For football/soccer fans, predictions for the World Cup

[Polaris]

Hopefully Russia doesn't do so in the cities where chemical waste has reduced the life expectancy to the mid 40s.

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NFL teams defunct starting in the early 1990s. These were the teams the NFL used to expand into new venues, but failed at gaining interest. The latter teams ended up draining the NFL of 30 million every year.

Birmingham Fire
Sacramento Surge
San Antonio Riders
New York/New Jersey Knights
Montreal Machine
Orlando Thunder
Raleigh–Durham Skyhawks
Ohio Glory
Amsterdam Admirals
Barcelona Dragons
Berlin Thunder
Cologne Centurions
Frankfurt Galaxy
Hamburg Sea Devils
London Monarchs
Rhein Fire
Scottish Claymores

NFL Europe. Yeah, completely different league. I have no idea what league the U.S. ones played in, but it wasn't NFL. OK, looked it up - WLAF.

You do realize that these things are different from NFL (without the qualifier), right?

They were actually the NFL, but just labeled differently to hit the markets where the usual NFL teams were not located and they didn't have to do some stupid restructuring like they did when they added expansion teams to the AFL/NFL lineup (Seahawks used to be in the same division as the Raiders for example). They failed miserably because those states cared more for high school and college football than the NFL, so they packed up and went abroad.....they ended up doing better overseas than in America (at least a few were just renamed, so technically more like 12 actual teams failed instead of the 18 I listed).

There were several non-affiliated professional American football leagues (and countless teams associated with those leagues) that ended up failing as well during the same time, but since they weren't part of the NFL, I did not include them.

In 20 years, NFL won't be as popular as MLS.