BERLIN – Raheem Morris remembers Olympic Stadium for the same reason most people do.

“That’s where Jesse Owens won a gold medal in front of Hitler,” the Atlanta Falcons coach said. “It’s crazy when you think you’re going to be in that same exact stadium. It’s just an honor to come here and play.”

In fact, Owens won four golds at the 1936 Olympics as Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were becoming early adopters in the concept of sportswashing. On Friday night, Morris will show the team a video of Owens’ Olympic Games and legacy. On Sunday, Atlanta (3-5) will play the Indianapolis Colts (7-2) at the same arena in the NFL’s first regular-season game in Berlin.

Morris’ memory of Olympic Stadium is not the only touchpoint these Falcons have with the building, though. Practice-squad place kicker Lenny Krieg is a Berlin native who has been to the stadium more than 50 times for professional soccer matches. Krieg, who was signed by Atlanta this offseason as part of the NFL’s International Player Pathway program, said that he expects to have nearly 300 family and friends in attendance for Sunday’s game.

Atlanta’s new kicker, Zane Gonzalez, also has soccer memories tied to Olympic Stadium. His favorite player, France’s Zinedine Zidane, played his final professional match there in the 2006 World Cup final. Gonzalez and his wife travel annually to Europe to watch soccer, he said, and that familiarity could help this weekend. Soccer fields like the one at Olympic Stadium are often slicker than NFL fields, and Gonzalez will be wearing longer cleats than usual this week as a precaution, he said.

“They made sure before I came, I had my passport ready to go,” said Gonzalez, who was signed Tuesday after the team released Parker Romo.

Falcons offensive line coach Dwayne Ledford played for the Rhein Fire and coached for the Frankfurt Galaxy in the World League of American Football. He searched this week, he said, for some of his old team gear to wear to Friday’s practices, but couldn’t find any.

Atlanta offensive lineman Kyle Hinton’s memories of Germany are all centered on American football. Hinton played his freshman and sophomore seasons of high school football at Vilseck High School at the U.S. Army garrison in Bavaria, where he was teammates with Minnesota Vikings running back Zavier Scott. Hinton, who will reunite with two of his former high school coaches and several friends on this trip, is expected to make his first start of the season at right guard in place of the injured Matthew Bergeron, who did not make the trip to Germany.

“It’s definitely weird how it all comes around, but I can’t get too much into the sentimental,” Hinton said. “I’m treating this like a business trip. It just so happens to be in a place I used to live in.”

The Falcons arrived for the business trip on Friday morning local time. After leaving Atlanta on Thursday evening, the team landed in Berlin and immediately hit the field at the practice facility for FC Union, a team in the Bundesliga, Germany’s top soccer league. The team arranged its travel schedule after talking to multiple sleep and sports-science experts, including at NASA, Morris said.

“There is always going to be a disagreement about the best day to go,” he said. “We chose the day we did after a bunch of discussions with a bunch of different people, not just in our building but outside our building.”

Atlanta’s traveling party arrived in Berlin at 7:30 a.m. local time and brought the buses straight to their practice facility, where they held a 90-minute practice session, the first 30 minutes of which were open for the nearly 100 media members in attendance.

“It’s crazy that it’s already here,” running back Bijan Robinson said. “Everybody needs to know we’re going to come out here and give them a show. Hopefully, we can come out here and give them that type of energy as well.”

The Falcons’ road to Berlin started in May 2023 when the NFL awarded the team international marketing rights for Germany. At the time, the league announced that Atlanta and Indianapolis would play this game, and later that month, the Falcons took Robinson on a promotional tour around the country that included a stop in Berlin and a visit to Munich to watch the Champions League final.

“For the fans that are there, this is their Super Bowl,” said Shannon Joyner, the Falcons’ director of marketing. “It really is cool to see the overwhelming interest by international fans.”

NFL teams played preseason “American Bowl” games in Berlin from 1990 to 1994 and have played four regular-season games in Germany. The league believes there are more than 20 million NFL fans in the country, making it Europe’s ripest target for the game, said NFL executive vice president Peter O’Reilly.

“We have seen (an) incredible response,” O’Reilly said. “Often people think about these games as people traveling in from other markets, but the vast majority of attendees are from the market itself.”

The Falcons scheduled multiple events in Berlin leading up to the game, including visits by team officials to the Ramstein Air Base in Frankfurt on Wednesday and Thursday. Atlanta will also host a FalconsHaus fan activation center, oversee a flag football clinic and have a fan rally and pregame walk from a dedicated Falcons bar on Sunday.

“The people in the stadium are just a portion of fans that will be in Berlin to be a part of the totality of the experience,” Joyner said. “That’s why it was important to us to create multiple touchpoints outside the game as well.”

The 23-year-old Krieg, who texted all his teammates a list of dozens of recommendations for local food and attractions this week, first remembers the NFL making an impact in his hometown about a decade ago, he said.

“That’s when I started watching football and playing Madden,” he said. “The NFL is doing a great job of expanding the game. Germany and Berlin are full of football fans. It’s a way of giving back to them. It’s a great thing.”

Krieg has provided tips for any of his teammates who have asked — and plenty have. His first piece of advice: Berlin is less “Sound of Music” and more Fifth Avenue.

“It’s really international, not as traditionally German as you might think,” he said. “It’s Europe’s New York — a lot of different cultures.”

Gonzalez, who only signed with the Falcons on Tuesday, will be making his first trip to Berlin but knows the European sports fans well enough to know that the kickers will be the stars Sunday.

“That’s probably the main thing they get and understand,” he said. “It’s awesome.”