It took the Green Bay Packers 10 hours and 40 minutes to reach São Paulo, Brazil, on their Boeing 777-300ER. The Philadelphia Eagles, flying on the same type of aircraft, had a slightly shorter flight plan of nine and a half hours — one way.
And that’s just the players and coaches plus whatever could fit in the cargo areas.
But when it came to transporting everything the two teams needed on the road, it took more than three months — and three airplanes plus a cargo ship — to get everything to the first NFL game in South America, which kicks off at 8:15 p.m. ET Friday on Peacock.
“It’s hard every week,” Packers director of logistics/team travel Matt Klein said. “This is probably just a little bit harder.
“It’s a big undertaking whether you take a team to Chicago or Detroit or whether you take it to Brazil. I think there’s just a lot of things that factor into it that are just different than traveling within the states.”
It has been an exhaustive undertaking for those directly involved in the planning. Eagles assistant general manager Jon Ferrari joked there were only three days since the trip became official in April that he and director of team and travel logistics Dan Ryan didn’t talk about Brazil, and one of them was the Fourth of July.
“To create that normal atmosphere for the players and coaches when we get there, it’s a lot to think about,” Ferrari said.
Taking an NFL team on the road is a process like none other in professional sports. Now try doing it in a stadium that has never hosted an American football game, in a country where the NFL has never played and players have even voiced safety concerns, leading São Paulo to tighten security ahead of games, according to the Brazilian state.
“It’s a lot of education on the front end,” Joe Valentine, the NFL’s manager of game and team operations, said. “For example, the airport authorities understanding that this is not like soccer. We’re going to have 40,000 pounds of equipment per team. [NFL teams] come with a travel party of 190 to 200 people. It’s not 60.
“It’s not that they can’t execute it, but it’s trying to set the expectations that this is very different from what you have done — and that goes across every aspect of the team operation.”
PACKERS PUNTER DANIEL Whelan’s locker at Lambeau Field is the closest to where first-year equipment manager Chris Kuehn and his staff do the bulk of their daily work.
“Everything we have here, we’ve got to bring over there,” Whelan said before the trip. “It’s so much work for those guys.”
He doesn’t know the half of it.
Even before it was announced on April 10 that the Packers would be the Eagles’ Week 1 opponent, Klein and a contingent from the Packers flew with Eagles officials, which included Ferrari and Ryan, to Brazil to get the lay of the land. The Cleveland Browns, who were in the running to be the Eagles’ foe, also sent representatives. They inspected the stadium and practice facilities and looked at hotel options.
In June, Klein returned to São Paulo with Packers director of performance nutrition Adam Korzun to meet with the hotel about meals. Eagles performance nutrition coordinator Stephanie Coppola also coordinated with their team’s hotel to ensure desired food quality and preparation. While the Packers transported their own drinks and snacks (an undertaking of its own), customs limited what could be brought into the country.
“They are relying completely on the hotel and their chef to prepare all their meals,” Valentine said. “They’re not sending any meat or anything like that. It’s more just trying to match it with their nutrition.”
Some of what the Packers and Eagles did send, however, has been in Brazil for weeks.
Three components were used to get everything — and everyone — there:
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Shipping crates aboard an ocean cargo liner that left in early June
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A shared cargo plane that arrived in Brazil earlier in the week
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Individual aircrafts to transport the teams
Valentine described the items that went by boat as “stuff that’s consumable, stuff that can’t go on an airplane” as well as the basics needed to play a game in a place that has never hosted American football.
“It’s basically like we’re starting from scratch in every aspect,” he said. “We didn’t have any pre-existing equipment — so pylons, down markers, goalposts, goalpost pads, benches. Everything that goes on the field needs to be sourced. That was all part of our ocean freight.”
Everything that went on the cargo ship had to be itemized on an ATA Carnet, essentially a passport for merchandise. The painstaking task of listing items one by one took weeks.
