One less league to compete with

The NFL has ended its European experiment, closing down NFL Europa two weeks after the leagues 16th and apparently final season.

Trivia fans will make note of the final game and score of NFL Europe which featured the Hamburg Sea Devils defeating the Frankfurt Galaxy 37-28 in the final World Bowl championship game.

The league began its minstrel show in Europe back in 1991, known then as the World League of American Football, featuring teams in the US, Canada and Europe. But success was hard to come by in a part of the world where football is played with a white round ball and is held in like religious tones by Europeans.

After a few years of dormancy, the league returned, downsized to a circuit of six and for the most part set up shop as a German league with one cross border shopper in the Netherlands. The league however has been losing money regularly, dropping some thirty million a season.

Re-branded as NFL Europa, the league found little exposure outside of its small German footprint and television exposure was hard to come by, with more than likely more fans watching on the NFL Network in the US than on the European outlets that bothered to cover the game.

In the end the NFL decided to make a business decision, and a league that regularly makes money hand over fist decided that the experiment in Europe wasn't worth its investment. While it was used as a developmental league of sorts for the Big show, for the most part it was merely a parking spot for players who hadn't quite shown enough for the NFL.

This could have a positive effect for CFL teams in the long run, with the European brand of the game done, players will be looking for a new place to test out their skills and seek out football home closer to their American base. It could also help with early recruiting for CFL teams, which won't have to worry about a player taking to European fields and then reporting to CFL teams later in the season or getting injured while over there and thus not being able to play at all in the CFL.

The NFL hasn't totally abandoned Europe, they still have plans to play exhibition and maybe league games on the European continent in the years to come. But fans in Berlin, Hamburg, Duesseldorf, Cologne, Frankfurt and Amsterdam will have to make do without their local heroes.
The NFL Europa adds its name to a growing list of extinct leagues, though in this case it was killed by the NFL's own hand as opposed to being killed off by NFL competition. The closure of the NFL Europa places it on the same roll call as the World Football League, USFL and the XFL as leagues since the early 70's that have tried to offer a different option for the NFL fan, fans who decided that the original brand was just fine.

A decade ago, you might have been able to add the name of the CFL to that list of the departed, but fortunately for Canadians, some sanity returned to the league and an improving product and stable financial base has left the CFL as one of the survivors of the current era of football.