MUNICH (AP) — “Leo” stood on a table and encouraged fans to cheer on Barry Sanders as the Detroit Lions great used a mallet to tap a wooden keg of beer at the team pub in Munich.
Leo, whose shaggy mane sports the colors of the German flag, is the Lions’ German mascot who has been appearing around Munich this week ahead of Detroit’s game against the New England Patriots on Sunday.
Click to Gallery
Atlanta Falcons running back Bijan Robinson (7) celebrates with a mascot after scoring a touchdown during an NFL football game against the Cincinnati Bengals in Madrid, Spain, Sunday, Nov. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Doug Benc)
Kansas City Chiefs mascot K.C. Wolf poses for a photo at the Chiefs House: Christmas Edition event in Munich, Germany, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Sean Ryan)
New England Patriots mascot Pat Patriot competes in drills with participants at the NFL Flag All Abilities Clinic with Patriots in Munich, Germany, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Doug Benc)
Kansas City Chiefs mascot K.C. Wolf poses for a photo with a fan at the Chiefs House: Christmas Edition event in Munich, Germany, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Sean Ryan)
NFL teams are using mascot diplomacy to win over international fans, and several teams have created German versions of their fun and furry characters with names like Wolfgang, Fritz and Leo.
The funsters are welcome additions in Germany, where fans are accustomed to the mascots of Bundesliga soccer clubs.
“We like it when the mascots are running around or making a show in the stadium. It’s very funny, and the atmosphere, we love it,” local fan Theresa Goebel said Saturday during a visit to the Lions fan fest in Munich.
Germany is the most sought-after country among NFL teams, 11 of which have league-granted marketing rights in the country. That’s the most in the NFL’s global markets program.
Several of the mascots are in Munich this weekend as all 11 teams with German rights are holding fan-related events.
The Lions created Leo last year to join longtime mascot Roary. The team also has Reizinho for Brazil, where the Lions also have marketing rights. Reizinho wears No. 10 in a nod to Brazilian soccer culture.
The Kansas City Chiefs already had KC Wolf when they decided a year ago to share his burden with four other mascots catering to some of the team’s designated markets: KC Wolfgang with “disciplined energy” for Germany, KC O’Wolf with “a touch of leprechaun energy” for Ireland, KC Wolfington “with cheeky charm” for Britain, and KC Lobazo “with presence and flair” for Spain.
But the first NFL team to add a German mascot was the Atlanta Falcons. Fritz Falcon was introduced in August 2024, joining longtime mascot Freddie Falcon. Fritz was front and center in Berlin last year when the Falcons played the Indianapolis Colts. Fritz is also in Munich this week and ran a 40-yard dash — naturally tripping and falling in the process.
“People love the Americana but we see that to reach that additional layer of fandom we do have to, collectively the league’s clubs have to go that extra mile and have to find ways how we can also talk to the fans,” said Alexander Steinforth, general manager of NFL Germany.
“And that’s why those local angles are super important for us. Teams kind of reinventing a second mascot — it’s great, it's fun,” he added. “But it’s just one layer of things that are happening when it comes to trying to be local.”
Some teams stick with their regular mascot for international duty. The Colts' mascot Blue was a fan favorite in Berlin and the team recently partnered with German lifestyle brand Lobster & Lemonade to bring “limited edition ‘Blue’ collection to Germany.” The jerseys and hoodies feature Blue throwing a pie.
New England stalwart “Pat Patriot” — fictional birth date July 4, 1776 — also goes on the road with team. He's been visiting fans in beer halls as well as playing flag football with local kids.
The Seattle Seahawks added “Bam C. Hawk” as the team's international mascot two years ago. Goebel, the local fan, was more familiar with the regular mascot. She owns a “Blitz” figurine.
“We have it in our living room," she said. "We love it, really.”
AP Sports Writer Ciarán Fahey in Berlin contributed to this report.
See AP’s full NFL coverage here
Atlanta Falcons running back Bijan Robinson (7) celebrates with a mascot after scoring a touchdown during an NFL football game against the Cincinnati Bengals in Madrid, Spain, Sunday, Nov. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Doug Benc)
Kansas City Chiefs mascot K.C. Wolf poses for a photo at the Chiefs House: Christmas Edition event in Munich, Germany, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Sean Ryan)
New England Patriots mascot Pat Patriot competes in drills with participants at the NFL Flag All Abilities Clinic with Patriots in Munich, Germany, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Doug Benc)
Kansas City Chiefs mascot K.C. Wolf poses for a photo with a fan at the Chiefs House: Christmas Edition event in Munich, Germany, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Sean Ryan)
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. air travel should be fully recovered from the longest nationwide ground stop in 25 years by the end of Sunday, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said Saturday.
Bedford said the flights “will still have delays and cancellations” on Saturday but promised that the “worst is behind us.”
His comments came as airlines across the U.S. worked to recover from a ground stoppage that lasted four hours, stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers.
New technology being added to the nation’s air traffic control system overloaded antiquated equipment and caused “intermittent” communications and radar gaps, leading to the flight shutdown of more than four hours, Trump administration officials said.
