WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The National Football League will host its 2027 draft in Washington, D.C., U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Monday at the White House, bringing the league’s biggest off-season event to the nation’s capital for the first time since 1940.
The three-day event that regularly attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors is expected to take place on the National Mall, a stone’s throw from the White House.
The announcement comes days after the Washington Commanders struck a deal with the District of Columbia to return to the site of the club’s former RFK Stadium, where Washington played from 1961-1996 and enjoyed the most successful era in franchise history.
The new stadium is expected to open in the nation’s capital in 2030.
The draft has rotated through multiple cities since the NFL ended New York’s five-decade-long reign as host in 2015. The three-day 2025 draft was held last month at Lambeau Field, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, home of the Green Bay Packers, with next year’s selection of college players joining the NFL to be held in Pittsburgh.
Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to attend a Super Bowl in February, where the crowd at the Superdome in New Orleans greeted him with a mix of cheers and boos, but he has a long and complicated history with the league.
Trump bought into the doomed upstart United States Football League in the 1980s and sought to have it compete directly with the NFL.
In 2017, during his first term in the White House, he spent weeks attacking the NFL over players who knelt during the pre-game playing of the national anthem in protest over police brutality and racial inequality.
(Reporting by Gram Slattery in Washington, D.C., writing by Amy Tennery in New York, Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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