Mexico City native John Sutcliffe joins SVP to talk about what it was like having Monday Night Football in Mexico and his hopes that the NFL keeps coming back. (2:44)

Monday night’s game between the Oakland Raiders and Houston Texans in Mexico City was the fourth regular-season NFL game played outside the United States this season.

Don’t expect that number to go down in the future. If anything, the NFL is curious to see whether it can go up.

International games are a big talker at owners meetings these days. In March in Boca Raton, Florida, a portion of the agenda was devoted to a discussion on potential future sites for NFL regular-season games. The discussions were preliminary and exploratory, but locations that came up as worthy of consideration included Brazil, Germany and -- most prominently -- China.

“I think teams are interested in how we expand our game on a global basis, particularly in China,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said at that meeting. “I think the size and influence of China in the global marketplace is obviously something you can’t ignore. From our standpoint, we know we have lots of fans over there and, more importantly, potential fans over there.”

There’s the key: “potential fans.” The motivation for the NFL’s exploratory discussions of foreign sites for regular-season games lies in the potential for increasing its customer base. At some point -- and some feel there’s evidence that it’s done so already -- interest in the game in the United States will start to flatten out or even decrease. In order to fend off the deleterious financial impact of such an event, the league must seek to generate interest elsewhere. Ratings may go down in this country, but that doesn’t mean they can’t go up in China or Mexico or the United Kingdom.

NFL fans in the roundabout of the Angel of the Independence in Mexico City. AFP PHOTO / PEDRO PARDO

The NFL says that, according to its fan tracking study, there are nearly 13 million NFL fans in the Mexico market, including 4 million self-described “avid” fans. It also says that 17 of its 18 International Series games have been sold out -- the only exception being the 2011 post-lockout London game between the Bears and the Buccaneers.

So, yeah, you’d better believe the NFL is going to keep pushing to hold games outside the U.S., and that Mexico is absolutely a place to which it plans to return. The questions the NFL is asking itself about international games are no longer, “Should we do this?” or “Can this work?” but rather, “Where else can we do this?” and “How can this work even better?”

For example, the league is wondering whether the 9:30 a.m. ET Sunday start times it used for the three London games this year is the best thing for its TV product, or whether it should move the London games back to the regular 1 p.m. ET window and make them night games locally.

The NFL also kept a close eye on the Colts, who elected not to have their bye following their London game this season. Colts officials have offered positive feedback on the experience, saying they didn’t feel their regular game-week routine was disrupted by flying back from London, as opposed to from, say, Seattle or San Francisco. But the Colts are an Eastern time zone team and one of the issues with London is how far away it is for West Coast teams.

At this point, the NFL is focused on the logistical details of international games, which means the idea of playing more of them going forward is already a foregone conclusion. If you wondered what to make of the abundance of international games in 2016, the answer is that you’d better get used to it.