Warriors

No franchise in the NFL carries the name Warriors, though the league has come close to it more than once. When the Washington franchise dropped its old identity in 2020, Warriors sat among the names weighed for the rebrand before the club settled first on Washington Football Team and later, permanently, on Commanders. A separate attempt got further on paper: Daniel Snyder trademarked "Washington Warriors" for a planned Arena Football League franchise that never took the field.

Outside the NFL, the name has stuck where the sport is played on a smaller scale. The London Warriors compete in British American football under the British American Football Association and the American Football League of England. Belgium has its Waterloo Warriors, and in Japan the Tokyo Warriors play in the X-League. Germany carries the name into several towns at once, among them the Bad Kreuznach Warriors and the Schwalmstadt Warriors, part of a domestic scene where American football has taken root without ever producing an NFL-level competitor to the name.

None of these clubs share a single lineage or a single ground; each grew up separately, in a different city, under a different federation, and none of them lines up with the Wolves or Tommies sides sometimes listed as recent opponents — those belong to other competitions entirely, among them American college football's St. Thomas Tommies. What ties the Warriors name together is not a club but a habit: a word that keeps getting proposed, trademarked or adopted in cities from London to Tokyo, without ever settling into one franchise the NFL calls its own.