Spartans

There is no next season to preview: the Hannover Spartans pulled out of the Regionalliga Nord before the 2022 campaign, unable to field enough players, and the club effectively came apart when Inna Lempert, then head of department, stepped down. What is left is the record of a team built in December 2006 out of the wreckage of the insolvent Hannover Musketeers.

The high point came in 2018, when Willie James Robinson Jr. coached the side to the Regionalliga Nord title and promotion into the GFL2. It lasted one year. The Spartans went straight back down after the 2019 season, the same year British quarterback Patrick Daley, on loan from the GB Lions, took snaps for a team that never got another shot at that level. Winston Huggins had run the programme through most of the years before that, from 2013 to 2017, laying down the football that eventually reached the Regionalliga summit under his successor.

The rivalries that mattered were regional ones, against clubs like the Lübeck Cougars and the Elmshorn Fighting Pirates, opponents drawn from the same corner of northern Germany where American football has had to fight for players and attention.