The Bengals are sending a 201-member traveling party to Madrid for Sunday’s game against the Falcons, and the trip begins Tuesday night with an eight-hour flight on an American Airlines jet. The scale of the move has forced the team to treat the trip like a temporary relocation, not a simple road game.
The plane has 306 seats, including 60 lay-flat seats and eight oversized ones made for big people, a detail that mattered enough for Jeff Brickner to make it part of the planning. He has spent the past six months putting the trip together, while the team prepares to build a temporary Spanish-style Paycor Stadium in Madrid so the football operation can look and feel as close to home as possible.
That is why the keyword is drawing attention now: the Bengals have not played an international game since 2019, and this is only their third such game ever. The trip was announced in May, and since then the work has spread across passports, inventory, customs forms, electrical gear, and the kind of setup details that rarely get noticed until they go wrong.
Adam Knollman started his inventory work the day the trip was announced, and he said the list has to include the quantity, dimensions, country of origin, and contents of every trunk and hamper. The team is also carrying an extra 2,000 pounds of just-in-case equipment, and even the clothing inventory has to specify shirts, shorts, pants, socks, and the percentage of cotton or other material in each item. That is the kind of paperwork-heavy burden that comes with trying to recreate a home operation on another continent.
There is also the human side of the machinery. Jake Kiser checked plug adapters and step-down voltage convertors for Spain's electrical system, while Travis Brammer and Roberto Cardona were part of the Sunday-night setup crew heading out for Madrid. Cardona speaks fluent Spanish and has helped Brickner translate in all areas, a role that becomes more important when every decision has to land cleanly in a country where the team is trying to run on a normal schedule despite the distance.
Brickner has said the point is to keep the players and coaches from having to think about logistics at all. That is the tension inside the whole trip: the operation has to be exact so the football can feel ordinary, even though nothing about moving 201 people, heavy equipment, and a full game-day setup across the Atlantic is ordinary. Joe Burrow enters the week with an NFL-leading 20 touchdown passes, and by Sunday the Bengals will have to prove that all this precision was not just for show.
The next step is simple to describe and hard to execute: board Tuesday night, land in Spain, and make the temporary stadium work in time for Sunday in Madrid. If the crew has done its job, the only thing left for the team to notice will be the game itself.
