The Green Bay Packers took 10 hours and 40 minutes to reach São Paulo, Brazil, with their Boeing 777-300ER. The Philadelphia Eagles, flying the same aircraft, had a slightly shorter flight schedule of nine and a half hours one way.

And that’s just the players and coaches and everything that fits in the cargo holds.

But to transport everything the two teams needed along the way, it took more than three months — and required three planes and a cargo ship — to get everything to the first NFL game in South America, which kicks off Friday at 8:15 p.m. ET on Peacock.

“It’s tough every week,” said Matt Klein, the Packers’ logistics and travel director. “This is probably a little tougher.”

“It’s a big undertaking, whether you’re going to Chicago or Detroit or Brazil with a team. I think there are just a lot of things that go into it that are just different than traveling within the States.”

It was a grueling undertaking for those directly involved in the planning. Jon Ferrari, the Eagles’ assistant general manager, joked that since the trip was officially announced in April, there have only been three days that he and Dan Ryan, the team’s director of travel and travel logistics, haven’t talked about Brazil, and one of those was July 4.

“We have a lot to think about to create a normal atmosphere for the players and coaches when we arrive,” said Ferrari.

Sending an NFL team on the road is a feat unparalleled in professional sports. Now try doing it in a stadium that has never hosted an American football game, in a country where the NFL has never played, and where players have even raised security concerns, prompting São Paulo to tighten security ahead of games, according to the Brazilian state.

“There’s a lot of education that needs to be done beforehand,” said Joe Valentine, the NFL’s manager of game and team operations. “For example, airport authorities need to understand that this isn’t like football. We’re going to have 40,000 pounds of equipment per team. (NFL teams) come with a traveling party of 190 to 200 people. It’s not 60.”

“It’s not that they can’t do it, but it’s about setting the expectation that it’s going to be very different from what you’ve done before – and that affects every aspect of teamwork.”

PACKERS PUNTER DANIEL Whelan’s locker at Lambeau Field is closest to where new equipment manager Chris Kuehn and his staff do most of their daily work.

“Everything we have here we have to get there,” Whelan said before the trip. “It’s so much work for the guys.”

He doesn’t know the half of it.

Before it was announced on April 10 that the Packers would be the Eagles’ Week 1 opponent, Klein and a Packers delegation with Eagles officials, including Ferrari and Ryan, flew to Brazil to do some on-site research. The Cleveland Browns, who were in the running to play the Eagles, also sent representatives. They toured the stadium and practice facilities and looked at hotel options.

In June, Klein returned to São Paulo with Adam Korzun, the Packers’ director of performance nutrition, to meet with the hotel about meals. Stephanie Coppola, the Eagles’ performance nutrition coordinator, also coordinated with her team’s hotel to ensure the desired quality and preparation of food. While the Packers transported their own drinks and snacks (an undertaking in itself), customs limited what could be brought into the country.

“They rely completely on the hotel and their chef to prepare all of their meals,” Valentine said. “They don’t send meat or anything like that. It’s more about tailoring it to their diet.”

However, some of the packages that the Packers and Eagles sent have been in Brazil for weeks.

To get everything – and everyone – there, three components were used:

• Transport crates on board a cargo ship that left in early June

• A shared cargo plane that arrived in Brazil earlier this week

• Own aircraft to transport the teams

Valentine described the items transported on the ship as “consumables that you can’t take on an airplane” and the basic equipment needed to play a game in a place that has never hosted American football.

“It’s basically like we’re starting from scratch in every way,” he said. “We had no existing equipment – so cones, markings, goal posts, goal post pads, benches. Everything that goes on the field has to be sourced. That was all part of our sea freight.”

Everything that came on the cargo ship had to be listed on an ATA carnet, which is essentially a passport for goods. The arduous task of listing each item individually took weeks.