Planes were taking flight and landing Saturday, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said. But the effects could be felt for days. Officials say the system will likely return to normal in time to handle the Thanksgiving travel rush.
The nationwide stop was the first since January 2023, when another key Federal Aviation Administration computer system that sends notices to pilots malfunctioned, and the second since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Andrew Charlton, an aviation consultant, said Friday's stoppage affected about a quarter of the 45,000 flights in the U.S. each day.
“The knock-on effect of that is incredible,” said Charlton, managing director of Aviation Advocacy. “The aircraft doesn’t just fly from A to B and back to B and then stop. It then moves onto C and then over to E and around and around and around. It is, of course, exacerbated if you’re talking about long-haul flights, international flights over the Atlantic or over the Pacific.”
At airports, passengers stared at screens showing delays or rushed to find buses or trains to their destinations.
Emily Brown and her 14-year-old daughter waited more than four hours Friday at the Dallas airport for their flight to Columbus, Ohio, before giving up. They were traveling to surprise her daughter’s best friend. Instead, she had to settle for phoning the friend through tears in the airport, Brown said.
“She saved up her money to buy her own ticket, and she’s planned this whole weekend,” Brown said. “Now we’re not sure when we’re gonna be able to go.”
A cheerful Southwest Airlines gate agent greeted passengers at Dallas Love Field at dawn Saturday with, “Good morning, good morning,” then repeatedly said all flights were full and asked passengers to have boarding passes ready to expedite the process and help keep flights moving.
Sports teams scheduled to play this weekend adjusted game start times, searched for hotel rooms, rescheduled flights and chartered buses. No. 19 Mississippi’s game at Oklahoma was delayed a full day to Sunday. Start times for some other games were pushed back hours.
FlightAware, a website that tracks flights, said more than 4,100 flights had been canceled. Cirium, a similar site, put that number above 3,200 flights.
Corbyn Wascher's flight was on the tarmac at the Charlotte, N.C., airport for four hours Friday on his way home to Moline, Illinois, from a conference in Miami. The 37-year-old high school teacher paid $100 to take an Uber to a hotel 25 minutes from the airport after he was unable to find a flight until Saturday afternoon to Chicago.
At London’s Heathrow Airport, several flights to and from the U.S. were listed as delayed or canceled Saturday.
“While U.S. flights have resumed, there may be some follow-on disruption as airlines work to rebook affected passengers and get all services back to normal,” said Tim Johnson, consumer director at the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority.
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told reporters at the White House that no one was in any danger as more than 3,000 flights in the air at the time of the grounding order landed safely.
Duffy blamed Congress for failing to approve more funding for new technology, while downplaying the fact that trying to implement new fixes overtaxed the system. He suggested more disruptions might occur.
“We didn’t think we would have this kind of outage. We did,” he said. “We were able to review what went wrong, and then reboot the system and go. But, you will have more of these.”
Duffy said the failure involved old equipment and was not linked to the FAA’s new AI-powered system, which the agency is rolling out to help predict problems in the sky.
The problem was due to updating a system that can never shut down, Charlton said.
“What you’re watching here is trying to change the tires of your car when the car’s going at 80 miles an hour down the expressway, because nothing stops in aviation,” Charlton said. “It’s a 24/7 operation. And to make changes on the fly, if you’ll pardon that pun, is incredibly complex and dangerous.”
The FAA already replaced thousands of old copper wires with fiber optic lines and upgraded hundreds of radio systems as part of the overhaul that began last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion in funding. Duffy and the White House are pushing for $30 billion more to complete the work.
The problem appeared similar to a regional air traffic control communication outage in September that snarled hundreds of flights across the Northeast, although that disruption was linked to a construction crew cutting a fiber optic line. Aging equipment was also blamed for brief radar outages last year that disrupted Newark airport.
Aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo said the difference this time was the nationwide scale of the disruption, which left controllers unable to reliably talk to pilots.
“If you don’t have that ability, whether it’s because the old wires that they have are just run down or for whatever reason, you’ve got to stop airplanes on the ground and not put them in the air, where you’re going to risk not being able to communicate with them,” said Arroyo, a former United Airlines pilot.
It differed from the one after 9/11 because planes were not being told to land immediately and pilots likely were able to communicate with ground controllers at airports, Arroyo said.
Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska, and Golden from Seattle. Associated Press journalists David Keyton in Berlin; Stephen Hawkins in Dallas; Mead Gruver in Fort Collins, Colorado; Jessica Hill in Las Vegas; Ali Swenson in Chicago; Alex Veiga and Jaimie Ding in Los Angeles; Seung Min Kim and Aamer Madhani in Washington; Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City; and Brian Melley in London contributed to this report.
Passenger watch as workers unload luggage from a United plane as flights are delayed at Los Angeles International Airport Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Ethan Swope)
Passengers wait as flights are delayed inside a terminal at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
The sun sets over Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in DFW Airport, Texas, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights nationwide. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)
A passenger moves through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport as all flights are canceled or delayed, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
People wait at a terminal at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Arlington, Va., after the FAA issued a nationwide ground stop. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)
An agent helps travelers at a ticketing desk at LaGuardia Airport in New York, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights nationwide. (AP Photo/Ryan Murphy)
