LOS ANGELES, September 11, 2026 – The Los Angeles Rams traded Southern California’s familiar sunshine for Melbourne’s iconic Cricket Ground this week, opening their 2026 regular season under an international spotlight 8,000 miles from home.
Facing their fiercest NFC West rival, the San Francisco 49ers, on Thursday, Sept. 10 at 8:35 p.m. Eastern time, the Rams helped inaugurate the first NFL regular-season game ever played in Australia. The historic clash streamed globally on Netflix, with local over-the-air broadcasts covering home team markets.
It wasn’t your typical Week 1 setup. Forget the comfortable home crowd or a gentle warm-up game; two divisional heavyweights got tossed straight into the deep end on foreign turf.
This Aussie showdown kicked off the 2026 season on back-to-back days, following the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots’ opener on Sept. 9. For Los Angeles, hopping continents meant tackling brutal jet lag, a staggering 17-hour time difference, and playing inside an oval venue built for cricket rather than American gridiron.
Yet, these two franchises know each other’s playbooks inside out. Pitting them against each other on the other side of the globe gave a bitter, late-season rivalry a wild new twist.
The Australia opener marks the start of a massive five-game broadcast deal between the NFL and Netflix for 2026. The streamer isn’t just sticking to holiday gimmicks anymore—it secured games in September, November, December, and January.
The Rams return to the platform on Wednesday, Nov. 25, when they host the Green Bay Packers at SoFi Stadium at 8 p.m. EST for the first-ever Thanksgiving Eve game in league history.
Netflix follows that up with a Christmas Day doubleheader—Green Bay vs. Chicago at 1 p.m. Eastern, then Buffalo vs. Denver at 4:30 p.m.—before wrapping up on Jan. 9, 2027, with a high-stakes Week 18 matchup TBD based on playoff seeds.
That flexible January slot could carry massive postseason implications. Division titles and wild-card berths could hinge on a single afternoon.
Playing in Melbourne brings great global exposure, sure, but international trips cut both ways. Drop a division game halfway around the world, and that 15-hour flight back to LAX feels twice as long.
The big takeaway? The NFL doesn’t treat international games like side-show exhibitions anymore. Australia got real regular-season football, Netflix locked in a year-round sports footprint, and the Rams were right at the center of it all.
