It is paradigmatic that the first game of the NFL regular season in Spain – the sixth country for international expansion of American football after the United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Germany – features a duel of quarterback Polynesians. Cosmopolitanism squared. Tua Tagovailoa for the Miami Dolphins, who idolized his Washington Commanders opponent in college, Marcus Mariota, who came into the league as a generational star and ended up as a rotational replacement. Two races below expectations – numbers 5 and 2 of draftrespectively – for two teams with seasons below their expectations who arrive at the Santiago Bernabéu match this Sunday (3.30pm, Four) with the same record – 3 wins and 7 losses – to exhaust the penultimate hope of saving them. Two franchises that add five Super Bowls for a party with an economic impact for Madrid estimated at around five million euros.
Both quarterback They coincided at Saint Louis School in Honolulu. Tagovailoa, 27, partially replicated the profile of Mariota, five years older, as a mobile, anarchic passer: improvising and running the ball against the reliability of a conventional passer. Only one other institution can boast two quarterback in the top-5 of draftthat of brothers Peyton and Eli Manning in New Orleans. An odious comparison. Compared to the four Super Bowls won – two each – the Hawaiians have barely tasted it playoffs. Despite the already long journeys, it is the first time they have faced each other. They agreed during the week how “incredible” the “opportunity” to share a stage like this, in the NFL’s first in one country, is for two young men who grew up “in the middle of the Pacific, a long way from here,” said Mariota, who spent his first five years with the Tennessee Titans and won just one postseason game. Since 2020, he has alternated supporting roles in Las Vegas, Philadelphia or Atlanta, where he started but ended up losing his spot.
The 21st century has not been sweet for the Dolphins, the only franchise in NFL history with a perfect season, in 1972: they won all 17 games, including the Super Bowl, against Washington, then the Redskins. Overshadowed in their division by the New England Pariots and the Buffalo Bills, they managed to qualify for the playoffs in 2022 and 2023, but fell in the first round. They are on track to worsen last year’s negative record (8-9) with Tagovailoa – with the Dolphins since he arrived in the league in 2020 – as the quarterback with the most interceptions in the NFL (13). Their campaign is so strained that last week they fired their general manager, Chris Grier, and moved the linebacker Jaelan Phillips, one of their best defenders. All in all, they surprised on Sunday with their best game, a resounding victory against the Bills (30-13) inspired by De’Von Achane, one of the stars of the Bernabéu. An explosive player, the fourth running back with more yards – which has nine touchdown. Despite the bad start, Florida have two games left playoffs with seven to play and a convenient schedule.
The Commanders arrive in free fall, with five consecutive defeats and a plague of injuries that led to the abyss of last season’s revelation. They entered the postseason late and reached the conference finals – the step before the Super Bowl – after eliminating the best team of the regular season, the Detroit Lions, who took revenge last Sunday with a categorical 44-22. A crisis aggravated by the loss of his quarterback starter, Jayden Daniels, a scoring machine last postseason, who dislocated his left shoulder Nov. 2 against the Seahawks, with the game already decided. His coach, Dan Quinn, apologized for not bringing Mariota to play garbage minutes, to the misfortune of the fans, who continue to see Daniels’ poster in Madrid’s decorations. After allowing 82 points in his last two games, Quinn announced this week that he will take over play-calling on defense, the aspect through which he emerged as the coach who saw his Atlanta Falcons squander a 28-3 loss to the Patriots in the biggest debacle of a Super Bowl.
It is the Dolphins’ eighth game, playing at home, outside the United States, a figure surpassed only by the Jacksonville Jaguars, with a close link to London, thanks to its owner. Their record, however, is not brilliant: two victories and five defeats. His coach, Mike McDaniel, began his first Metropolitano appearance in Spanish: “How are you?” Like I did two years ago in German. The Commanders, trained in Valdebebas, are among those who have traveled the least: it will be their first international duel in nine years. They have yet to win outside the United States, with a record of one loss and one draw, in 2016 against the Bengals, the only one in two decades of NFL expansion. In Daniels’ absence, Bobby Wagner, one of his defensive references, enthusiastically takes on the role of ambassador given the idea that in Europe they only know stars like Tom Brady because he is married to the model Gisele Bündchen. “In ten years they will be able to say that we were the first to change the situation.”
A match for which there were still tickets left. The almost 80,000 units put on sale on July 8th sold out in a few hours, with prices ranging between 85 and 395 euros. There have been times when the virtual queue exceeded 720,000 users. In recent times, the seats initially reserved for television, protocol or security have been freed up and put up for sale, along with some refunds. According to the operator Ticketmaster the cheapest price is 165 euros; The most expensive ones were still there this Saturday, on the first tier, at 395. Motitas to be awarded in a stadium with a guaranteed full house.
