WHEN JOE THOMAS retired from the NFL in 2018, his wife Annie made it clear where she expected him to dedicate his attention going forward. “It’s family time,” he recalls her saying. “You don’t have an excuse to go to work every day, 50 hours a week or more.” The former Cleveland Browns star had four kids; the time immediately following his retirement were going to be peak dad years. “My wife has done a really good job of making sure that I understand that . . . your kids are only going to be kids once.”
But after 11 seasons in the NFL, the Hall of Fame offensive tackle still wanted to stay close to the gridiron. And more than that, he wanted to coach—even though he knew that the commitment to game planning and craft stood at odds with his commitment to family time.
Six years later, after stints as an NFL Network broadcast analyst, podcast host, and volunteer youth coach, he’s found the perfect compromise. Joe Thomas, one-time immovable offensive lineman, is spending this spring and summer as the Ravens offensive line coach. But no, we don’t mean the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens. Thomas is coaching the Ravens in Munich. (As in Munich, Germany.)
Thomas lined up at his left tackle position for the Cleveland Browns.
The Munich Ravens are a franchise in the European League of Football (ELF), a fledgling pro American football league that includes 17 teams in nine countries across the continent —and it just may be the perfect place for Thomas, who announced he would head over to Munich midway through last year. That led to a collective “they have pro football in Germany?” from plenty of NFL fans.
But Thomas is enjoying his unique road to coaching. By trekking to Munich, he’s simultaneously gaining valuable coaching experience and serving as a global ambassador for the sport he loves while still prioritizing his family. I caught up with Thomas on a call from Munich (more accurately, as he drove home from a ski outing in Austria, just another perk of his unconventional gig) to hear his story.
THOMAS ADMITS HE didn’t know much about football outside the US before traveling to Munich with the NFL Network to cover the league’s first regular season game in Germany in 2022, part of the league’s ongoing International Series that has staged contests in London, Mexico City, and Germany since 2007. While taking in the city’s festivities surrounding the event, he guested on a live podcast recording that was attended by more than 5,000 fans who Thomas says were “going absolutely bonkers.”
Thomas also reconnected with one of the show’s hosts, Patrick Esume, a German-born football figure who worked with the Browns as part of the NFL’s Minority Coaching Fellowship in 2007, Thomas’s rookie year. Esume, now the ELF’s commissioner, told Thomas how American football was growing in Germany. “That’s when I started thinking there’s really a chance that I can come over here and we can live out a little bit of a dream of living abroad for a while, while coaching,” Thomas says.
Most US-based football fans know little of the sport’s expansion beyond North American soil beyond the NFL’s 17-year-old International Series. Those games include hordes of Europeans cheering from the stands wearing mismatched team jerseys, who are mostly excited to see their favorite sport in person, no matter which teams take the field. But there’s even more love for more than just NFL football than that, says Thomas. “It’s really cool seeing the passion for American football over here in Germany,” Thomas says. “You can tell that there is a passion for American football over here that’s really untapped.”
Munich Ravens players during ELF competition.
Enter the ELF, which started in 2021 (the Munich Ravens’ first season was 2023) and is just the latest European attempt to establish legitimate pro American football abroad. Before that came NFL Europe, a US-affiliated developmental league that folded in 2007, and a constellation of other semi-pro club confederations across the continent. Most of these leagues asked European players to pay membership “dues” while paying Americans to play key positions (think QB) and coach as “imports.” The ELF actually pays all players, although it still depends on American import talent.
Thomas talked to his family about heading to Munich last year, and they made the move in January, well ahead of the ELF season, which begins in late May and wraps in mid-September. Since then, he’s immersed himself in preseason training sessions with players while still working to maintain work-life balance, thanks in part to his new and (more) relaxed European lifestyle.
Stateside, pro and college coaching in all levels and all sports is an ultra-intense profession. Both NFL and college assistants and head coaches can find themselves spending more than 100 hours at team facilities, breaking down film, building out game plans, and analyzing players. So intense is coaching that longtime Baltimore coach John Harbaugh makes it his routin