I’m sad about the news, but only because it means the World League (old-school) will never, ever get back to being as good as it was when it launched. I learned to actually appreciate pro football through the inaugural World League season, when my completely-randomly-picked-when-I-started-watching-in-week-2 London Monarchs stomped the league en route to a championship season. (Stan Gelbaugh was my first true sports hero, and arguably the only living one I have left now that Rod Beck is dead.) The original 10-team NA+Euro league was a really interesting concept and was a lot of fun to watch. (And gave us football on USA Network, and color commentary on ABC by a very crabby Dick Vermeil! Imagine!)

Honestly, I’m surprised that the league has hung on as long as it did with the lame-ass six-team format of the 1995 revival. Six teams is at least two too few to build any sort of excitement or drama through a season (something the CFL and even Vince McMahon get/got, for chrissake) and despite the occasional “we are looking into expanding to Austria and East Uganda” they’d roll out in rumors every season, they just kept laming out. I know the fans in Europe who followed their teams were passionate, but when they kept making changes that resulted in virtually no roster carryover from year to year, and banished all those old football lifers like Steve Pelluer to favor the 22-25 year old bubble guys, it lost what little allure it had left for me. Not to mention, yes, the tremendous embarrassment that was the Monarchs playing on the undersized soccer field at White Hart Lane, where they alternately used 7-yard end zones or the 94-yard main field (which just didn’t have a “50″ line, it wrapped at the 47), after the team had played in the decidedly-nicer Wembley just a few years before… ugh.

The sad thing is, the NFL will probably turn a profit on their one “real” European game per year instead of the 31 World League games per year fielded before. The business decision makes sense, but for those who love off-brand football, it’s a sad day.

The league will have to live on through (I’m not kidding) the Fantasy World League, http://www.fwl.org.uk , now entering its (really) eleventh year of operation.

AFL-relevant content for this comment: Sherdrick Bonner was my QB for a few seasons back when I ran the FWL’s London Monarchs. His digital FWL self just retired, sadly.