http://www.profootballtalk.com/rumormill.htm
A league source tells us that the death of NFL Europa will be announced on Friday, June 29.
Auf wiedersehn, adieu, ciao, hasta la vista, aloha, and all that crap.
It's been a poorly-kept secret of late that the NFL is ready to pull the plug on its 15-year effort to export the game of American football to the land of hairy, stinky armpits (the men need to work on their hygiene, too).
The original idea was to drop quasi-NFL teams on foreign soil and hope that the presence of the sport would cause fans in other nations to discover the greatest pastime on the planet. Instead, the fever has spread only a bit faster than democracy in the Middle East.
Still, the league formerly known as NFL Europe and before that the World League and before that the World League of American Football served its purpose. Unlike our temporary fascination with Australian Rules Football back in the 1980s, when ESPN was making the gradual transition from tiddly winks to major league sports, the NFL acted on the interest that was rising in other countries by creating a minor league that played there.
The real challenge will be to get folks in Europe (and elsewhere) to respond to the "real" version of the greatest sport in the world. If they do, the NFL could eventually do to soccer what it has done in the U.S. to baseball.
Despite the peurile writing, PFT tends to have credible sources.
