A significant private backer says the moment is right to try again at a sustainable, pan‑European American football league. David Gandler, co‑founder of streaming service Fubo, has put in a seven‑figure personal investment to launch the European Football Alliance (EFA). The plan is to kick off in May with seven teams, and to add two more clubs — one in London, also backed by Gandler, and one in Milan — in 2027.
The EFA is emerging alongside another new project, the American Football League Europe (AFLE), which so far has announced five teams. AFLE managing director Moritz Heisler says the organizations have been in talks about combining efforts, arguing that a future competition does not need to be the biggest, just the smartest. An EFA source described the discussions more narrowly, saying they center on AFLE teams joining the EFA.
Both groups face the same fundamental challenge: how to build a commercially viable, competitive league in a market where American football remains niche compared with soccer and basketball. The NFL tried a European experiment, NFL Europe, until 2007, reportedly losing about $30 million a year. Although that competition found pockets of popularity in England and Germany, it was never fully embraced as a top‑level product and was ultimately wound down in favor of staging regular NFL games on European soil.
Heisler says past failures were not a rejection of the sport itself but a failure to localize. He argues that success requires deep ties to local fans and clear links between clubs and their communities, including homegrown players. Gandler, drawing on his media background, sees a parallel opportunity in broadcasting and streaming: a European league could create international value while helping local franchises monetize rights on domestic markets.
The split from the existing European League of Football (ELF) earlier this year underscores the governance and financial questions at the center of the debate. Several teams left the ELF demanding structural reforms, economic fairness and transparency amid accusations of mismanagement; the ELF later entered self‑administration, a form of insolvency, while pledging to continue operating. Critics point to a rapid expansion strategy that led to wide disparities between clubs, uncompetitive matches and uncomfortable logistical failures — images of players queuing for portable toilets at a Berlin game last July became a symbol of those gaps.
EFA backers say their model will emphasize financial sustainability, collective franchise control and revenue sharing, adopting what they call the NFL’s ‘gold standard’ in governance. Mason Parker, owner of the Prague Lions and an EFA signee, says the league will succeed only when team owners treat the league’s profit and loss as their own and when incentives are properly aligned across clubs.
The broader landscape is also shifting because of the NFL’s expanding footprint in Europe. The league now stages regular‑season games overseas, runs extensive related events, and has granted international marketing rights to its 32 teams, all moves that raise the bar for any rival competition. Meanwhile, flag football’s inclusion in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics adds momentum: Gandler calls the sport’s growth an inflection point, with accelerating European viewership and greater global appetite.
EFA backers say a viable European league would not aim to replace the NFL but to complement it — creating sustained local narratives, tracking players who move between Europe and the United States, and filling the calendar when NFL activity in a market ebbs. Past pathways from Europe into the NFL have had limited success, they acknowledge, but investors believe that better governance, localized teams and smarter media strategies could finally make an enduring pan‑European American football competition possible.