How Sportsbooks Price NFL's London and Berlin Games

Published September 10, 2026 · 9 min read · By the OddsLighthouse Editorial Team

Every NFL season now includes a handful of games where one "home" team gives up its stadium, its crowd, and a full week of its normal routine to play a few thousand miles away. The league has run games in London since 2007 and added Germany — first Munich, later Frankfurt and Berlin — to the international rotation in 2022. For bettors, these games aren't just a neat storyline. They strip away several assumptions that spread and total prices quietly lean on every other week of the season, and sportsbooks have to rebuild part of their model around a game that doesn't look like a normal Sunday.

Why international games break the usual home-field model

A standard NFL spread starts from a power rating for each team and then layers on adjustments — home-field advantage, rest, weather, injuries. Home-field advantage is usually worth somewhere in the range of one to two points in a modeled spread, built from years of data showing designated home teams perform modestly better than they would on a neutral field. International games remove the part of "home field" that actually drives that edge: the home team's own stadium, its own locker room, a crowd that's shown up specifically to support them, and no extra travel.

London and Berlin games keep the label "home team" for scheduling and broadcast purposes, but functionally both teams are playing a true road game. Books don't just delete the home-field adjustment for these games — they have to decide how much of it, if any, still applies, since the designated "home" team still gets its name on the marquee, still wears its home uniforms in most cases, and often draws a noticeably larger share of the crowd than the true road team.

Time zones, travel, and the "designated home team" problem

Both teams cross the Atlantic for one of these games, but they don't do it identically. A West Coast team traveling to London crosses eight time zones; an East Coast team crosses five. Teams also differ in how they handle the trip — some fly over on the Tuesday or Wednesday before the game to get extra time adjusting to the clock, while others try to stick closer to their normal week and fly in a day or two later. Neither approach has a settled edge in the data, but oddsmakers watch practice reports and travel itineraries in the days before these games more closely than they would for a normal divisional matchup, since a team's own choices about how it prepares can matter as much as the raw travel distance.

There's also a quirk specific to these games: the "home" team sometimes has more travel baggage than the "road" team, because the road team may have had a bye or an unusually light prior week built around the trip, while the home team just played a normal game the week before flying out. Sportsbooks price the actual travel and rest situation for each specific team and date rather than defaulting to a fixed international-game adjustment, which is part of why lines on these games can look unusual compared to a market-implied spread you'd expect from the two teams' records alone.

A neutral stadium, a partisan-ish crowd

Wembley Stadium, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, and Allianz Arena aren't neutral in the way a Super Bowl site with a balanced ticket draw is neutral — attendance still skews depending on which teams have the bigger overseas fan base. A team with a large, established following in the UK or Germany can draw a crowd that looks and sounds a lot like a normal home game, even while playing thousands of miles from its actual stadium. Bookmakers who've watched several seasons of these games factor in which franchises travel well internationally and which effectively play in front of a crowd with no real rooting interest, since crowd noise affects snap counts, false-start rates, and how comfortable an offense is operating on the road — all small effects, but ones a model tries to capture rather than assume away.

The bye week that almost always follows

The NFL has generally scheduled a bye the week immediately after an international game for the designated "home" team, a practice meant to offset the extra travel and disrupted routine. That scheduling detail matters for bettors well beyond the game itself: it means the participating team isn't managing a short week or an accumulating injury report the way it would after a normal road trip, since the players get a full ten-plus days to recover before their next game. It also means the international game itself sometimes gets treated with slightly more caution by a coaching staff that knows a breather is coming right afterward, rather than needing to protect starters for a quick turnaround the following Sunday.

What actually shows up in the line

In practice, the adjustments show up in three places. First, the spread compresses the home-field component more than a bettor unfamiliar with international scheduling might expect — a team favored by 3 points at home against a given opponent domestically might only be favored by 1 to 1.5 points for the same matchup in London, all else equal. Second, early kickoff times (international games are usually 9:30am ET) sometimes get modest total adjustments, since it's an unusual window for both fan bases and can affect how sharp the opening line is before enough money has traded to tighten it. Third, prop markets around these games — first-half performance, "will there be a delay-of-game penalty," officiating-related props — tend to draw more recreational interest than a typical Sunday slate, since the novelty of the setting brings out bettors who don't normally wager on that specific matchup.

None of this means international games are inherently more beatable or more unpredictable than a normal week — it means the inputs going into the number are different, and a bettor comparing a London or Berlin line to what the same two teams "should" be worth on a neutral power rating needs to account for why the home-field number looks smaller than usual before assuming the market got it wrong.