“If I send a box that has, say, four T-shirts and three sweatshirts and two pairs of shoes — or whatever,” Klein said, “you have to say there’s two pairs of Nikes and they were made in Thailand, and then the shirts were made somewhere else. And you have to put the sizes, what it’s made out of. Same with every single medical item — a box of gauze pads, 25 rolls of this kind of tape and 50 rolls of this kind of tape, ibuprofen, shampoo that you take for the locker that has to be shipped because it has chemicals in it.
“It’s been on site, it cleared customs [and was] sitting in our storage.”
The cargo plane carried most of the sideline equipment teams needed for game day.
The final component, of course, was the team planes. One of the Packers’ initial concerns about playing in Brazil centered on team travel and whether they could get a large enough plane to land at Green Bay’s Austin Straubel International Airport. If not, they would have to bus to Milwaukee, a two-hour ride.
“We ultimately did, but it was a challenge,” Valentine said. “The type of plane that they wanted was hard to get, and then you add the difficulty to get it in and out of Green Bay.”
The larger plane means more pods for players to stretch out in. The Eagles made other adjustments to account for the longer commute. Instead of the usual one meal during air travel, they had two. There was a focus on extra hydration before and during the flight. And the group was encouraged to stay awake during the trip so they could sleep well once they arrived in Brazil on Thursday night.
None of this is cheap, either.
A league source said it costs teams between $750,000 and $1.5 million in expenses for a typical road game. The Brazil game far exceeded that, so the NFL covered the difference between what it would cost the Packers to get to Philadelphia and the cost to get to Brazil because it was originally an Eagles home game.
The league made sure that each team had the same amount of resources for the undertaking of moving the operation overseas, Ferrari said, “to make sure everything was equitable” for the two teams set to compete Friday night.
Once on the field at Arena Corinthians, the players should notice a grass that is similar to the kind they play on at their home stadiums. Eagles head groundskeeper Tony Leonard has been working with NFL field director Nick Pappas “for months,” Ferrari said, to get the conditions just right for an NFL game.
“It’s a soccer pitch, but it’s been sort of retrofitted,” Ferrari said, “so it’s in great shape.”
Then there were the last-minute concerns. The team did a “passport day,” as Klein called it, during the mandatory minicamp in June, to make sure every player had the proper paperwork. They also planned for what would happen if general manager Brian Gutekunst added a player who wasn’t with them in the offseason and did not have a passport. In that case, they would take that player to the Chicago Passport Agency on an off day to expedite the process. The Eagles similarly had all the necessary visas in place to account for roster changes.
Malik Willis, the backup quarterback the Packers traded for two weeks ago, said upon arrival in Green Bay he already had a passport from the Titans’ game in London last season.
ONE THING THE Eagles have going for them is they have a resident expert on the area in quarterback Tanner McKee, who lived in São Paulo for a month and in Brazil for more than two years while on mission trips. He is fluent in Brazil’s primary language, Portuguese, and has been a resource for those curious about what to expect during their stay.
“It will be fun for the whole team to kind of experience the culture — it’s an amazing culture and so I’m excited for everyone to dip into that,” McKee said.
“It’s similar to the people of Philadelphia: Anytime you show a little bit of love, they’re going to love you back 10 times more, and so just having an NFL team there and present, fans are going to love it. I’ve had … hundreds of Brazilians follow me on social media, hitting me up, asking me questions, so I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to be down there.”
Since the team flew in Wednesday night and will leave right after the game, there won’t be much time for exploring. The Eagles also held a small community event at the stadium after their walk-through Thursday.
Even with all the planning and preparation, there are still unknowns and unforeseen circumstances that could have arisen.
“The trick is you’ve got to have a lot more foresight in how you’re planning it out compared to just going to Detroit,” Klein said. “There’s a little more trust now because you’re putting stuff on [a ship and a plane] and you’re not with it.
“It’s out of your hand sometimes. That’s the big thing with this trip is there’s a lot of things that are out of our control, whether that’s because the league is operating it or because it’s in another country.”
