The San Francisco 49ers are one of the most storied franchises in the National Football League (NFL). With five Super Bowls and eight conference championships to their name, they stand as one of the most prominent of the 32 franchises, both domestically in the US and worldwide.
It stands to reason, then, that in the new era of global market access for NFL franchises, the 49ers are one of the teams that have most embraced the NFL’s global markets program (GMP), the league's international market area allocation effort.
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That program was introduced in 2022. The following season, the 49ers won the highly competitive NFC West division and went to the NFC Championship Game before falling to the Philadelphia Eagles. A year later, the team did one better, winning the NFC Championship, before falling to the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl, narrowly in overtime.
Having returned to the playoffs in 2025-26, the 49ers have spent much of their time in the GMP among the upper echelons of the NFL, giving it a strong base from which to promote itself, and it has done so.
Of the 32 NFL teams, 21 have more than one global market, and of those 21, only eight franchises have more international markets than the 49ers’ three.
Through the GMP, the 49ers franchise was initially allocated marketing rights to the UK and Mexico, before adding the UAE to its portfolio in 2025.
Internationalization is an area that the team’s commercial staff is familiar with. Caleb Homeres, the senior director of brand and integrated marketing at the 49ers, joined the franchise back in 2021 after over 20 years at the Golden State Warriors NBA franchise. His stint at the Warriors coincided with a time period that saw the basketball team develop into one of the hottest global brands of any US sports property.
The 49ers had already played abroad in the UK twice before his arrival and have gone abroad once since (Mexico in 2022), but the establishment of the GMP that year would galvanize international marketing efforts across the league.
In the upcoming 2026 season, the 49ers will play abroad not once, but twice, in two different markets, opening the campaign against the Los Angeles Rams in Melbourne, Australia, on September 10, then making the shorter trip to Mexico City, Mexico, for a designated home game later in the year.
While in-market games are naturally a major interest driver on rare occasions, establishing a long-term position in international markets requires a year-round presence. The 49ers' primary vehicle for this, as Homeres attests, is flag football.
“Flag football is really a way that we can get into the local community and establish a presence in the local community,” he says.
Like many in the NFL, the 49ers’ ambition with the GMP is to become the “world’s team”. While that may seem like a broad aim, the franchise has already invested in flag football, a project that also falls in line with the NFL’s goals for the sport.
While the league, and indeed the franchise’s flag football aims begin at the grassroots level, Homeres believes that it is that demographic that will yield the best results long term.
“We want to be able to identify, engage, connect, and build fans in each one of our markets. Flag football is core to that,” he states.
He adds that there is not a direct line between the grassroots flag football participant and the avid 49ers NFL fan, but that they are, rather, two different consumer segments that both must be served.
“We have different ways of engaging at its hands versus grassroots participation. So, I wouldn't say a straight line. The way we look at it is these are all different audiences that have different interests, and what we want to do is cater to them in different ways,” he says.
This strategy has already worked close to home and is rapidly spreading, with Homeres explaining: “California is an epicenter of flag football in the United States. There are over one million flag football players in California, and 250,000 of those are girls.
"In Mexico, you have over three million people playing flag football, with over one million girls. So it's really a way that we can engage with youth. Flag football is an inclusive sport. It's a low-barrier-to-entry injury. It highlights athleticism.”
For the first time, at LA28, flag football will appear at the Olympic Games, a coincidence of timing which Homeres adds can help galvanize the team’s international flag efforts.
“I think the Olympics are perfect, because you have seen a rapid growth of flag football since its sanctioning for the Olympics in 2023 across almost all global markets," he says. "Now it provides that North Star for kids who are playing. It says, ‘one day you can be an Olympic athlete.’”
Although the Olympics stands above as a global ideal, a market-by-market approach is still the predominant means of touching down on a closer level internationally. After all, not every player will ascend to the Olympic level, but many will maintain the sport as a hobby, something that can also engender strong fanhood ties.
“A big part of it really is understanding the market. You look at a market like Mexico, where there are 3 million flag football players, and then you look at the UAE, where there might be like 3000. Very different markets require different approaches," Homeres says.
“I think what we have to do in each one of our markets is we have to really identify [touchpoints], we need to understand the landscape, understand kind of where we can fit in, what opportunities there are, who the partners are that we can work with in each of the markets.”
To this end, the team established a “community supporters program” aimed at growing American football and flag football participation in the UAE back in 2025. The Emirates American Football League (EAFL) and the Emirates Flag Football League (EFFL) became the first two organizations to partner with the team through the program.
Intensifying the presence worldwide
Beyond flag football, the GMP as a whole has been revelatory for the NFL, Homeres attests, stating: “Without this global markets program, we would have to rely on traditional measures, such as content, such as broadcast, but [now] we can actually go into the markets and connect with people on a one-to-one level.
