MEXICO CITY — It’s Thursday night in Mexico City. The Steelers are playing the Titans, and though the game is nearly 2,400 miles away in Pittsburgh, it is being televised in Spanish throughout Mexico on Fox Deportes. The game is hard to miss.
Walk the streets of the upscale Polanco neighborhood, and nearly every restaurant with an outside patio is bustling with diners and has the game on TV. Walk over to Papa Bill’s Stadium, and a few dozen fans are eating chicken wings and watching the game on a large projection screen.
And if you take an Uber ride to the Roma Sur neighborhood closer to downtown, you’ll find a group of 25-40 hardcore Steelers fans wearing Le’Veon Bell jerseys and watching the game at the local Buffalo Wild Wings.
Antonio Piñon calls this meeting place “The Steel Cage.’’ He’s wearing his Steelers “Salute to Service’’ hat and T-shirt, and between sips of Victoria beer he complains about the Steelers’ execution in the red zone, boasts of his trip to Heinz Field last year, and explains how he has loved the Steelers since the days of Mean Joe Greene.
But Piñon, 45, stops mid-sentence when Antonio Brown catches a 5-yard touchdown pass to give the Steelers a 23-14 lead in the third quarter.
“HERE WE GO STEELERS, HERE WE GO,’’ he chants along with his fellow Steelers fans. “Sorry, I don’t have my Terrible Towel.’’
The experience is surprisingly familiar for an American football fan. But it shouldn’t be a surprise. Mexico has been watching the NFL since the 1970s, and today fans devour the product.
The Patriots face the Raiders on Sunday in Estadio Azteca, a game that sold out in about 20 minutes after it was announced. It marks the second year of a three-year deal with the NFL to host regular-season games at the legendary stadium, and will be just the third regular-season NFL game in this country.
With the demand for tickets, the massive popularity of the Raiders and Patriots, and the increased police presence, Sunday’s game will have the feeling of a mini Super Bowl.
“The people in Mexico City could not have been more excited to show off their city and their love and knowledge of NFL football,’’ said former quarterback Matt Hasselbeck, who was part of ESPN’s broadcasting crew when it did last year’s Raiders-Texans game in Mexico City. “The security, the police force, the pageantry there is pretty powerful. It almost makes you feel like something really important is about to happen.’’
Why Mexico?
While the NFL held a 49ers-Cardinals regular-season game in Mexico in 2005, the NFL’s international focus over the last decade-plus has been on London. The league plays four games a year now in the UK, and has focused a lot of energy on the feasibility of placing a team here full time.
Mexico is the obvious next step in the NFL’s international strategy, said Mark Waller, the NFL’s vice president of international. Mexico has been watching the NFL on TV since the Cowboys and Steelers were dominating in the 1970s.
The league estimates that it has about 22 million fans in Mexico, compared with 13 million in Canada, 13 million in the UK, and 10 million-12 million in Germany.
Waller said Mexico City has the most NFL fans of any city in the world — noting, of course, that Mexico City is the second-largest city in the Western Hemisphere at more than 20 million people.
“I grew up watching ‘Monday Night Football’ with Howard Cosell and Dandy Don [Meredith] like everyone else,’’ says ESPN international reporter John Sutcliffe, a Mexico City native.
Big business
Four Mexican networks (two free channels, two pay channels) televise games with their own broadcasters — Fox Deportes, ESPN International, TV Azteca, and Televisa. ESPN has the rights to “Sunday Night Football,’’ “Monday Night Football,’’ and its own version of the RedZone channel in Mexico, and Mexican fans can watch up to nine games each weekend.
“You can actually watch more live NFL football in Mexico than you can in the US, and that’s been the case for a long time,’’ Waller said. “And so the level of fandom and the knowledge that fans have is really on par with the US.’’
Football has become Mexico’s No. 2 sport behind soccer. The NFL now has 25 sponsors in Mexico, compared with six in 2008. The NFL says that more than 2.5 million children play flag football in Mexico. Several elite private and public high schools field tackle football teams that often cross into Texas for games.
The Patriots are also becoming big business in Mexico. NFL Mexico research pins the Patriots as the country’s No. 3 most popular team, behind the Cowboys and Steelers but ahead of mainstays such as the 49ers, Raiders, and Cardinals. The Patriots were nowhere on the radar 20 years ago, but five Super Bowl victories have made them a hit internationally.
Robert Kraft is keenly aware of the growth potential in Mexico and essentially raised his hand to play in this Mexico game (so long as he didn’t have to give up a home date). The Patriots hosted a pep rally in Zocalo Square on Saturday for several hundred fans, with appearances by Pat Patriot, the team cheerleaders, and Kevin Faulk and Steve Grogan.
“You’ll find a lot in the international markets popularity is driven by historical success, so the Steelers are very popular, the Cowboys,’’ Waller said. “The Patriots definitely are popular, and I would tell you that the Patriots are popular around the world. The success that they’ve had in the last 10 years has definitely been picked up and reflected in global fandom.’’
Knowledgeable fans
In the UK, the NFL is still more of a curiosity. In Mexico, it is ingrained in the culture.
“You’ll see the knowledge. They know what’s going on,’’ said Sutcliffe, who does sideline reporting for ESPN International’s “Monday Night Football’’ broadcasts. “They know the Patriots are having trouble on defense. They know ‘La Ardilla’ is hurt. They know the Raiders haven’t been consistent.’’
(“La Ardilla’’ is “The Squirrel,’’ which is Julian Edelman’s nickname. He is out for the year with a torn ACL.)
Hasselbeck, who played 17 NFL seasons, said last year’s Mexico game was far unlike the preseason game he played in Tokyo early in his career, or like the four UK games held each year.
