Walt
In August 2025, the Arizona Cardinals handed centre Hjalte Froholdt a two-year, $20 million extension through 2028 — his second extension in two years. Froholdt isn’t the first Dane to carve out a long NFL career. Nearly four decades earlier, a kicker from Struer named Morten Andersen walked away as the league’s all-time scoring leader.
This is a look at how two Danes built NFL footprints the hard way, and the quiet Danish ecosystem that’s grown up around them.
The Great Dane’s Blueprint: Morten Andersen’s Hall of Fame Case
Morten Andersen was born in Copenhagen in August 1960 and raised in Struer, out on the west Jutland coast. He arrived in Indianapolis as a high school exchange student at Ben Davis, hauling a soccer and team-handball background and a left foot that didn’t know what a football was yet. He figured it out fast. At Michigan State he drilled a 63-yard field goal against Ohio State in 1981 — a Big Ten record at the time, and the sort of leg that gets a 4th-round grade.
The Saints took him 86th overall in 1982, the first Dane ever drafted into the NFL. What followed was 25 seasons across New Orleans, Atlanta (twice), the Giants, the Chiefs and the Vikings. The résumé is almost absurd when you line it up. 382 games played — an NFL record. 2,544 career points. 565 field goals. Both numbers were league records when Morten Andersen hung up the cleats, and both still sit near the top of the all-time list. Seven Pro Bowls. Both the 1980s and 1990s All-Decade Teams. Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2017 — the first Dane in Canton and only the second pure placekicker enshrined, after Jan Stenerud.
That’s the template: unglamorous route in, unglamorous position, decades of nothing but accuracy.
Hjalte Froholdt and the Cardinals’ $20M Vote of Confidence
Hjalte Froholdt grew up in Svendborg, down on the southern Danish island of Funen, and like Andersen he took the exchange-student route to America — sophomore year of high school in Warren, Ohio, where American football was something he had to learn from scratch. He learned it well enough to end up at Arkansas, and well enough that the New England Patriots spent a 4th-round pick on him in 2019, making him only the second Dane ever drafted.
The first few years were the usual journeyman shuffle. Patriots. A brief Houston practice-squad stop. Then Cleveland from 2021–22, bouncing between guard and centre. Arizona signed him in 2023 as a free agent on a two-year, $4.6M deal that nobody outside the Cardinals building paid much attention to. He won the starting centre job out of camp and hasn’t given it back since.
That’s where the Froholdt–Cardinals partnership started looking like a bargain. August 2024: a two-year, $12M extension with $8M guaranteed, through 2026. August 2025: another two years, $20M, through 2028. For a guy who was a backup lineman four years ago, that’s a serious pile of money. The box score backs it up. 51 straight starts at center across 2023, 2024 and 2025 — one of only four NFL centres to pull that off, alongside Ted Karras, Creed Humphrey and Coleman Shelton. 1,070-plus snaps every season. A 72.0 PFF pass-block grade in 2025 and exactly one sack allowed.
Denmark’s Quiet NFL Infrastructure: Fans, Media, and a Growing Digital Market
Froholdt is one of only five Danish-born players ever to appear in an NFL regular-season game. That's a remarkably small pool for a country of six million. But the audience has outgrown the player pipeline. Danish-language NFL coverage has been around for years, DAFF-affiliated youth leagues support a modest amateur scene (Andersen was the DAFF Hall of Fame's first inductee back in January 2006), and fantasy football communities operate in Danish on the same weekly rhythm as any American league.
This growing interest in American football reflects a broader shift in how Danish audiences consume sports and digital entertainment. Fans can now follow live statistics, participate in fantasy competitions, discuss match predictions, and access specialised sports content through online platforms. Sports betting has also become part of the wider digital sports economy, connecting traditional sports audiences with the rapidly developing iGaming industry.
Beyond sports betting, online casinos represent another established segment of Denmark's digital entertainment market. Players can encounter both domestically licensed services and international platforms offering different game selections, payment methods, and account features. The distinction is particularly relevant in Denmark, where Spillemyndigheden regulates gambling activities and ROFUS serves as the national self-exclusion register. Danish-licensed gambling operators must check this register, while international platforms operating outside the country's licensing system are not integrated into it. The Danish review website dansk.casino explores this segment in its guide to casino uden rofus, providing information about offshore casinos, their licensing jurisdictions, available games, and payment options. The resource also helps readers understand how these platforms differ from Danish-licensed operators, particularly regarding regulatory oversight and player protection measures.
The ecosystem around a Danish NFL fan in 2026 looks nothing like the one Andersen left behind when he flew to Indianapolis. What began as a niche following of an American sport has developed into a connected digital environment spanning sports media, fantasy competitions, online communities, and interactive entertainment.
What Comes Next for the Danish Pipeline
Thirty-seven years passed between Andersen’s draft in 1982 and Froholdt’s in 2019. That gap is partly a function of how long American football took to establish any kind of amateur infrastructure in Scandinavia, and partly bad luck. It’s narrowed now that the DAFF development programme is a real thing and the NFL’s International Pathway has scaled to include more European athletes every year.
So who’s next? Realistically, the lanes for European kids who come to the sport late haven’t moved much — specialists (kicker, long snapper) and offensive-line projects you can develop over three or four years. That’s exactly how both Andersen and Froholdt got in.
In the meantime, with Froholdt’s deal running through 2028, Denmark will have an NFL starter on the field at least through the Super Bowl LXIII cycle. That hasn’t been true for most of the modern era.
Charlie Campbell
