It’s back.

Some 213 days after the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots at Super Bowl 60, the NFL returns, with the same sides meeting again to open the season.

On Wednesday (01:20 BST, Thursday) the Patriots travel to Lumen Field to play a Seahawks team hoping to become only the ninth franchise to win the title in consecutive seasons.

If you’re in the market for a team to follow this year, BBC Sport is here to help.

We’ve crunched the numbers on a wide range of categories to put the information at your fingertips – and there’s a handy quiz at the end to help you figure out your best fit.

Let’s start with the top dogs – the trophy winners.

Leading the way with six Super Bowls each are the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Patriots, the latter all coming since the turn of the century under legendary coach Bill Belichick.

Not far behind are the Dallas Cowboys, known as ‘America’s team’, and the San Francisco 49ers, who have each won five.

Taking in the pre-Super Bowl era, the Green Bay Packers have the most NFL championships with 13, including four Super Bowl wins.

At the other end of the spectrum, 12 franchises have never won the Vince Lombardi Trophy, including the Buffalo Bills and the Minnesota Vikings, who have both lost four times in the Super Bowl.

Perhaps silverware isn’t everything to you.

If history is more your bag, four teams have been around for 100 years or more. The Arizona Cardinals, Chicago Bears, New York Giants and Green Bay Packers were all established in the 1920s.

For those who prefer more modern upstarts, look no further than the Houston Texans, who only started competing in the NFL in 2002.

We took a calculation of the centre of the UK being a location in Lancashire and figured out the distance from that point to each franchise’s stadium in the US.

East Coast teams such as the New England Patriots, Philadelphia Eagles and the two New York teams – the Giants and Jets – are the closest by that metric, coming in at just over 3,000 miles away.

If you would prefer to get as far away from home as possible, shoot across the US towards the Pacific Ocean and opt for the Los Angeles Chargers or Rams, fully 5,263 miles away as the crow flies.

Any NFL game is a major event and, as amply demonstrated during the football World Cup this summer, the US is full of stadiums to suit.

We took the average attendance for each team over the past five seasons to calculate the biggest – and it was the AT&T Stadium in Dallas, where England played their opening group game against Croatia.

The lowest average was the Chicago Bears, with element-exposed Soldier Field the only stadium to come in under 60,000.

The franchise are developing plans for a venue across the state border in Hammond, Indiana.

Taking US weather data from 1991 to 2020, we looked at the range of temperatures from highest to lowest across all 32 areas.

It is no surprise that the hottest areas will affect desert teams Arizona Cardinals and Las Vegas Raiders, with Florida’s Miami Dolphins and Tampa Bay Buccaneers also offering scorching summers and mild winters.

If that is not for you, then 12 franchises have an average lowest temperature under freezing, including the Vikings, whose average in January is -8C.

Since first jetting to London in 2013, the Jacksonville Jaguars have played in the UK 14 times, and will stretch that further when they play back-to-back weeks there in October.

That number far outstrips every other franchise, with the Buffalo Bills playing six times in the now defunct Toronto Series of the mid-2000s and twice in London, and the Miami Dolphins third with seven overseas games.

The NFL continues to extend its reach with nine international games planned for 2026, including a maiden trip to Australia when the San Francisco 49ers face the LA Rams at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on opening weekend.

The Dallas Cowboys, whose only previous appearance on foreign soil was in 2014 at Wembley against the Jaguars, will play the Baltimore Ravens at another iconic world stadium, the Maracana in Rio de Janeiro, at the end of September.

Here’s the data we used for reference.