Detroit Lions

From Portsmouth to a 32-year wait

The club started in 1928 as the Portsmouth Spartans in southern Ohio, joined the NFL on 12 July 1930 and, with the money gone, moved to Detroit in 1934, where it was renamed the Lions as a companion to the baseball Tigers. Four league championships followed — 1935, 1952, 1953 and 1957 — all of them before the Super Bowl existed. Detroit remains the only franchise to have operated for the whole of the Super Bowl era without reaching one.

What came after 1957 shaped the identity more than the titles did. Detroit did not win another play-off game until the 1991 season, and then did not win one again until 2023. In between came 0-16 in 2008, the first winless campaign after the schedule expanded to sixteen games. Individual work carried the attention instead: Barry Sanders rushed for 2,053 yards in 1997, and Calvin Johnson caught 122 passes for 1,964 yards in 2012, a single-season receiving mark still unbeaten. Sanders' number 20 and Bobby Layne's 22 are among seven retired by the club.

Home has been Ford Field on Brush Street in downtown Detroit since 2002, after twenty-seven seasons at the Pontiac Silverdome. Sheila Ford Hamp has been principal owner since 2020, succeeding her mother, Martha Firestone Ford. Brad Holmes is the general manager.

The rebuild that worked, and the Januarys that did not

Dan Campbell was hired as head coach on 20 January 2021. His third season produced the break: 12-5 in 2023, a first NFC North title and the club's first division title since 1993. Detroit then hosted two home play-off games in the same season for the first time, beating the Los Angeles Rams 24-23 and Tampa Bay 31-23, before leading San Francisco 24-7 at half-time in the NFC Championship game and losing 34-31.

The 2024 season was the best in the club's history by record and by margin: 15-2, the first number one NFC seed Detroit has held, a clean sweep of the NFC North, 564 points at 33.2 a game, a points differential of plus 222 and an unbeaten road season. It ended with a 45-31 divisional-round defeat by Washington, making Detroit only the second fifteen-win team to lose its first play-off game.

Then came the correction. Detroit went 9-8 in 2025 and finished fourth in the NFC North, having been 7-4 before winning only two of the last six and being eliminated from contention on Christmas Day. A Week 17 loss to Minnesota included six turnovers, having managed only eight in the whole season to that point. Injuries ran through the offensive line and the secondary, Frank Ragnow retired, and defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn left to take the New York Jets head job. Six players still made the Pro Bowl — Jack Campbell, Jahmyr Gibbs, Jared Goff, Aidan Hutchinson, Penei Sewell and Amon-Ra St Brown — with Campbell and Sewell named first-team All-Pro.

Where the 2026 team actually is

Drew Petzing now calls the offence, Kelvin Sheppard the defence, with Dave Fipp on special teams. The winter additions were practical rather than large: centre Cade Mays on three years at 25 million dollars, running back Isiah Pacheco, tight end Tyler Conklin, linebacker Damone Clark and edge rusher D.J. Wonnum.

Five games have produced a split team. Detroit beat New Orleans 31-30 in overtime on 13 September, lost 41-31 at Buffalo on Thursday 17 September, beat the Jets 31-24 on 27 September, lost 32-26 at Carolina on Sunday night 4 October, then scored on seven consecutive drives to win 45-21 at Arizona on 11 October. In that Arizona game Goff went 19 of 30 for 271 yards and three touchdowns for a 125.8 rating, his fifth game of the season without an interception; Gibbs ran for 151 yards and two scores and passed Sanders for the most touchdowns, 57, by any player under 25 in NFL history; Jameson Williams scored twice and Sam LaPorta took five catches for 88 yards.

The defence is the problem and the pass rush is the consolation. Detroit recorded twenty sacks in the first five games, the most the club has managed over that stretch of a season. It also conceded 148 points — 29.6 a game — and 297.4 passing yards a game, with 107.0 on the ground. Rookie corner Keith Abney II started at safety against Arizona and took his first interception, which is a fair indication of how thin the back end has been.

Campbell, speaking on 19 October after the Week 6 bye, said the staff had gone back through all five games and that "I think we are improving in areas, and I think there's still a lot of room to improve, but I do think we're beginning to figure out who we are." He said he feels better about this roster than he did about the 5-2 team of a year ago, and has been blunt that "we're not going to be mediocre. I don't accept that." Safety Brian Branch, back from an Achilles problem, and Mays, back from a wrist injury, both returned to practice targeting the Green Bay game, though Campbell does not expect Branch to take a full seventy-play load straight away. Sewell, meanwhile, went into Week 7 with the highest Pro Football Focus grade of any tackle in the league at 90.9, and the best run-blocking grade at 93.0.

The building, and what it costs to get in

Ford Field seats north of 65,000 under a fixed roof, with large windows that keep daylight in the bowl. The design leaves out a conventional club and suite tier, which drops the upper deck closer to the field and gives sightlines that hold up from almost anywhere in the building. Gates open roughly two hours before kick-off. Tailgating is not allowed in the official lots, so the pre-match drinking happens in the surrounding bars and private lots; the QLINE streetcar and I-75 and I-375 feed the site directly, and parking starts low if booked in advance.

The club spent money on the concourses for 2026, and the changes were in place for the home opener against New Orleans. A Game Entertainment Stage is built into the Ford Column near Gate G, housing the matchday DJ and touchdown celebrations. The 1934 Club is a new premium space with food, drink and live radio broadcasts; the Bernstein Advantage Gate is a reworked entrance; the Soaring Eagle Sports Bar has been renamed and fitted with interactive activations; a Stadium Tailgate grab-and-go uses actual Ford truck tailgates as high-top tables; and a Mobile Food Passport lets supporters collect stamps across Detroit-specific food stands. The Blue Moon Bar has moved to a corner between concourses.

None of it is cheap. An Action Network study published in August 2026 put the cost of a Lions game for a family of four at 2,109.50 dollars — the fourth-highest in the NFL and 634.95 dollars above a league average of 1,474.55. Tickets accounted for 1,971.68 of that, with about 80 dollars for parking and 57.82 for four hot dogs, two beers and two soft drinks. Reviews of the building itself are warm on sound, food and seats; the recurring complaint in supporter accounts is the price, and visiting fans note they are kept to the less generous corners of the bowl.

The run to January

There are nine home dates in 2026 and eight on the road. Green Bay at Ford Field on 25 October is the first division fixture of the season. Detroit then meet New England on 15 November at FC Bayern's stadium in Munich, and host Chicago on Thanksgiving, 26 November, kicking off the day's slate at 1pm Eastern on CBS. After that the remaining schedule runs through Tampa Bay, Tennessee, Miami, Atlanta, the New York Giants and the rest of the division — Minnesota and a second Bears game — finishing on 10 January.

Eight of the twelve remaining games are against opponents Detroit can reasonably expect to outscore, which is the shape of the season: an offence that has already hung 45 on a team, a pass rush setting club records, and a secondary that has to hold up for the arithmetic to work. Campbell's answer at the bye was not a personnel overhaul but consistency across all three phases, which is a less satisfying answer than the numbers demand.