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

And that’s just the players and coaches, plus whatever fits in the luggage compartments.

But when it came to transporting everything the two teams needed by road, it took more than three months — and three planes plus a freighter — 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,” Packers director of logistics/team travel Matt Klein said. “This is probably a little bit tougher.

“It’s a big undertaking, whether you’re taking a team to Chicago or Detroit or Brazil. I think there’s just a lot of things that come into play that are just different than traveling within the states.”

It was an exhaustive undertaking for those directly involved in the planning. Eagles assistant general manager Jon Ferrari joked that there were only three days since the trip became official in April that he and director of team and travel logistics Dan Ryan didn’t talk about Brazil, and one of those was the Fourth of July.

“There is a lot to think about to create a normal atmosphere for the players and coaches when we get there,” Ferrari said.

Taking an NFL team on a trip is a process unlike anything seen 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 players have even expressed safety concerns, prompting São Paulo to beef up security for games, according to the Brazilian state.

“It’s a lot of education on the front end,” said Joe Valentine, the NFL’s manager of game and team operations. “For example, the airport authorities 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 they’re trying to set the expectation that this is very different from what you’ve done. And that goes for all aspects of the team’s work.”

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

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

He doesn’t know the half of it yet.

Even before the Packers were announced as the Eagles’ Week 1 opponent on April 10, Klein and a contingent of Packers officials, including Ferrari and Ryan, flew to Brazil to assess the situation. The Cleveland Browns, who were in contention to be the Eagles’ opponent, also sent representatives. They inspected the stadium and training facilities and looked at hotel options.

In June, Klein returned to São Paulo with Packers director of performance nutrition Adam Korzun to talk to the hotel about meals. Eagles performance nutrition coordinator Stephanie Coppola also coordinated with their team’s hotel to ensure the desired quality and preparation of the 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 of an attempt to make it fit their nutritional needs.”

However, some of what the Packers and Eagles sent has been in Brazil for weeks.

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

• Crates are being transported aboard an ocean liner that left in early June

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

• Individual aircraft to transport the teams

Valentine described the items transported by boat as “consumer goods, goods that don’t fit on an airplane,” and the basic necessities for playing a game in a place where American football has never been played.

“It’s like starting from scratch in every way,” he said. “We didn’t have any existing equipment — so cones, down markers, goal posts, goal post pads, benches. Everything that goes on the field has to be bought in. That was all part of our sea freight.”

Everything that went onto the freighter had to be itemized on an ATA Carnet, essentially a passport for merchandise. The laborious task of listing items one by one took weeks.

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

“It has been on site, passed through customs and was in our storage.”

The cargo plane carried most of the equipment the teams needed for race day.

The final item, of course, was the team planes. One of the Packers’ first concerns about playing in Brazil revolved around team travel and whether they could get a plane big enough to land at Austin Straubel International Airport in Green Bay. Otherwise, they would have to take a bus to Milwaukee, a two-hour drive.

“We eventually did it, but it was a challenge,” Valentine said. “The type of aircraft they wanted was hard to get, and then it’s hard to get it in and out of Green Bay.”

The larger plane means more pods for players to stretch out in. The Eagles made other adjustments to account for the longer travel time. Instead of the usual one meal during the flight, they ate two. There was a focus on extra hydration before and during the flight. And the group was encouraged to stay awake during the trip so they could sleep well when they arrived in Brazil on Thursday night.

And it all doesn’t come cheap.

A league source said it costs teams between $750,000 and $1.5 million in expenses for a typical away game. The Brazil game far exceeded that, so the NFL covered the difference between what it would cost the Packers to come to Philadelphia and the cost of going to Brazil because it was originally an Eagles home game.

The competition ensured that each team had equal resources to move the operation abroad, Ferrari said, “to ensure that everything was fair” for the two teams competing against each other on Friday night.

Once on the field at Arena Corinthians, players should notice a turf field that resembles the grass they play on in their home stadiums. Eagles head groundskeeper Tony Leonard has been working with NFL field director Nick Pappas for “months,” Ferrari said, to get the conditions just right for an NFL game.

“It’s a football pitch, but it’s been renovated a bit,” Ferrari said, “so it’s in great condition.”

Then there were the last-minute concerns. The team held a “passport day,” as Klein called it, during mandatory minicamp in June to make sure every player had the proper paperwork. They also planned for what would happen if GM Brian Gutekunst added a player who didn’t make the offseason and didn’t have a passport. In that case, they would take that player to the Chicago Passport Agency on a free day to expedite the process. The Eagles similarly had all the necessary visas in place to account for roster changes.

Malik Willis, the backup quarterback the Packers traded last week, said he already had a passport from the Titans’ game in London last season when he arrived in Green Bay.

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ONE THING THE Eagles have an advantage: They have an expert on the subject in quarterback Tanner McKee, who spent a month in São Paulo and more than two years in Brazil during his mission trips. He speaks Brazil’s primary language, Portuguese, fluently and is a source of information for those curious about what to expect during their stay.

“It will be fun for the whole team to experience the culture. It’s a great culture and I’m looking forward to everyone being able to participate in it,” McKee said.

“It’s similar to the people in Philadelphia: if you show a little love, they love you 10 times more, so it’s great to have an NFL team there and be there. I have … hundreds of Brazilians who follow me on social media, who approach me and ask me questions, so I think it will be really nice to be there.”

Since the team flew in Wednesday night and leaves right after the game, there isn’t much time to explore. The Eagles also held a small community event at the stadium after their walk-through on Thursday.

Even with all the planning and preparation, unknown and unforeseen circumstances can still arise.

“The trick is you have to have a lot more foresight in how you plan it, compared to just going to Detroit,” Klein said. “There’s a little bit more trust now because you’re putting stuff on (a ship and a plane) and you’re not there.

“Sometimes it’s out of your control. That’s the big thing with this trip: there are a lot of things that are out of our control, whether it’s because the league is organising it or because it’s in a different country.”