There’s no word yet on whether the Broncos mascot, Miles, will change his name to Kilometers temporarily, but the team has several fan and community events set for their week-long stay in London.
The Broncos are hosting a fan event at The Admiralty Club near Trafalgar Square on Saturday from 1-5 p.m. London time and a pub-to-pitch style parade beginning at 11 a.m. at The Antwerp Arms near Tottenham on Sunday.
“You make a trip like this overseas with a football-first mindset,” Broncos president Damani Leech told The Denver Post. “This is about the game and trying to get a win, but it’s also an opportunity to connect with our existing fans and deepen our relationship with those fans. I found, last time we played there, not only are there Broncos fans from Colorado who made the trip, but there are Broncos fans from all across the U.S. and Canada who use it as an opportunity to go to a different away game site.
“Not to mention all the fans we have across the U.K., Ireland and across Europe. It’s a great opportunity to deepen our relationship with those fans.”
The last time Denver played in London, Leech and the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group had been on the job for a little more than two months. Now they’re well-established and have a better sense of what Broncos Country looks like in the U.K.
They’ve got more than 1,200 fans signed up for their pair of events.
“Last time we played there, I was just genuinely surprised,” Leech said of the number of Broncos fans.
Denver’s partner in the NFL’s global markets program is Mexico — there haven’t been games there the past couple of years as Estadio Azteca gets renovated ahead of the 2026 World Cup — but the Broncos, “recognize that we have fans there and fans will be traveling, so we do want to use this as an opportunity to deepen our relationship with them.”
In addition to the weekend fan events, the Broncos are also hosting a flag football clinic for about 60 middle schoolers at Grey Court School in London, which Leech called a “really special” event that will feature Broncos owner Carrie Walton-Penner.
“We’ll have Miles, alumni and cheer,” Leech said. “The school is part of the NFL’s flag football program, and the team that’s participating plays as the Broncos, so there’s a nice connection there with that group. That’ll be fun.
“It’s great from a community standpoint, it’s great from a flag football standpoint. That sport alone is just growing. It’s really important to the league as a strategic lever, and obviously, it’s going to be in the Olympics in L.A. in 2028. So for all those reasons, it made sense for us.”
And that of the Broncos’ last 15 postseason games in Denver, eight of them — per Pro-Football-Reference.com — were played in temperatures 37 degrees or warmer? The last five Empower Field playoff temps: 43, 46, 40, 41, 63.
Snow down, Broncomaniacs.
Denver won’t just be playing in Super Bowls over the next decade.
We’ll be hosting them.
“The Broncos have been, since Day 1 of the franchise, an important fabric and part of the community in Denver,” Broncos CEO Greg Penner told The Denver Post’s Parker Gabriel in an exclusive interview. “Finding a site of that size that we could weave into the downtown area and all that just was incredibly unique, combined with the historic nature of the site. …
“We have the bones of the old railyard and a couple of buildings and a unique site that we think enables us to create something unique and special, both with the stadium and the mixed-use development around it.”
The Walton-Penner Group just raised the roof without raising taxes. Despite overtures from Lone Tree and Aurora, they’re keeping the Broncos in Denver. Where they belong.
In other words, Penner and his wife Carrie Walton-Penner read the room the way Peyton Manning read defenses at the line of scrimmage.
“We’re really thrilled that they came with that partnership mentality and not, like we’ve seen in other cities, ‘You give us a bunch of money or we’ll leave,’” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis told The Post. “I think the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group is deeply committed to Denver and deeply committed to the community.”
Not anymore. You want a venue with 60,000-plus seats that can host Taylor Swift in March or April? Check. You want a venue where football fans can still feel the elements on an autumn gameday? Got that, too. Open that bad boy up and let the Colorado sunshine in.
We don’t need the cool kids on the coasts to tell us Denver is the best darn sports city in America. But building a multi-purpose stadium at Burnham Yard gives the Front Range many more chances to prove it — and on the largest stages imaginable.
New Orleans officials recently estimated that Super Bowl LIX was worth more than $1.25 billion in economic impact to the Crescent City. San Antonio boasted an economic bump of $440 million from hosting the Men’s Basketball Final Four this past April.
You wouldn’t want a piece of that?
The Penners do. And thank goodness.
“The goal is to create something that is active on gameday,” Penner stressed to The Post, “but also (for) the rest of the year.”
There’s nothing wrong with Empower Field, which opened in 2001. There’s nothing all that right about it, either, at least from a real estate purview. Even the best ideas, like the best concrete, get weathered by time.
Pro sports owners are playing a different level of Monopoly than they were three decades ago. It’s not just about owning Tennessee Avenue anymore. It’s about gobbling up St. James Place and New York Avenue next door, then making sure a row of strip malls, restaurants and hotels get built on top of them. Collect the rent, funnel some of that money to Bo Nix and Nik Bonitto, pass GO, collect $200. Rinse. Repeat.
