Monarchs

Twenty-one nothing against the Barcelona Dragons settled World Bowl I in 1991, and it did so in front of the Monarchs' own crowd at Wembley, where Stan Gelbaugh took the offensive award and captain Dan Crossman was named the game's most valuable player. The London club had been built that same year as one of the original entries in the World League of American Football, the competition that would later become NFL Europe, and the Wembley win gave it the one major honour it would collect before the decade was out.

The Monarchs stayed at the old Wembley for their first two seasons, then, once the league paused and restarted, shifted grounds more than once: White Hart Lane took them in for 1995 and 1996, Stamford Bridge for 1997. By the final season the team had stopped calling one stadium home at all, rebranded as the England Monarchs and sent around the country to play at Crystal Palace, Ashton Gate and Alexander Stadium in turn.

Some of the names that passed through were bigger than the league itself. Brad Johnson played for London before going on to win a Super Bowl with Tampa Bay, and William Perry, already known to American audiences as "The Refrigerator" from his years with the Chicago Bears, spent time in Monarchs colours as well. The rivalry with Barcelona that had defined 1991 gave way in the mid-1990s to matches against the Scottish Claymores, the closest thing the league had to a home fixture on the British Isles.

Falling attendance caught up with the club before the decade closed. The league had begun expanding into Germany, adding the Berlin Thunder, and in July 1998 the Monarchs were dissolved. Wembley had held 82,000 for that first World Bowl.