National Football League

This chapter integrates the respective business and sports-specific alliances, events, innovations, opportunities, threats and trends, which are reflected as international business strategies, that the league has experienced and/or managed to accommodate in order to achieve its mission. It provides some relevant facts, statistics and other historical information about the American Bowl series games. The chapter then examines the formation, development, failure and finally, the reemergence of the World League of American Football (WLAF) in 1995, which was renamed the National Football League Europe (NFLE) in 1998. During the initial five years when the NFL had established the American Bowl series, the City of London in England hosted one football game in 1986 and another game in 1987. After the WLAF had resumed its regular season game schedule in 1995, one year later the NFL Properties (NFLP), which was a division of the NFL, had aggressively started to extend the NFL&s;s brand from America to overseas markets.