Before the NFL routinely played regular-season games in Europe in 2007, there was NFL Europe. And before there was NFL Europe, there was the World League of American Football (WLAF), which would eventually evolve into essentially a 13-year spring developmental league.
The first WLAF games were played on March 23, 1991, nearly 10 years before the first version of the XFL burst on the scene in 2001. The WLAF started with 10 teams, three of which represented big European cities — the London Monarchs, the Barcelona Dragons, and the Frankfurt Galaxy.
The other non-American team in ’91 was the Montreal Machine, joined stateside by the Raleigh-Durham Skyhawks, the Sacramento Surge, the Birmingham Fire, the New York/New Jersey Knights, the San Antonio Riders, and the Orlando Thunder. Read more >
