Sara Walsh recalled this week receiving one of the best professional emails of her life. Her NFL Network boss, Charlie Yook, sent her some notes on the logistics of her upcoming assignments and finished the email with a line that would melt the heart of any globe-trotter:

“Have fun living in London.”

Over the next month, Walsh, a self-described “London lunatic” who traveled to Wimbledon with her family this summer to check off a sports “bucket list” item, will be spending as much time in The Big Smoke as Keir Starmer. She has been assigned as the sideline reporter for all three of the NFL Network’s October broadcasts from London, including Vikings-Browns on Oct. 5, Broncos-Jets on Oct. 12 and Rams-Jaguars on Oct. 19.

The broadcast teams for the London NFL games have yet to be announced, but The Athletic has learned that Kenny Albert and Jonathan Vilma will call the Week 5 Browns-Vikings game from Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, along with Walsh. The Broncos-Jets game in Week 6 from Tottenham Hotspur Stadium will be called by Rich Eisen and Kurt Warner, plus Walsh. Finally, the Week 7 game between the Rams and Jaguars from Wembley Stadium will return Eisen, Warner and Walsh as the broadcast team. Fox will produce all of the London broadcasts.

The NFL’s London games are, of course, part of a larger global plan, which includes the NFL’s first regular-season game in Dublin this Sunday, a not-insignificant meeting between the Steelers (2-1) and Vikings (2-1) at Croke Park, the largest sporting arena in Ireland. (The game will air exclusively on NFL Network, with Joe Davis and Greg Olsen in the booth, with sideline reporters Pam Oliver and Jamie Erdahl. The game will also be available on local broadcast stations in Minneapolis and Pittsburgh.)

This year’s international series kicked off early in September in São Paulo when the Chargers defeated the Chiefs 27-21 in YouTube’s first-ever NFL broadcast. The seven games abroad this season are an international record.

NFL officials have previously noted that when its games are played at 9:30 a.m. ET — ideal for Europe — they reach nearly 80 percent of the world at a time when people can watch a game. We know this stat because the NFL has clear lines for global expansion. League owners clearly want an 18-game NFL season, which would add broadcast inventory, allow the league to reshape existing deals and put more global expansion in play. (Note: The league needs the players to sign off on that, and David White, the interim executive director of the NFL Players Association, told The Associated Press in September that he hasn’t had any conversations with the league about expanding the length of the regular season.)

The NFL’s upcoming billion-dollar agreement with ESPN, pending regulatory approval, allows it to license four games to another media partner, and this inventory could easily be used as part of a package for a global broadcaster such as YouTube or Netflix.

As the research firm MoffettNathanson wrote in a note to investors in September: “We would not be surprised if the league held back four of those six international games to bring to market for a global streaming player. After securing those four NFL Network games to repackage, the NFL may potentially carve out further games from other partners, such as CBS, if the league looks to utilize the Paramount-Skydance deal to exercise its change-of-control clause and restructure its current agreement with Paramount. This could allow the league to create a more robust rights package to entice new streaming partners like Apple or deepen its existing partnerships with Netflix and/or YouTube, setting those parties up to be a more significant bidder the next time the broader set of rights comes due.”

Sports broadcasters are usually pumped to get a trip abroad. Walsh has previous experience working as a sideline reporter on NFL international games, including the NFL’s first game in Germany three years ago.  That game featured Tampa Bay, led by Tom Brady, defeating Seattle in front of 69,811 at Allianz Arena in Munich, home to Bayern Munich. You might recall the Munich crowd memorably singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” in unison. Last year, Walsh returned to Munich as part of the broadcast for the Panthers’ 20-17 win over the Giants in Week 10. She was also part of the broadcast crew for two NFL games in Frankfurt in 2023. Away from the NFL Network, she hosts U.S. National Team (soccer) coverage for TNT.

“I don’t know if TV translates how crazy it is,” Walsh said of working international games. “When I did the first game in Germany, it felt like you were doing a Super Bowl. I remember doing a postgame interview with Tom Brady, standing on this field in Munich, and no one had yet exited the stadium. When Tom and I were standing there, the entire crowd was singing. I mean, it sounded like stadium karaoke. We couldn’t hear each other, and this was 10 minutes, maybe, after this game had ended. It was crazy how many different NFL jerseys we saw being worn because this was their only experience to feel and taste part of the NFL.

“Getting to these games abroad has been probably the coolest thing I’ve done in my career.”

(If you want to see the interview, head to the 11:32 mark here.)

Given her experience working abroad for the NFL — she’ll have been on the sideline for seven games in Europe at the conclusion of this year’s schedule — Walsh is a big believer that NFL fandom is broad enough for the league to have a European division. The NFL clearly has its designs on global domination. In February, the league announced a multiyear commitment to play regular-season games in Melbourne, Australia, beginning in 2026. Earlier this week, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told CNBC that setting up a London-based team was possible.

“Would you plant one NFL team in Europe? I mean, that’s really difficult to figure out like how that would work travel-wise,” Walsh said. “There are people that probably would not love that as much as others. But some kind of division would be incredible. Games in Germany have now become a yearly thing. A couple of years ago, London was a novelty, and now it’s not just a regular stop, but a three-game stop.”

(Photo: Harry Murphy / Getty Images)