“This felt different. The people that I interacted with when we were in Mexico City, they were in multiple fantasy football leagues, they were into the day-to-day,’’ he said. “Their questions would be, ‘What do you think about Doug Baldwin in the slot?’ It was a whole ’nother level.’’
Thursday night at Buffalo Wild Wings, Piñon talked about how the Patriots and Steelers seem destined to meet in the playoffs this year, and how the Steelers really needed to win on Thursday to keep pace with the Patriots for the No. 1 playoff seed.
Piñon said he has trekked to Pittsburgh and New England for games in recent years, and is excited to drive 12 hours to watch the Steelers play in Houston on Christmas Day. He explains his nicknames for the Steelers — Ben Roethlisberger is “Cacheton,’’ or “Cheeky,’’ because of his round cheeks. Antonio Brown is “Toñito.’’
Piñon doesn’t believe Tom Brady is “el mejor el todo tiempo’’ — the greatest of all time — because that honor still belongs to Joe Montana. But he said many Mexicans are ashamed of Mauricio Ortega, the former newspaper executive who was caught stealing Brady’s Super Bowl jersey last February.
“We were embarrassed by the T-shirt thief,’’ Piñon said. “That’s not what we’re about.’’
Game day
Patriots receiver Danny Amendola feels like he got a good glimpse of what game day will be like when he visited Mexico City with Edelman in June on a promotional trip.
“It’s going to be electric,’’ Amendola said. “The fans are going to be jumping, it’s going to be loud, it’s going to be unique, it’s going to be fun.’’
The NFL’s largest crowds have come at Estadio Azteca. A 1994 preseason game between the Oilers and Cowboys still holds the record attendance at 112,376. The 49ers-Cardinals regular-season game in 2005 was played in front of 103,467, which was a record at the time.
The Patriots played in Mexico City once before — a 1998 preseason game at Estadio Azteca against the Cowboys in front of 106,424, a game that former Patriot Troy Brown remembers more for its choppy turf than for anything that happened on the field.
Azteca is 51 years old but underwent significant renovations in the last two years to bring it up to NFL standards, with new locker rooms, press facilities, and luxury suites. The capacity has been reduced to about 72,000 for Sunday’s game, Waller said.
Estadio Azteca is an icon in the sports world as the first stadium to host two World Cup finals — Pele and Brazil won there in 1970, and Diego Maradona and Argentina in 1986. Some Mexicans consider it an honor that Brady and Bill Belichick will now grace the field.
“It’s a very special place. For some, it’s the most important stadium in the world,’’ Sutcliffe said. “Julio Cesar Chavez has boxed there, the Pope has been there, U2 has been there. I guess the only guy who’s left is Tom Brady.’’
Estadio Azteca is also unique. It has a giant trench, or basically a moat without water, to prevent fans from storming the field. The stadium used to have chain link fences with barbed wire in the front rows of the lower and upper decks, but those have been removed.
Last year’s Texans-Raiders game was marred by a fan hitting Brock Osweiler in the face repeatedly with a laser pointer. The police presence is significant.
“The fans there know how to bring some intensity to the game,’’ Hasselbeck said. “It gets kind of rowdy in pregame.’’
Most unique about the stadium is the air quality. Estadio Azteca sits at approximately 7,200 feet, almost 2,000 feet higher than any NFL stadium. The Patriots spent a week in Colorado trying to acclimate to the altitude, but Mexico City’s legendary smog adds another layer of difficulty. The Raiders and Patriots arrived Saturday, to deal with as little of the smog and atmosphere as possible.
Former US soccer star Eric Wynalda once called Azteca “the worst place to ever play a sporting event. You can’t breathe. The pollution is so bad that if you don’t have some form of rain that’s brought all that down you are going to be sucking wind.’’
Hasselbeck didn’t play in the altitude last year but still felt it.
“I definitely felt dry, dehydrated, thirsty,’’ he said. “I didn’t get sick but there were several people that were struggling. Lots of Tylenol, Advil. I think it’s a real thing.’’
The future
The NFL’s deal to play in Mexico expires after the 2018 season, but Waller expects it will be extended “way beyond 2018.’’ No teams have been identified for next year’s game, but since the NFL requires teams that are moving cities to lose a home game for an international game — the Rams have a deal to play in London, and the Raiders now have played twice in Mexico City — the Chargers are an obvious candidate to “host’’ it.
Playing in Mexico City fulfills a short-term goal for the NFL to give back to its diehard fans in Mexico and reinforce its strong Hispanic fan base.
Logistically, the NFL believes it could put a team in Mexico City tomorrow and have it be popular from a fan standpoint. But the economic realities of Mexico City and the dollar-peso conversion would make it difficult for a team to succeed, at least for now.
Unlike with the UK, the NFL doesn’t have much of an appetite yet for placing a team full time in Mexico City, or playing a Super Bowl here. Estadio Azteca is the only stadium in the country that meets the NFL’s standards, but it doesn’t have the infrastructure that owners crave. Even playing more than one game a year at Azteca will be difficult, because two professional soccer teams also play home games there.
“I think the fundamentals in Mexico are very simple: Can you actually make it work from an economics perspective?’’ Waller said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that there’s enough fans and enough opportunity. The issue is the relatively straightforward one — will that economy grow, will that country flourish in the way that it has been projected to flourish, and if and when it does that, is there a stadium to play in?’’
But there’s no doubt the passion that exists, and continues to grow, in Mexico for the NFL.
“It’s a great experience. I would highly recommend it,’’ Hasselbeck said. “I just came back from Lambeau Field. People are like, ‘Ah, that’s a trip I’d like to do.’ Yeah, I totally agree, but this is a pretty cool one, too.’’
Ben Volin can be reached at ben.volin@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @BenVolin.
