SAN FRANCISCO — The day after NFL commissioner Roger Goodell attempted to temper expectations that the league will eventually expand the regular season to 18 games, leaders of the NFL Players Association issued a strong show of opposition to the idea.
“Our members have no appetite for an 18th regular-season game,” NFLPA interim executive director David White said Tuesday during the union’s annual Super Bowl week news conference.
White further explained, “We have no interest in entertaining changes … that harm player health or that harm recovery process, or that harm the ability to compete at the highest level for the longest period of time. We’re interested in considering changes that fully account for those factors, that minimize risk and that ensure players are properly recognized and compensated for a true fair share of the value that they create.
”You heard that last year when the executive committee was up here, and they were talking about what happens to their bodies. … They were very open and candid about (the fact) that it’s punishing, and we can see that on the teams that have deep postseason runs, and we saw it this year. If you looked at even Week 16, the biggest storyline was arguably about the critical contributors going down. And this was across many teams. And if you look at wild-card weekend, which would be the 18th game, if you took that week, really significant injuries, some that were high profile, but a bunch that weren’t, they happen, and those injuries, they cost players pay. They can shorten careers, they can diminish lifetime earnings. And when your average career is already three to four years, that becomes something that is existential. So the 18th game is not casual for us. It’s a very serious issue.”
Goodell cautioned on Monday that adding an 18th game was “not a given.” He explained that NFL owners want to discuss such an expansion with NFLPA leaders even though the current collective bargaining agreement runs through the 2030 season. However, Goodell said that no formal negotiations on the matter had commenced, and that very few informal discussions had taken place either.
Goodell’s stance seemed to walk back what New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft said in a recent interview: “I want to tell you guys that we’re going to push like the dickens now to make international (games) more important with us. Every team will go to 18 (regular-season games) and two (preseason games) and eliminate one of the preseason games, and every team every year will play one game overseas. Part of the reason is so we can continue to grow the cap and keep our labor happy.”
Eyeing the handsome broadcast deals the NFL continues to ink with partners, players believe that it’s possible for the league to continue to grow the pie without adding another regular-season game. White and NFLPA president Jalen Reeves-Maybin also said the players “are in no rush” to begin negotiations well in advance of the expiration of the current CBA.
The NFL recently announced that ACL tears decreased by 25 percent and the 30 such injuries through mid-December marked a seven-year low. However, Achilles tears did increase from an average of 13.5 per season to 16 in 2025. The number of concussions rose as well, going from 129 in 2024 to 168 in 2025. Mindful of longevity, players worry about the toll that another regular-season game would take on their bodies. Owners have unofficially proposed a setup where the preseason would decrease from three to two contests to help compensate for wear and tear. But few veteran players suit up in the preseason and view such a tradeoff as inadequate.
Another area where owners are bullish while players remain leery involves international expansion.
The NFL in 2026 will field nine games on foreign soil. As Kraft revealed, owners and league officials — envisioning a day where the NFL becomes a sport with a truly global audience and rivaling that of the Premier League — want to eventually see the NFL stage an international game every week with each team playing one game abroad each season.
Wear and tear, quality of field surfaces (which, if inadequate, could lend itself to increased injuries), travel times and recovery windows before resuming competition stateside rank among the areas that players worry about the most when discussing international play. The NFL doesn’t have a uniform policy for how far in advance teams travel to international cities for games, when they return and how much recovery time they have before practices resume for the next game. So players would like to see data on the best procedures and for teams to implement those with consistency.
The current CBA allows for the NFL to stage as many as 10 international games per season. Additional contests would require further negotiations with the NFLPA.
“That is something for players to decide once they have all the information in front of them,” White said. “But we do have some sense of what makes a positive experience when you’re traveling internationally, what makes a positive experience when you’re traveling a long time, and the time that you need before you get back in the ring to get run over by freight trains, which is what these well-honed bodies are doing. So that’s what’s going to be important to us. It’s how they’re rolling that out, and how the players are experiencing that — making sure that the players are at the center of that feedback.”
The NFL would love to expand the international schedule. The NFLPA would like a more uniform travel policy. (Harry Murphy / Getty Images)
Notes
• Reeves-Maybin said the NFLPA remains in the midst of its search for a new full-time executive director, but there is no official timeline for this selection. It’s believed that the union will look to elect its next leader sometime this spring, however. Reeves-Maybin declined to reveal if White — the former head of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — ranks among the candidates under consideration for the full-time position.
• It remains unclear if the NFLPA will release its team report cards in 2026. In each of the three previous seasons, the union conducted anonymous player surveys on working conditions of each team and released those findings in the offseason. The union began doing so in hopes of holding teams accountable for everything from facilities, family accommodations, cafeteria menus, medical treatment and coaching. The NFL this past season filed a grievance against the NFLPA to halt the report cards, arguing the public grading system is a violation of the CBA because it involves public criticism of teams, owners and coaches. When asked on Tuesday about where things stand with the grievance and if the union will release the report card findings for a fourth consecutive offseason, White declined to comment, saying the dispute remains unresolved.