U2 to Headline Halftime of the NFL's First Thanksgiving Eve Game on Netflix

The NFL is inventing a new holiday, and it has hired the biggest stadium band on earth to bless it. U2 will headline the halftime show of the league's first-ever Thanksgiving Eve game — the Green Bay Packers at the Los Angeles Rams on Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2026, at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood — streaming on Netflix, according to SPIN and Reuters via Field Level Media. Kickoff is set for 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT, with Netflix coverage beginning at 6 p.m. ET, per the Rams' official announcement.

Thanksgiving Day football is sacred ground in the NFL. Thanksgiving Eve has never existed as a football date at all. The league and Netflix are not just scheduling a game; they are trying to annex the night before the holiday, the one evening when half the country has just traveled home, nobody has to work the next morning, and a national audience is sitting around looking for something to watch. And they have booked the band that practically invented the modern stadium spectacle to make sure it feels like an occasion.

A first in league history

The game will be the first ever played on Thanksgiving Eve in NFL history, according to the Rams. The Packers visit the Rams at SoFi Stadium, with kickoff at 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT on Wednesday, Nov. 25. Netflix's coverage starts at 6 p.m. ET, and local viewers can also watch on NBC-4, per the Rams' official site. The halftime performance will be produced by Jesse Collins Entertainment, according to the Rams.

The scheduling is aggressive and, frankly, clever. Thanksgiving Eve is one of the biggest social nights of the year, and the NFL has simply decided it would like to own it. Putting a marquee matchup — Green Bay visiting Los Angeles — under a first-of-its-kind banner, on a global streamer, with a halftime show designed to be talked about the next day at the dinner table, is how you turn a Wednesday in November into a tradition by declaration.

U2's long road back to an NFL halftime

For U2, this is a return to a stage they have only stood on once before — and it happens to be one of the most remembered halftime performances ever given. The band's only previous NFL halftime was Super Bowl XXXVI in February 2002, when the Patriots met the Rams in New Orleans, according to SPIN. Performing months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the band projected the names of the victims during the show, in a tribute that turned a football intermission into a national moment of mourning and resolve.

That history is exactly why this booking lands. Netflix is not hiring a halftime act; it is hiring a guarantee that the halftime will mean something. The band is also celebrating 50 years since forming in Dublin in 1976, per SPIN — half a century from a school noticeboard in Dublin to the middle of America's newest football holiday. There are not many acts who can walk into that slot carrying both the history and the catalogue to fill it. U2 is the shortest of short lists.

What Netflix is saying

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos made the streamer's thinking plain in the announcement, as reported by SPIN: "There's a reason U2 has headlined stadiums for decades: they don't just perform, they deliver iconic moments audiences remember forever... We're thrilled that they'll bring that same magic to the NFL stage on Netflix," Sarandos said, in remarks in the announcement reported by SPIN.

Read that quote closely and you can see the strategy. Netflix's live sports business is built on moments that travel — clips, conversations, the thing everyone at work or at the holiday table asks whether you saw. A U2 halftime in the band's 50th year, on a night the NFL has never played before, is engineered to be precisely that.

Following Beyoncé and Snoop

The Thanksgiving Eve show extends a lineage Netflix has been building carefully. Beyoncé's 2024 Christmas performance — the Beyoncé Bowl, staged at Ravens-Texans — became a four-time Emmy-nominated production, according to SPIN. Snoop Dogg followed in 2025 with Snoop's Holiday Halftime Party at Lions-Vikings. Each year the streamer has treated its NFL halftime as a headline event in its own right, cast with an artist whose name is as big as the game's.

U2 fits that pattern and stretches it: this is the first of the Netflix halftime headliners whose legend was built in stadiums rather than on the charts of the streaming era, and the first attached to a brand-new date on the calendar rather than an established holiday. And the 2026 slate keeps rolling after Thanksgiving Eve — Netflix's Christmas doubleheader follows with the Packers at the Bears, then the Bills at the Broncos, per SPIN.

What to know for game night

The essentials, per the Rams and SPIN: Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2026, at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. Netflix coverage begins at 6 p.m. ET; kickoff is at 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT. Local viewers in Los Angeles can also catch the game on NBC-4, according to the Rams. Halftime belongs to U2, produced by Jesse Collins Entertainment.

Whether a Thanksgiving Eve game becomes a permanent fixture will be decided by exactly one thing: whether America shows up. The NFL and Netflix have done everything possible to make sure it does — a first-ever date, a glamour matchup, and the band that turned a Super Bowl halftime into history the only other time it was asked. Follow the season in our Sports section and the day's headlines in News.