“We've been able, since 2022, to rapidly expand and grow our fan base by connecting with those stands, creating meaningful interactions, and getting into the community.
“I think that has been huge for the growth of the NFL and also for global fandom. I think that that's one of the reasons why we're really excited to play in both Mexico City and Australia.”
Even though Australia is not a country with international marketing rights, Homeres claims that the 49ers remain one of the most popular teams in the market, as it is in many other global territories where it does not have marketing rights, and that the international games help to maintain that global hegemony.
“It allows us to engage with our fans in Australia to market where we don't have market rights, but we know that we have many fans there," he explains.
"We're working on our model to identify the fans. [We want to] create programs where we can engage with the fans in this game, and the time around the game will give us a huge opportunity to really engage with those fans. So, fan events, community-oriented events, we want to connect with these fans, and then hopefully they’ll be the fans of the future."
Eventually, the team hopes, this will lead to a situation where fandom grows organically outside of the allotted GMP areas. Take, for example, last week’s NFL Draft, where the 49ers invited their international fan of the year, Germany’s David Rösler, to make the #107 pick in person.
Germany is perhaps the NFL’s biggest market in Europe, or at least on a par with the UK, and although the 49ers do not have marketing rights for Germany, nor have they ever played a game there, it illustrates that the ability of teams now to cultivate fan bases globally is still possible.
Later in the round, when it came time for the #139 pick, the team phoned in to present the call from Mexico. More specifically, the draft pick was presented from the locker room of the Mexican national soccer team, where Mexican soccer icon Andres Guardado read out the selection alongside former 49ers offensive tackle Alfredo Gutierrez.
Mexico-born Gutierrez, who featured on the 49ers roster between 2021 and 2023, features prominently across the team’s Spanish-language social media pages, which boast over 183,000 followers across X and Instagram
That pick, in particular, illustrates much of what has made the activation strategy a success thus far, drawing from cultural touchpoints outside of American football and integrating the 49ers' brand.
The 49ers’ third global market, the UAE, poses probably the complete opposite problem to the team’s Australia venture. Namely, how do you promote the organization in a market where you have marketing rights, but that does not have international games?
“There's no established league office in a lot of emerging markets,” Homeres explains. “So really, what we're doing is we're going in and having to build a foundation. So, the model is a little bit different, because the overall amount of fans in the market might be smaller. And so what you have to do is you have to go in and build at a grassroots level that fandom. You have to go and identify your fans.”
“We want familiarity with American football to grow in the UAE. We’re really focused on building something, and we're hopeful that for the UAE, as its sports ecosystem is largely built around large-scale events, the NFL will bring a game to that region in the not-so-distant future.”
In the interim, though, it is the establishment of partnerships in the area that is a key driver of local brand growth.
In the first year of market access to the UAE, the 49ers took steps to do just that. McGettigans, the international pub and bar group, partnered with the franchise, and its UAE locations were designated as official viewing destinations of the team in the country, staging free watch parties and other fan-focused community activities aimed at driving interest in the franchise.
That element, Homeres stresses, is vital. “The partners that we're working with are really essential to having success for these programs,” he says, be it fan fests or the aforementioned flag football efforts.
In the UK, this means the support of the Leeds United Foundation, the charitable arm of the English Premier League soccer side that the 49ers own via its investment business. In the UAE, this support is provided by long-term sponsor Cisco, where they have identified youth flag football as a particularly important vehicle through which to activate their partnership.
Most recently, in Mexico last week, the 49ers partnered with local sponsor Foliatti Casino to activate around the draft at Anáhuac Sur University with an Alfredo Gutierrez meet and greet, an activation that the team says drew over 500 registrations. That was not the 49ers' first collaboration with that university,
The 49ers’ strategy of leveraging these partnerships to support international growth extends beyond the physical realm. In late 2025, for example, the organization tapped professional services heavyweight PwC, its new digital consulting partner, to consult on the improvement of the team’s digital environment, which led to the revamp of the dedicated 49ers mobile app.
Costa Kladianos, the 49ers executive vice president of technology, told Sportcal at the time: “With that said, the 49ers Faithful is millions strong worldwide. Our new app, which will really be more than just an app, will serve as a 49ers hub for fans globally. It is a major priority for us to continue engaging 49ers fans who can’t always be at Levi’s Stadium on gamedays.”
Either way, be it in the physical realm or the digital, reaching these fans who aren’t at the eight or nine 49ers home games each season, not just in the US but globally, is the priority, and as the international arms race heats up with more markets being added each year and the inclusion of all 32 franchises, key differentiators such a in-market partnerships and flag football programs will become key to establishing one franchise above all the others.
