Friday Night Lights, São Paulo Edition

The first NFL game ever played in South America took place in a stadium whose owners have spent years trying to get rid of the color green, and both teams on the field wore green.

Friday night lights, Itaquera edition

What a historic week to be an American football fan in Brazil.

On Friday, September 6, 2024, the Philadelphia Eagles played the Green Bay Packers at Neo Química Arena, home of the soccer club Corinthians, out in Itaquera on the east side of São Paulo. It was the first regular season NFL game on the continent, and a sellout: 47,236 people. It was also the league's first Friday night season opener since 1970, which meant that for a lot of the locals around us, their introduction to live American football came under actual Friday night lights. The Eagles' coach said before kickoff that every one of his players grew up on Friday nights. So, it turns out, did a stadium full of Brazilians, starting that evening.

How nostalgic is that.

Pregame, with Freed

We pregamed with Freed and friends, which brought back how our friendship started in the first place: a shared love of American football, right here in Sampa. It is a very specific thing to bond over in a country that has a different sport it calls football, and it stuck.

Outside the gates, the jerseys were a census of the entire league. Bills. Broncos. Texans. Giants. Jay in a Panthers number 1, me in a São Paulo game shirt, and roughly nobody wearing the same team twice.

I also made a quick cameo on Meu Timão, the Corinthians fan channel, which was out working the crowd with a camera. I was wearing a football helmet at the time. I looked, I am told, like an ultra.

The cheese situation

Fans repped everything, and one group topped it off with foam cheese wedges on their heads. My first draft of this story credited these to Philadelphia fans, on the logic that Philadelphia means cream cheese. The jerseys underneath said LOVE and ALEXANDER, which is to say Green Bay. The cheeseheads were Packers fans. The cream cheese was me.

Why green is a dare in Itaquera

To understand the crowd, you need a little São Paulo soccer history, because the color of your shirt meant something different in that building than it would anywhere else on earth.

In 1914, Italian immigrants in the Brás neighborhood, many of them working for the Matarazzo industries, founded a club called Palestra Italia. It played in green. In March 1942, with Brazil now on the Allied side of the Second World War, the Vargas government banned organizations from using names tied to the Axis countries. Palestra Italia became Palestra de São Paulo, and when that was not enough either, the club renamed itself Sociedade Esportiva Palmeiras that September, keeping the P on the crest and the green on the shirts. Palmeiras played its first match under the new name a week later.

Palmeiras is Corinthians' great rival, and has been for more than a century. Corinthians takes the rivalry seriously enough that, according to the Associated Press, club executives once tried to paint the field black. In 2021 the club fined one of its own players for wearing green boots in a match.

So the NFL arrived with two green teams. The Eagles, as the designated home team, made the diplomatic move: white jerseys, black pants, black helmets. Corinthians colors. That won over plenty of Corinthians fans. It also gave a lot of Palmeiras fans, who had already said online that they would wear green no matter what, a team to adopt. Between the Eagles' black and white and the Palmeiras crowd in green, the Packers got something close to a hometown welcome.

The locals had a name for the green-clad visitors, too: Green-Gos, a play on gringo. Extra funny in a house where green is the enemy.

The Eagles won, 34 to 29. Anitta played halftime, with fireworks over the roof. Everyone went home a little hoarse.

Safety, and the seat

Before the game, there was a fair amount of American hand-wringing. A Packers running back said on a podcast that players had been told not to wear green because of gangs; the NFL called that false, and the São Paulo state government added security for the teams. From where we stood, safety was not really an issue.

The seat was. Mine was broken, and with the place packed to the brim with 47,000 new friends, there was no fixing it and nowhere to move me. The upside: security was not going to stop me wherever I decided to go. A broken seat, it turns out, is a stadium pass.

Sunday: Magnus runs a 5K

The cherry on top came two days later. On Sunday morning, Magnus Waffles ran his first official 5K at the NFL Run in Parque Villa-Lobos, in his own Panthers jersey, with his pack.

He sprinted by like a champ, and the course answered with cheers of "fofinho," which is Portuguese for something close to "fluffy little thing" and, in Magnus's opinion, his name.

Boo-yah. Naps earned.

If you go

• The game moves around. The NFL came back to Neo Química Arena in September 2025 for the Chargers and the Chiefs, and took its 2026 Brazil game to Rio's Maracanã. Watch NFL Brasil for the next announcement, and be fast: local reporting had the 2024 tickets selling out in about an hour and fifteen minutes.
• Take the train. The stadium sits next to Corinthians-Itaquera station on Metrô Line 3-Red. For the 2024 game, the Metrô and CPTM trains ran around the clock.
• The beer is an exception. São Paulo state normally bans alcohol sales at stadiums. For the NFL, the rule was relaxed, which is why everyone in our photos is holding a red cup.
• Wear your colors. The NFL said there was no ban on green, and plenty of people wore it. Just know whose house you are in.
• The fan fest was free. In 2024 the NFL Experience at Parque Villa-Lobos ran all weekend with free entry (you registered in the NFL OnePass app), including a viewing party for anyone without a ticket.
• The run. The 2024 NFL Run offered a 5K and a 2K walk, and the premium kit let you pick a shirt from any of the 32 teams. If you are bringing a dog, check the race rules first.

The whole league, in one city

The thing I keep coming back to is the parking lot. In a stadium built around a hundred-year argument about one color, the crowd outside was every color the NFL makes, and nobody was arguing about any of it. Brazil took a sport it had mostly watched on television and turned up in whatever jersey it loved. The only fan all weekend who could not be sorted into a rivalry was white, very fluffy, and running in a Panthers shirt.

What a start to the season. Logging on to fantasy.