s nothing bigger than a game as a catalyst for how you can grow.”

Even when the Giants fly out of Munich after Sunday’s game, they’ll still maintain a year-round, in-person marketing presence in Germany. Recruiting German fans won’t happen overnight — and it can’t just happen through social media and screens from afar.

“We have to make a commitment to be out there,” Shah said. “It’s essentially planning a second team from a marketing perspective.”

‘Living a little bit of American life’

So will it work?

It just might — and not only because of what the Giants are doing now.

The seeds were planted because of Germany’s divided post-World War II landscape. People who lived in the south — near American military bases and around Munich — were exposed to what is now the American Forces Network, which showed NFL games.

For years, anyone without AFN had no exposure to American football. The World League popped up in 1991, and Frankfurt got a team. The Rhein Fire, based in Dusseldorf, came along in 1995. Teams in Berlin, Cologne, and Hamburg later joined. But that league, eventually known as NFL Europe, folded in 2007. It never resonated nationally anyway.

Fans who attended those games “cared not really about the sport, but they cared about going out there and living a little bit of American life,” said Sash Jansen, a 47-year-old obsessive Giants fan who lives in Bonn, has followed the NFL since 1991 and owns 140 game-worn Giants jerseys plus 400 video tapes of Giants games.

Then the NFL launched its International Series of regular season games, with Giants-Dolphins in London in 2007. Eight years later, ProSieben Maxx seized on Europe’s growing NFL interest and started regularly televising games in Germany.

The channel struck gold with its broadcasting approach, explaining football’s complex rules in a simple and lighthearted way, while cutting down on the one thing Germans hate about the NFL — all the stoppages and commercial breaks.

ProSieben reached out to fans on social media: Show us what you’re eating during the game. Show us who you’re watching with — and where. Fans responded, and those images filled the breaks, along with that week’s NFL highlights. It felt like a collective experience, complete with a studio show full of good-natured ribbing, like “Inside the NBA.”

“It was a very loose approach,” Jansen said. “It was very open. That really brought people together. With young people, it really took off. They understood that it’s a big event and high entertainment.”

ProSieben’s rules explanation segments were so breezy that Jansen’s girlfriend (now wife) watched with him to learn the game. And ProSieben employed a charismatic play-by-play announcer, Frank Buschmann, who sounded nothing like the typical stoic German broadcaster — but instead, more like Gus Johnson.

“Way over the top,” Jansen said. “It was totally different than what Germans are used to.”

This was just the jolt Germany’s Sunday evenings needed. The country is six hours ahead of America’s East Coast, so the 1 p.m. NFL games start at 7. For decades, the German Sunday evening TV routine was the same — the news followed by “Tatort,” which means crime scene. It’s a police procedural that has aired continuously since 1970.

“That’s an old-fashioned thing,” said Johnson, the Giants’ German-born fullback. “Football was something fresh, something nobody really knew about. It’s cool. It’s American. And you have this crew on TV that’s making it really fun to watch.”

Wearing NFL love on their sleeve

ProSieben’s track record of fun left Jansen disappointed over the past season-plus — because RTL, which took over for ProSieben last year, presents games in a less quirky way. Jansen worries this will stall the NFL’s popularity growth in Germany, especially among kids.

“They tried to make it more mainstream,” he said. “They reduced that [offbeat] part to a minimum, to make it seem more serious. It took the fun for the young kids out of it.”

Still, Jansen sees the NFL’s continued appeal every day. He’s a history teacher at a school for kids ages 11 to 19. He used to show up every Friday dressed head-to-toe in Giants gear. Then, six years ago, he noticed kids wearing NFL team hats and jerseys — Chiefs, 49ers, Patriots. He heard them rave about Patrick Mahomes, Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski.

“There are a few kids running around 1731083203 with a jersey on every day,” he said. “There is even a guy that is a big Giants fan.”

But once he started spotting those hats and jerseys, he ceased wearing Giants attire. He wants to keep his personal passion separate from work, even as his wife nudges him: “If that kid knew what our basement looked like, he would fall over.”

The Giants would love a country full of fans like Jansen, even though he often rips their failures on his Facebook page.

He was 13 in 1991 when he randomly watched Super Bowl XXV — that Giants-Bills classic — in the middle of the night, 10 days after the first Gulf War began. It felt like the Iraq news took a backseat. He was “blown away that there’s something that could be bigger than war.”

In those days, Germany got only the Super Bowl on TV. Now, he remains just as captivated. He pays about $200 for the NFL’s international Game Pass to watch every game on the American feed. (His man cave has four TVs mounted on the wall for efficient viewing.) Naturally, he stayed up all night to watch the Giants-Steelers Monday night game in Week 8.

