Grizzlies

American soldiers stationed near Ansbach started throwing a football around in 1979, and what began as a barracks pastime turned into one of the founding members of the German Football League. The Grizzlies were there when the league itself took shape, and within a few years they were the team to beat: German Bowl titles came in 1981, 1982 and 1985, a run that put the club among the sport's early standard-bearers in Bavaria. Runner-up finishes followed almost as often — five times across the 1980s — the kind of near-misses that mark a side which kept reaching finals without always winning them.

Rivalries in German football at this level tend to be regional and long-running, and the Grizzlies' meetings with sides such as the Amberg Mad Bulldogs belong to that pattern of Bavarian clubs measuring themselves against each other season after season.

The team still plays out of Ansbach, at the Sportanlage Carolinum, in a town better known for its half-timbered old quarter than for American football — which is precisely why a club built by soldiers passing through, and then kept alive by the town after them, is worth noticing at all.