“If I ship a box that has, say, four T-shirts, three sweatshirts and two pairs of shoes — or whatever,” Klein said, “you have to say there are two pairs of Nikes and they were made in Thailand and the shirts were made somewhere else. And you have to say the sizes and the material they’re made of. The same goes for every single medical item — a box of gauze, 25 rolls of this tape and 50 rolls of this tape, ibuprofen, shampoo that you take for the locker and that has to be shipped because it has chemicals in it.”

“It was on site, passed customs and was in our warehouse.”

The cargo plane transported most of the equipment the teams needed for match day.

The last issue, of course, was the team planes. One of the Packers’ initial concerns before the Brazil game was about the team’s travel and whether they would get a plane big enough to land at Austin Straubel International Airport in Green Bay. If not, they would have to take a bus to Milwaukee, a two-hour drive.

“We finally got that done, but it was challenging,” Valentine said. “The type of aircraft we wanted was difficult to obtain, and then there’s the difficulty of getting it in and out of Green Bay.”

The larger plane means more cabins for players to stretch out in. The Eagles made other adjustments to accommodate the longer flight. Instead of the usual one meal during the flight, they ate two. The focus was on extra hydration before and during the flight. And the group was encouraged to stay awake during the trip so they could get a good night’s sleep after arriving in Brazil on Thursday night.

None of this is cheap.

According to one league source, a typical away game costs teams between $750,000 and $1.5 million. The game in Brazil far exceeded that amount, so the NFL covered the difference between the Packers’ travel costs to Philadelphia and the cost of traveling to Brazil since it was originally an Eagles home game.

The league has ensured that both teams have the same resources for the relocation of the match abroad, Ferrari said, “to ensure that everything is fair for the two teams that will compete against each other on Friday night.”

As soon as players step onto the field at Arena Corinthians, they will notice that the turf is similar to the one they play on at their home stadiums. Tony Leonard, the Eagles’ head groundskeeper, has been working with NFL field director Nick Pappas “for months,” according to Ferrari, to create the perfect conditions for an NFL game.

“It’s a football pitch, but it’s been retrofitted in some ways,” Ferrari said, “so it’s in excellent condition.”

Then there were the last-minute worries. The team held what Klein called a “passport day” during mandatory minicamp in June to make sure every player had the proper paperwork. They also planned for what would happen if general manager Brian Gutekunst added a player who hadn’t been with them in the offseason and didn’t have a passport. In that case, they would take that player to the Chicago Passport Agency on an off day to speed up the process. The Eagles also had all the necessary visas to accommodate roster changes.

Malik Willis, the backup quarterback the Packers signed two weeks ago, said upon arriving in Green Bay that he already had a pass from the Titans’ game in London last season.

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ONE THING THAT One advantage for the Eagles is that they have a local expert on the area in quarterback Tanner McKee, who spent a month in São Paulo and more than two years in Brazil during his mission trips. He is fluent in Brazil’s primary language, Portuguese, and is a good resource for anyone who wants to know what to expect during their stay.

“It will be fun for the whole team to get to know the culture. It’s an incredible culture and I’m excited for everyone to be a part of it,” said McKee.

“It’s similar to the people in Philadelphia: If you show them a little love, you’ll get ten times more love back. And if an NFL team is there and in attendance, the fans will love it. Hundreds of Brazilians follow me on social media, message me and ask me questions. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to be down there.”

Since the team flew in Wednesday night and will leave immediately after the game, there isn’t much time to explore the stadium. The Eagles also held a small community event at the stadium after their tour on Thursday.

Despite all the planning and preparation, there are still unknowns and unforeseen circumstances that could have arisen.

“The trick is that you have to plan a lot more in advance than if you just drove to Detroit,” Klein said. “There’s a little more trust today because you’re putting things on a ship and a plane and you’re not there with them.”

“Sometimes it’s out of our hands. That’s the big problem with this trip: there are many things that are out of our control, whether because the league organizes it or because it takes place in another country.”