He started collecting game tapes — initially, just so he could watch games. (He grew up near Cologne and didn’t have AFN.) Then he started with game-worn jerseys — and never stopped. He recently visited Brad Benson’s New Jersey home to buy his 1986 Super Bowl jersey.

Jansen’s man cave collection spills into his downstairs kitchen — 42 mannequins clothed in jerseys, with more jerseys on hangers and in frames. He has everyone from Michael Strahan to Mark Collins, Eli Manning to Charles Way.

He invites friends over for a guided tour of his Giants shrine. They look quizzically at the jerseys. “That thing is dirty,” they say. “Don’t you want to wash it?”

He would never think of doing that to Leonard Marshall’s Super Bowl jerseys. He owns both. He even set up a touch screen in front of their mannequins that plays highlights of Marshall wearing that exact jersey in those legendary games.

Around the corner is a server with 20 terabytes (almost 80 MacBooks) of digitized Giants games. A fire extinguisher sits nearby.

He’ll likely be in his basement for Giants-Panthers, though it’s just 350 miles from his home. The secondary market tickets he’s seen — between $550 and $650 — are just too expensive. Plus, he prefers his routine — muting his TV and synching the Giants’ radio broadcast.

“There are enough people that are crazy enough to buy those tickets that don’t really care about football,” he said.

Hooking kids on NFL ‘drama’

One recent afternoon, Johnson sat in front of his locker at the Giants’ training facility.

What feels like a lifetime ago, his classmates back home in Stuttgart gave him curious looks when they saw his pads and helmet.

Then he went on to play high school football in Florida and at the University of Tennessee. Johnson, 29, has now appeared in 70 NFL games (with 35 starts) over six seasons with the Patriots, Raiders, and Giants. He’s made almost $6 million, and he owns a minority share of the Stuttgart Surge, his hometown team in the European League of Football.

It all started for him after he watched the 2007 Giants-Patriots Super Bowl. He was 13 — just like Jansen when the NFL caught his eye — and he immediately started playing flag football.

Clearly, for the NFL to thrive in Germany, it needs to hook young fans and players — if only because older German fans don’t care about the soap opera storylines that so often fuel the league’s popularity in the United States.

“They’re very stubborn,” Jansen said. “They are absolutely not into American lifestyle of presenting things — all the drama. And the NFL, it’s all about drama. In Germany, people don’t care [about that] because we are not as emotional about sports as Americans are.”

At least not the older crowd. The NFL is trying to change that mindset for younger fans. And they’re doing it on the ground in Germany.

The Patriots — one of four teams to get initial Germany marketing rights in 2022 — are building a turf field outside Dusseldorf, complete with a Patriots logo. They plan to partner with flag football organizations in Germany, said Joe Dorant, their senior director of international business development.

Meanwhile, the Giants’ Munich schedule this week included a youth football visit and community flag football event. Maybe none of these young flag football players wind up in the NFL or European League — NFL Europe’s fourth-year successor, which the NFL does not fund. But participation is critical for the NFL’s chances of succeeding in Germany.

“Eventually, it’s going to live and die with how many kids we can get excited about the sport and involved in the sport,” Johnson said. “There’s always going to be a lot of people watching. But if you want to really establish the sport, you’ve got to support the local teams — and you’ve got to get people excited about the sport that’s also happening in Europe.”

That way, he said, “kids don’t start throwing the football for the first time when they’re 15, 16, but they might get a football when they’re a [little] kid. If you want that to happen, then you’ve got to establish football as part of our culture and society.”

Johnson has a message for NFL teams about the next important step in their overseas marketing plans: “Invest in the sport over there. Invest in supporting flag football.”

Johnson is doing his part in Stuttgart, where his Surge now partners with the city’s Bundesliga soccer club — including home games at its 60,000-seat stadium. Johnson is in his third year of running a youth camp in Stuttgart. Demand for spots keeps increasing, and the camp’s field location and quality improve every year.

“The enthusiasm is there,” he said. “The kids’ skill set is getting better.”

He thinks he knows why. And it’s the same way the Giants and the NFL are making so many inroads in Germany — the ever-present screen and all the fascinating footage it brings.

“When I started playing, we couldn’t watch anything,” Johnson said. “We couldn’t watch the games. We couldn’t watch any drills. Kids now, they can see it on TV. They can see it on YouTube. They know what it’s supposed to look like — and can emulate that.”