The World Bowl was the annual

American football American football (referred to simply as football in the United States and Canada), also known as gridiron, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, the team wi ...

championship game of the World League of American Football/NFL Europe. The World Bowl was played each year from 1991 to 2007 (except 1993 and 1994). The game was conceived as the final of the NFL-related spring league, the World League. The first World Bowl was played in 1991 in London. With the 1995 relaunch of the World League with the North American teams removed, all subsequent World Bowls were played in Europe between European clubs. The only World Bowl to take place outside Europe was World Bowl '92 in

Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple- ...

, Canada. The World Bowl trophy was a globe made of

glass Glass is a non- crystalline, often transparent, amorphous solid that has widespread practical, technological, and decorative use in, for example, window panes, tableware, and optics. Glass is most often formed by rapid cooling (quenchin ...

measuring 35.5 cm (14 inches) in diameter and weighing 18.6 kg (41 lbs).

Overview

When the World League of American Football (WLAF) was founded in 1991, with teams in North America and Europe as well as expansion plans for Asia, the name World Bowl was appropriate. The name was kept after 1995 when the league limited itself exclusively to Europe. From 1995 to 1997, the World Bowl venue was decided by the standings after five weeks of the 10-week season. In other years, the sites were predetermined before the season. The 2002 World Bowl was hosted in Rhein Fire's hometown of

Düsseldorf Düsseldorf ( , , ; often in English sources; Low Franconian and Ripuarian: ''Düsseldörp'' ; archaic nl, Dusseldorp ) is the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. It is the second-largest city in ...

as a farewell to the old Rheinstadion. After the new LTU Arena (now Merkur Spiel-Arena) was completed, the 2005 World Bowl was hosted there again. It would return in 2006, the first time that the game was played in the same site in consecutive years. As the city's Fortuna Düsseldorf team spent much of this time in lower tiers of the German soccer pyramid, Düsseldorf was the rare NFL Europe city in which American football held an arguably competitive position. Nine World Bowls were played on Saturdays and six World Bowls were played on Sundays (1991, 1996-1999, 2000).

World Bowl (WLAF, NFL Europe, and NFL Europa Championships)

*Note:

Roman numerals Roman numerals are a numeral system that originated in ancient Rome and remained the usual way of writing numbers throughout Europe well into the Late Middle Ages. Numbers are written with combinations of letters from the Latin alphabet, ...

were not officially used by NFL Europe until World Bowl IX. Before 2001, the games were titled with the current year, such as World Bowl 2000.

Team records

Results by country

Hosting cities

While the Olympic stadiums in Montreal, Amsterdam and Barcelona hosted World Bowls, the league never selected Berlin as a host town, though the city's Thunder played in the Olympiastadion from 2003 to 2007.

Other uses of "World Bowl"

The former World Football League, a short-lived 1970s competitor to the NFL, was the first to name its championship game the World Bowl. In World Bowl I, the only WFL World Bowl contested, the Birmingham Americans defeated the

Florida Blazers The Florida Blazers were an American football team who played in the World Football League in 1974. The team moved to San Antonio in 1975 and became the San Antonio Wings. History The Blazers began in 1974 when oceanographic engineer E. Joseph Wh ...

22–21 on December 5, 1974 at Legion Field in

Birmingham, Alabama Birmingham ( ) is a city in the north central region of the U.S. state of Alabama. Birmingham is the seat of Jefferson County, Alabama's most populous county. As of the 2021 census estimates, Birmingham had a population of 197,575, down 1% f ...

. The game had been scheduled to be played at the Gator Bowl Stadium in

Jacksonville, Florida Jacksonville is a city located on the Atlantic coast of northeast Florida, the most populous city proper in the state and is the largest city by area in the contiguous United States as of 2020. It is the seat of Duval County, with which th ...