Only one thing is more exciting and more celebrated than a Jude Bellingham Calvin Klein commercial in Madrid this week. No, not Duran Duran's live show on Friday night. Of course, we are talking about the NFL's return to Spain, where Bellingham and Real Madrid's iconic Bernabeu opens its doors to gridiron for a second straight year when the Cincinnati Bengals take on the Atlanta Falcons in the resumption of football's European roadtrip this Sunday.
Madrid will take centre stage once again for the seventh of a record nine international games being played in 2026, arriving a fortnight on from the NFL's Paris debut and ahead of its return to Munich later this month. In doing so it welcomes an MVP and Super Bowl contender to town, so too perhaps the best running back in the sport. As for the aforementioned MVP candidate, Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow arrives armed with a growing Super Bowl impatience as he and Zac Taylor seek to cash in on one of the league's borderline-unstoppable offenses.
He has tasted Lombardi heartbreak, he has endured post-Big Dance hangovers and weathered both the mental and physical impact of contention-hindering injury setbacks. But he has momentum and a long-awaited fast start with which to launch Cincinnati's Championship surge. Burrow was blunt in the offseason of the need for urgency, placing a 'this is it' last-chance-saloon pressure on his own organisation in view of a Super Bowl run.
He has answered his own call emphatically with chart-topping numbers over the first half of the campaign. The former No 1 overall pick is 195 of 267 passing with a league-high completion percentage of 73 while amassing 2,115 yards and a league-high 20 touchdowns to six interceptions. His 302.1 yards per game are the most in the NFL, he leads all quarterbacks with a success rate of 55.3 and is first in completion percentage over expected.
"He's playing his best football that he has ever played in his career in my opinion right now," said Falcons defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich. To put into context the dominance of both Burrow and Cincinnati's No 1-ranked passing attack, the Bengals are seventh in total yards and second in scoring despite ranking 30th in the running game. In fact, the Bengals have posted just one run of 15 or more yards this season, the fewest in the league.
It has been uncontainable aerial bombardment, Tee Higgins second only to Jaxon Smith-Njigba with 726 receiving yards while Ja'Marr Chase has 492 yards. There isn't a more explosive or more frightening offensive trip currently, and as much has always meant that Cincinnati's search for defensive improvement need not be transformative, but merely enough to float somewhere around middle ground. "Usually a team kind of has one number one guy and they have two of them," said Falcons safety Xavier Watts of Higgins and Chase.
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