The news of Tom Brady coming out of retirement last March didn’t resonate just in Tampa.
Five thousand miles and an ocean away, 17 million German football fans had reason to rejoice.
The first NFL regular-season game on their soil, a Buccaneers-Seahawks matchup Sunday in Munich’s Allianz Arena, would feature the sport’s biggest superstar.
“Perhaps the understatement of the year — it adds to the excitement and the buzz around this game that he’ll be on the field,” said Peter O’Reilly, NFL executive vice president of club business and league events.
“He is clearly a worldwide superstar who not only the many avid fans in Germany are well aware of, but casual fans and anybody on the street is aware of Tom Brady. No doubt it adds to what will be an amazing first-ever game in Germany this year.”
The game, to be held at the home of soccer powerhouse Bayern Munich, is the next step in the NFL’s strategy to expand beyond US borders. The forays into Mexico in 2005 and the United Kingdom in 2007 confirmed that international markets had an appetite for the NFL. Now the league has a four-year deal to play games in Germany as part of an aggressive worldwide marketing expansion.
The NFL and its teams are also marketing heavily in Canada, Brazil, Ghana, Australia, China, New Zealand, and Spain, though no games are scheduled in those countries.
The NFL counts approximately 17 million fans in Germany, 3.3 million of which it considers “avid.” The league says millions of Germans tuned in to Super Bowl LVI last February, and that TV viewership is up more than 20 percent this season. When Buccaneers-Seahawks tickets went on sale, the queue to purchase was 800,000 long, and Ticketmaster said 3 million tickets could have been sold to the game (capacity, unfortunately, is only 67,000).
Germany has long been a potential hotbed for the NFL; in the old NFL Europe (1995-2007), five of nine teams were based there. But former Patriots offensive tackle Sebastian Vollmer, one of the first German natives to play in the NFL, said he can’t believe how much football has grown in popularity in recent years.
“When I was a kid, we didn’t have it,” said Vollmer, 38. “I remember I would get bootleg VHS copies of ‘The NFL’s Biggest Hits,’ stuff like that. But it was nothing; you had to look for it. Now it’s everywhere — interviews and mainstream media, on the TV, in newspapers, it’s there. It has arrived.”
As he spoke Tuesday, five days before kickoff, Vollmer was surrounded by a dozen people wearing Buccaneers jerseys or T-shirts at the famous Hofbrauhaus, which has been designated the Buccaneers’ official beer hall this week in Munich.
The Buccaneers will be the home team, as one of the four teams given marketing rights to Germany as part of the NFL’s International Home Marketing Areas program. The Patriots, Chiefs, and Panthers also were granted rights to Germany, and each will have its own beer hall this weekend in Munich.
The Patriots are taking over Herrschaftszeiten for three days, with a DJ and Patriots trivia and other attractions. Vollmer and another German former Patriot, Markus Kuhn, will do a meet-and-greet with fans and a football chalk talk.
The week’s activities also included a flag football tournament and an appearance by the German national women’s flag football team.
Next year will be the AFC’s turn to host international games — AFC teams get the bonus ninth home game in 2023 — and either the Patriots, Chiefs, or both will host a game in Germany. The NFL has deals to play games in both Munich and Frankfurt over the next four years.
Vollmer said the NFL got big in Germany around the time the Patriots beat the Seahawks in the Super Bowl. Coincidentally, Sunday’s matchup is again Brady vs. Pete Carroll and the Seahawks.
“When we won the 2014 Super Bowl, that is when football was on free TV for the first time in Germany, so that really helped,” Vollmer said. “And having me, obviously, earning a lot of fans here in Germany.”
But the stakes for Buccaneers-Seahawks are bigger than a typical Week 10 game. Because so many German fans are casual, the winner can establish itself as a national favorite.
“I think, generally, 50 percent of [German] football fans have not picked a team yet; they are NFL fans,” said Vollmer. “So it’s an incredible opportunity. I think whoever wins this game, whoever puts on a strong performance, has the chance at least to gain more fans, and in the end that’s what these teams are all about.
“It’s big business, and in the end, winning helps.”
At least one member of the Buccaneers has played in Germany before. Head coach Todd Bowles said he played a preseason game there with the 49ers in the early 1990s. He also was the Jets’ head coach when they played in London in 2015.
The 6-3 Seahawks will offer a tough test for the 4-5 Buccaneers, but that’s not the only challenge on Bowles’s mind.
“You have to deal a lot with the travel,” he said. “The toilet tissue we had to bring, because it’s a lot harder over there than it was here. So that was probably a different experience for us, but they’ve all been fine. The travel has been good.”
Brady, who has played two regular-season games in London and one in Mexico City, said on his “Let’s Go!” podcast during the week that he’s “super excited” to play in Germany.
“We’re playing in this very, very cool arena where Bayern Munich plays … and it looks amazing in pictures,” Brady said. “The chance to go across to another country, play a sport that I love, I have heard there’s 3 million ticket requests for 67,000 seats.
“So the place is going to be rocking, and if it’s anything like what I see in those German Bundesliga games, this is going to be one of the epic games that we’ve ever played in.”
Ben Volin can be reached at ben.volin@globe.com.