Stadiums are so expensive to build that a single-use facility, especially one available for 12-20 dates a year instead of 50-60, isn’t cost-effective. The land around Empower Field is owned by the Metropolitan Football Stadium District. Whatever’s built at Burnham Yard will be owned by the Walton-Penner Group and designed with a neighborhood in mind, not just the stadium itself.
Oh, there will be bumps. That’s inevitable. The city’s slated to foot the bill for public improvements related to connectivity to the stadium — exit ramps, roads, RTD, etc. And Tuesday’s announcements didn’t mention Personal Seat Licenses (PSLs) — a one-time fee paid by fans for the “right” to buy a seat.
If there’s a cloud rolling in behind all those rainbows, it’s that. PSLs seem inevitable here, too — a survey the Broncos sent to fans in 2023 included that very subject.
Would a Super Bowl be worth that? Everyone who let hosting a World Cup slip away from soccer-mad Denver in 2026 should land a red card for life. With this new district, hopefully, it won’t happen again.
Five years down the line, who knows? In 2020, as a franchise, the Broncos looked listless and lost — a sleeping giant resting on the laurels of orange-and-blue bloods everywhere.
The Walton-Penner ownership group woke everybody up. The beast is taking names now. It’s buying up land. It’s drawing castles in the sky.
For what it’s worth, Penner sounds as if he wants to keep the lid off as much as possible. And for as many Broncos games as feasible. He gets it. All of it.
“We wanted something that is true to our roots here and looked at domed stadiums,” Penner told The Post. “But (we) just thought that wouldn’t enable us to take advantage of Colorado sunsets and Mile High views and playing in the elements if we choose to.”
Give the Penners an inch, they’ll take a Yard. All the way to the bank.
Saylor Swanson says it so casually you can almost miss it.
“I’ve always pictured myself playing quarterback,” Swanson, an Arvada West High junior, said Wednesday morning at the Broncos’ training facility.
She has been, really, for the past two years playing flag football in CHSAA’s pilot program.
She will be this fall, too, but in a slightly different capacity. She’ll be the quarterback for her team’s varsity program after Colorado on Tuesday became the 11th state to make girls flag football a sanctioned high school sport.
On Wednesday, Broncos owner Carrie Walton Penner, team executives and CHSSA commissioner Mike Krueger talked about the journey to get to this point, but also about what comes next.
Broadly, it’s a similar set of feelings for Swanson and the players as it is for the people tasked with implementing the sport and growing it around the state. It’ll be similar to the past two years in some ways, bigger in some ways and exciting all the same. And there’s plenty of work and growth ahead.
“I’m so glad it’s actually taken off,” Saylor said. “I played football when I was a little kid with my brothers and I’ve always wanted to play. I never expected it to be an option. I played co-ed when I was younger and I kind of quit because the boys were getting rough and I was the only girl.
“I’ve always wanted to play for an all-girls team and high school, playing with my friends, it’s just so awesome.”
The Broncos made it clear that the organization will be part of the next phase, too. They’ll continue providing funding and the team’s vice president of community impact and Denver Broncos Foundation executive director Allie Engelken also said they’ll provide education on grant opportunities through Nike, USA Football and other resources available to schools.
“We’re excited to continue to support this sport this season and beyond,” Engelken said. “We do that through not only financial commitment for schools as well as high-impact for youth, but also through a lot of programmatic elements.”
As it pertains to girls flag football, Engelken said those include, “officials and referee recruitment and training. Coaches clinics and sanctioning. Ensuring coaches feel prepared to coach an emerging sport. That includes a regional NFL Flag tournament. … that will continue in partnership with the NFL.
“We see our opportunity for support to continue to grow.”
Krueger noted many school districts face tight budgets in the first place — ”I’ve yet to talk to an athletic director who calls me and says, ‘I’m trying to figure out what to do with all the money I have,’” he said – but expressed confidence that girls flag football is well worth the relatively modest investment.
“The neat thing about girls flag football and flag football in general is that the barriers to it are not hard to overcome,” Krueger said. “It doesn’t take a lot of equipment. The jamboree styles that were incorporated, I know in talking to my colleges across the state — the athletic and activities directors — when you can run three games on one full-sized, 120-yard field, that makes the facility availability and equipment cost (more manageable) and you don’t need 30 or 40 people out there to have a team.”
Not only that, but the data collected so far shows more than half of the pilot program participants weren’t playing another fall sport. To Engelken and the others here Wednesday, that suggests the sport is poised to provide not only an alternate avenue but a new path altogether for girls around the state.
“That’s why this moment matters,” Walton Penner said. “It matters for every girl who loves football but has never seen a place for herself. It matters for every student who has watched others find their passion. For every high school kid looking for her team, her community, her people, this matters.”
