It has been made official by the National Football League that their de facto minor league, the World League... no, NFL Europa, will be folding, effective immediately. How you feel about this probably runs the gamut from vaguely concerned to disinterested, and I can understand your lack of sentiment.

The NFL originally gave birth to the World League of American Football, a rather hodge-podge league that was partially backed by the NFL and partially based in the United States. There were all sorts of interesting things about this league: 10 teams divided into three divisions; a "West Division" consisting of Sacramento, San Antonio, and Birmingham; and two unique rules - one assigning ascending point values to field goals based on distance, and another requiring one non-U.S born player on each of your squads (offense, defense, and special teams). This incarnation was so successful that it lasted a whopping two years before going under to fix the... kinks.

The team ditched its US base and came back wholly European, by keeping the teams that were already based in Barcelona, London, and Frankfurt, while adding franchises in Dusseldorf, Amsterdam, and Edinburgh. However, ratings and fan bases outside of Germany continued to flag, so in 1997, the league took bold new steps: the teams in London and Edinburgh would now play their home games in multiple stadiums within the country, and it would now become NFL Europe.

After that, nothing would remain the same for long. The London Monarchs were shut down after 1998 and replaced with a team in Berlin. Then in 2003, the Barcelona Dragons and Scottish Claymores (the Edinburgh team) both folded and were replaced with a team in Cologne in 2004 and another in Hamburg in 2005.

Now it was the fall of 2005, and the league had changed significantly since its first inception. Now the NFL had what was touted as a European spring league, a place for young players to grow and develop, when what they really had was a league that had minimal presence or relevance outside of Germany where players went to live out their careers.