Games to be played outside U.S. borders

NEW ORLEANS -- Two NFL regular-season games will be played each year outside the United States in Mexico, Canada and Europe, starting in 2007.

The plan, first announced last month, was approved Tuesday at the recommendation of new commissioner Roger Goodell.

No specific sites were given for the games. But when the proposal originally was disclosed, the league suggested that Britain and Germany likely would host the European games.

The plan would be set up so that teams would rotate over a 16-year period, with each team playing outside the country twice over that span, once as a visitor, the other as a home team. That means a team would lose one home game during that span.

In 2005, the NFL staged its first regular-season game outside the United States when the Arizona Cardinals hosted the San Francisco 49ers in Mexico City. A crowd of 103,467 flocked to Azteca Stadium, the largest crowd for a regular-season game in NFL history.

-- The Associated Press