A major investor in a new American football league in Europe says now is the right moment for a sustainable pan‑European competition, despite many past failures.
David Gandler, co‑founder of the streaming service Fubo, has personally put in “seven figures” to back the European Football Alliance (EFA). The league plans to start in May with seven teams, with two more — one in London (also backed by Gandler) and one in Milan — slated to join in 2027.
“There’s pent‑up demand,” Gandler told DW. “The only thing really missing around American football is structure. So to capture that kind of growth, what you really need is a professionally‑governed, transparent and responsive league.”
The EFA is not the only new initiative: the American Football League Europe (AFLE) has also emerged, announcing five teams so far for its upcoming season. AFLE managing director Moritz Heisler said the two organizations were talking about “bringing things together,” adding: “If done right, a merged or evolved AFLE doesn’t need to be the biggest league, just the smartest one.” An EFA source, however, described the talks as being about AFLE teams joining the EFA.
Both groups confront the same core question: how to build a successful, commercially viable American football league in Europe. Even the NFL’s earlier experiment, NFL Europe, closed in 2007 after reportedly losing about $30 million per year. Though it had pockets of popularity in England and Germany, it struggled to find a foothold in the US and was widely seen there as a developmental circuit. Since then the NFL has instead brought regular‑season games to Europe.
“Compared to football and basketball, American football is a niche sport in Europe,” Heisler said. “But the NFL didn’t ‘fail’ in Europe because people don’t like American football. It struggled because it tried to import a US product instead of localizing deeply enough.” Heisler argues that success depends on engaging local fans and connecting them with players from their own cities.
Gandler, who has a background in streaming, sees a strong media opportunity as well. “There’s a massive opportunity on the media side,” he said. “I think there’s a way for us to create significant value on an international level, but at the same time helping the local franchises maximize their rights on the domestic market. It’s all about homegrown players.”
Earlier this year teams split from the existing European League of Football (ELF), demanding “structural reforms, economic fairness and real transparency” — criticisms aimed at alleged mismanagement by the ELF’s CEO. The ELF later announced it had entered self‑administration, a form of insolvency, while saying it intended to continue operating and stick to its season schedule. An EFA source quipped: “They have no teams!”
The EFA promises “financial sustainability” and says it wants to follow the NFL’s “gold standard” of collective franchise control and revenue sharing. Mason Parker, owner of the Prague Lions, one of the clubs signed to the EFA, said governance is crucial. “The league will be successful when the team owners start treating the league’s P&L [profit and loss] like their own P&L. The other league was simply not structured that way. The incentives weren’t correctly aligned.”
Heisler said the ELF focused too much on speed and scale, expanding rapidly and creating mismatches that led to uncompetitive games and wide disparities between clubs’ facilities. Images of players queuing for portable toilets during a game in Berlin last July highlighted those gaps and drew ridicule online. “There was no vetting,” Parker said. “The [other] teams had no say. That’s a perfect example of the systemic problem that the ELF had.”
Another complicating factor is the NFL’s own strategy in Europe: staging more games on the continent, running extensive ancillary activities around those fixtures, and granting international marketing rights to its 32 teams to build long‑term brand presence.
With flag football (a non‑contact form of the sport) set to debut at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, Gandler says American football is at an “inflection point.” “Viewership in Europe is accelerating, and the sport, in my view, is entering a global growth phase,” he said, noting the Olympics catalyzed basketball’s international adoption.
Gandler hopes a European league could complement the NFL by “bridging storylines” — tracking former NFL players who come to Europe and European players who go on to the NFL. Past efforts to help non‑US players break into the NFL have had limited success, he acknowledged, but sees room for a European competition to fill gaps when NFL activity in a market subsides.
Edited by: Matt Pearson
