NFL maiden MCG Melbourne game attracts fans by the swarm

Image: Melbourne Cricket Ground on Facebook

The National Football League’s (NFL’s) first game at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Melbourne, Australia, drew 100,021 fans making it the seventh most-attended regular-season game in the NFL history and just the fourth since 2000 to draw more than 100,000 attendees.
 

Packed-like-sardines Crowd

The NFL’s Melbourne game also outdrew the highest-attended cricket match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. On December 26^th, 2025, Australia and England drew 94,199 fans to the arena. The largest crowd at MCG for an Australian Football League (AFL) game was 121,696 for the 1970 Victorian Football League (VFL) Grand Final. In its current configuration with a capacity of 100,024 the MCG has twice hit that mark for the 2022 and 2023 AFL Grand Finals.
 

Ecstatic Crowd

‘The Athletic’ stated that the 10:35 am local time kickoff didn’t quiet the crowd at the Melbourne Cricket Ground even if the NFL teams Los Angeles Rams and the San Francisco 49ers offenses got off to a sleepy start. (The Netflix pregame broadcast reported that bars around the stadium opened at 6 am).

New York (US)-based the National Football League (NFL) is a professional American football league in the United States. Composed of 32 teams it is divided equally between the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). The NFL is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada and the highest professional level of American football in the world.

The 100,024-seat \Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), also known locally as the ‘G’, is a multipurpose stadium located in Yarra Park in the suburb of East Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Melbourne (Australia)-based the Australian Football League (AFL) is the pre-eminent professional competition of Australian Rules football. It was originally named the Victorian Football League (VFL) and was founded in 1896 as a breakaway competition from the Victorian Football Association (VFA) with its inaugural season in 1897. It changed its name to the Australian Football League in 1990 after expanding its competition to the other Australian States in the 1980s.

The Australian Rules football or Aussie Rules, and also known simply as Australian football, football or footy in Australia, is a contact sport played between two teams of 18 players on an oval field, often a modified cricket ground. The points are scored by kicking the oval ball between the central goal posts (worth six points) or between a central and outer post (worth one point, otherwise known as a ‘behind’).

The Victorian Football League (VFL) is an Australian Rules football competition in Australia operated by the Australian Football League (AFL) as a second-tier, regional, semi-professional competition.
 

Largest Stadium

‘The Athletic’ further stated that the MCG is the largest stadium in the Southern Hemisphere with an official capacity of 100,024. The NFL home stadium capacities range from about 60,000 to 82,500 at the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey (US), the home of the NFL teams New York Giants and New York Jets.
 
The most-attended NFL regular-season games are:

• September 20^th, 2009: The Dallas Cowboys vs. the New York Giants at the 80,000-capacity Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas (US) (now the AT&T Stadium). Attendance – 105,121 (about 30,000 standing-room only);
• October 2^nd, 2005: The San Francisco 49ers vs. the Arizona Cardinals at the 87,523-capacity Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, Mexico. Attendance – 103, 467; and
• November 10^th, 1957: The San Francisco 49ers vs. the Los Angeles Rams at the 77,500-capacity Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Attendance – 102,368.

 

Record Attendance

The last time the NFL drew more than 100,000 fans in the regular season was in Week 17 of the 2009 campaign when the Dallas Cowboys-Philadelphia Eagles game recorded 100,621 fans in Dallas. That was the same season that Dallas opened the Cowboys Stadium and the standing room increased capacity at the new venue.

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