The World League of American Football, 30 years later - a retrospective

johnnysama · April 26, 2023

On 2/23/2023 at 6:28 PM, MJWalker45 said:

The NFL was too risk adverse when they pulled the plug. The loss in reps was seen over the years as some of the game play at the start of the NFL season was not as sharp as those years the WLAF/ NFL Europe existed to allow players to work on technique.

Aesthetic wise, it's a shame those uniform designs didn't stay around, at least the looks of the 1991-1992 seasons. Templating took away from the teams when they returned in 1995 as a Europe only league.

One thing I actually liked about the league was even though there was a "template", it wasn't one uniform design stuck on every team. I also loved the fact that the sleeves for home and away were the same for some of the teams. Ohio, and Sacramento had this. Orlando did a s well, but only for the 1992 season.

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5092/5403274116_cbf7a5d683_z.jpg

The league also started wearing the championship game patch way before the NFL finally did.

Also, choosing colors that weren't normally associated with pro teams really helped the league stand out. Over time they went back to standard colors, with the exception of Hamburg, whose current iteration is now a mix of the colors for Hamburg and Cologne.

The league did try the experiment of making football jerseys look like soccer jerseys. I actually have a Frankfurt Galaxy and Rhein Fire authentic. The Rhein Fire jersey which copied these designs when they entered the league is from Fab Knit, the Galaxy is a 1995 Reebok jersey.