Cage The Elephant will headline the halftime show at the 2026 NFL Munich Game, the National Football League said Tuesday, adding a live rock set to the matchup between the New England Patriots and the Detroit Lions on Sunday, Nov. 15 at the FC Bayern Munich Arena.
The performance is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. CET, or 9:30 a.m. ET, and will air live in Germany on RTL and Sky Sport. It lands at a moment when the league is turning the 2026 NFL International Games into a wider entertainment package, with a record seven halftime shows presented by American Express across seven countries and four continents.
For Matt Shultz, the announcement brings the band back to a country it knows well. He said Cage The Elephant have played a lot of shows in Germany over the years and that local crowds have always given the band everything they have. He added that a halftime slot is different from a club or arena set because the band gets one shot in front of a stadium and a global audience, so every second has to count.
The booking also fits the NFL's broader push beyond the United States, where the league said it has staged 62 regular-season games to date. Munich is still a relatively new stop in that map. The 2026 game will be only the third regular-season NFL game staged in the city, after matches in 2022 and 2024, even as the league plans to return again in 2028 as part of a multi-year agreement with FC Bayern Munich and the City of Munich.
Tim Tubito, who oversees league presentation, said Munich has produced some of the most memorable atmospheres of any international game the NFL has staged and that the league wanted a halftime act that could meet that crowd head on. He called Cage The Elephant one of the great live rock bands working today and said Germany's rock tradition and singing football crowd made the pairing feel natural.
What the band will play in Munich remains the open question. The NFL has not said which songs or production elements will anchor the set, only that Cage The Elephant will bring the same energy it brings to its own shows. The rest of the international schedule already has other acts lined up, but Munich now has the one detail fans were waiting for: who gets the stage when the game stops and the spotlight shifts to halftime.
