Get your passport ready: Bears could be headed to Spain in 2024

If you’re planning on catching the next Chicago Bears game in Europe, you better make sure your passport is up to date. It could come as soon as next season in Spain, according to NBC Sports’ Peter King.

“Spain and Brazil in the next two years, Paris in 2025 or beyond, and Dublin at some point soon,” King wrote Monday. “The Steelers would like to play a designated home game there at some point soon and would likely have nine home games in 2025 and 2027.

‘Significant rumors here about Spain being the game site for 2024, likely with the Bears as the home team. But stadia in Brazil—after the World Cup and the Olympics in the country in the past seven years—are a bit better, and that could be a factor as well.”

Coming off back-to-back horrendous seasons, the Chicago Bears may seem like an odd choice to grow the sport internationally. But the Bears were one of two teams the NFL teams allocated to Spain in January 2022 as part of the NFL’s International Home Market Area program. The Dolphins were the other, and they just played an international game against the Chiefs in Week 9.

So, yeah, if Spain gets an NFL game, the Bears will be one of the two teams playing in it.

Maybe I’m a buzzkill, but I’m against giving up a home game for an international appearance. It hurts a team like the Bears, who need every advantage they can get to win right now. Playing a home game in a foreign country seems a bit unfair.

Perhaps the Bears won’t be the team that gets the game if they don’t have enough superstars to be a good draw. Justin Fields has a chance to be one, and if he finishes the 2023 season the same way he finished 2022, fans around the world will jump at the opportunity to see him play live.

We aren’t there yet, and we won’t be until Fields returns from his dislocated right thumb, which could be as early as Week 10’s Thursday night game against the Carolina Panthers.

If you’re into the international game scene, you’re probably pumped up by King’s intel. If you’re like me, you’re a little bummed out. And in a 2023 season full of disappointing moments, traveling across the pond for a home game in 2024 will feel like a punch in the gut (unless you love it, then you’ll be really happy).