[1] In terms of attendance figures, cumulative salaries paid by teams, performance in international exhibition games and competitions and ability to draw foreign talent, the GFL is arguably the strongest national league in Europe.

The lowest ranked team of each conference plays a home and away series against the winner of the second division, and may be relegated if they lose.

A newly founded team must start out at the bottom of the league pyramid, just as in soccer, even though there have been rare exceptions, including the Hamburg Blue Devils.

[7] In March 1979, the AFBD, the American Football Federation of Germany (German: American-Football-Bund Deutschland), was formed, the first of its kind in Europe.

[8] In 1979, the American-Football-Bundesliga, later to be renamed the German Football League,[9] was formed, consisting of six clubs, the Frankfurter Löwen, Ansbach Grizzlies, Düsseldorf Panther, Munich Cowboys, Berliner Bären, and Bremerhaven Seahawks.

The era of the Frankfurter Löwen was hereby ended and the club went defunct in the mid-1980s, while the Ansbach Grizzlies continued to be an outstanding team, playing in all of the first eight German Bowls.

After this, the Braunschweig Lions set a new record, winning four German Bowls straight, beating four different teams in the finals.

In 2005, the Blue Devils were once more the opposition, followed by two southern teams, the Marburg Mercenaries in 2006 and the Stuttgart Scorpions in 2007, in an unbeaten season for the Lions.

It also saw the end of an 18-year title drought for the south, when the Schwäbisch Hall Unicorns defeated Kiel 48–44 to take out the national championship for the first time.

For the 2012 season, the Mönchengladbach Mavericks, runners-up in the northern division in 2011, were refused a license,[14] leaving an extra spot in the league which was awarded to the Lübeck Cougars.

The Schwäbisch Hall Unicorns repeated their 2011 success and once more defeated the Kiel Baltic Hurricanes in the German Bowl, becoming the first team from the south to win back-to-back championships since the 1982 Ansbach Grizzlies.

The 2014 German Bowl was contested by the two division champions with Braunschweig taking out their ninth title with Schwäbisch Hall only scoring a Field Goal until the fourth quarter.

The Lions won their ninth German Bowl victory with the highest-ever winning margin, defeating the Schwäbisch Hall Unicorns 47–9.

In 2019 the Lions from Braunschweig managed to avenge their semifinal defeat the year prior beating Frankfurt at home on their way from yet another division title to yet another German Bowl triumph against the Unicorns, in the process thwarting Schwäbisch Hall's attempt at their own "championship three-peat" and dealing the first defeat in the tenure of Head Coach Jordan Neumann who had taken over the job ahead of the 2017 season after the retirement of Schwäbisch Hall icon Siggi Gehrke who had coached the team for most of its existence and is mostly credited with the enduring success of the team.

The delays and ultimate cancellation caused some teams significant financial and organisational hardship as many costs – including salaries, transportation, and room & board expense for import players – were incurred despite no games being played.

As can perhaps be expected, the season was full of upsets and surprises despite top teams in Dresden, Schwäbisch Hall and Braunschweig largely keeping their roster intact.

Braunschweig meanwhile struggled and never achieved full team cohesion, in part due to relatively strict anti COVID-19 measures in the state of Lower Saxony preventing them from training together for much of the preseason and forcing them to hold their home opener in front of empty ranks.

Ultimately placing fourth in the North, the Lions were eliminated in the quarter-final on the road in Schwäbisch Hall in a game in which the Unicorns defense won the ball off of Braunschweig turnovers five times.

German Bowl XLII was played in Frankfurt am Main at the Waldstadion and saw the first ever title of a team from the New states of Germany in GFL history as the Dresden Monarchs defeated the Schwäbisch Hall Unicorns 28–19.

Between the end of the golden era of the Ansbach Grizzlies in 1986 and the rise of the Schwäbisch Hall Unicorns (who first reached the German Bowl in 2011), southern clubs only made five appearances in the championship game of which only one was successful (the Munich Cowboys in 1993).

Soon, this changed, and the allowed number of foreigners on the field for a team at any given time, in this case specifically, Americans, was reduced to five.

However, with the drawdown of US forces in the mid-1980s and the increase in talent and professionalism throughout the league, a more formalized mechanism was put in place to recruit and fly in former college football players to play in Germany for pay (salary) as well as room and board.

However, the restrictions on non-EU nationals remained in place, unless those players could prove that they had spent at least three years playing for a youth team in the sport in Germany.

Players are marked with an "A" on their jersey and helmet to allow referees to determine at a glance whether the limit is obeyed on the field.

These restrictions are specifically in place for US, Canadian, Mexican and Japanese citizens and, on request, exemptions can be made for players from countries without established structures in the sport.

This rule is designed to prevent an advantage to the wealthier clubs, who could otherwise recruit a large number of players from the traditional American football countries.

[18] However, the aforementioned inevitable exception for EU citizens provides a strong incentive to sign players with dual nationality who have played college football but do not count as "Americans".

In some cases the clubs have even encouraged or helped their players to get the citizenship of an EU country when they are eligible through ius sanguinis or residence.

Reilly Hennessey, who has dual Italian and US citizenship, had to wear an "A" on his jersey in the 2021 season of the Italian Football League due to having played college football at Central Washington University but was not subject to this limitation in German Bowl XLII when he played for the Schwäbisch Hall Unicorns later that same year.

The Ansbach Grizzlies still have won the secondmost titles in the south, seven, despite not having competed in the league since 1990:[5] Since the inception of the Eurobowl in 1986, German clubs have taken part in the competition in most seasons.