Born on a Base: How FIDAF and Italian Football Began
Football’s Italian story starts more than a century ago, with a Thanksgiving Day game in Genoa between the crews of the USS Connecticut and the USS Kansas. It was a one-off game, and decades passed before the sport returned in any organized way: first with Allied troops, in the Bambino Bowl in Bari and the Spaghetti Bowl in Florence, the latter drawing a crowd of 25,000, both played between 1944 and 1945; then through U.S. bases that kept the game alive into the 1950s and 1960s. By 1969, those bases had formalized their games into the Northern Italian Football League.
In 1972, Bob Kap set out to bring American football to Europe on a large scale through the Intercontinental Football League project, together with Bruno Beneck, former president of the Italian Baseball Federation and a renowned director at RAI, Italy’s state broadcaster. Rome was among the league’s potential franchise locations. The league never got off the ground, undone by both the oil crisis of that era and widespread international tensions. This did not deter Beneck, however, who founded the Roma Gladiators, later known in Italian as Gladiatori Roma, and organized friendly matches against teams from NATO bases.
In 1977, Beneck organized tournaments in Viareggio under a body he called FIFA, a federation with no connection to world soccer’s governing body. The teams that took part, informally backed by the sports press of the day, soon formed the backbone of Italy’s first real league. In April 1978, Beneck met a group of young Romans who had written to him asking for help. Within weeks, together with Marcello Loprencipe, Gianfranco Calistri and Niccolò Franchetti Pardo, he founded the Lega Italiana Football (LIF), and he later inaugurated the Vince Lombardi Stadium in Castel Giorgio, Italy’s first venue built specifically for the sport.
The first official championship was held there in July 1980. Lupi Roma, Gladiatori Roma, Diavoli Milano and Tori Torino were the first four teams to take part in an official American football championship in Italy. Lupi Roma were the first team to win it all, in a format borrowed from soccer, the round robin system, although the title was only formally recognized in 2016. The 1981 season featured the same four teams, with Diavoli Milano relocating to Pavullo nel Frignano, in Emilia-Romagna. It was never completed due to organizational shortcomings, with Gladiatori Roma top of the table after the first three games.
Meanwhile, Milan was building a parallel track. Giovanni Colombo, who had founded the Gruppo Sportivo Hotel Manin in 1970, launched the Rhinos in 1978. By 1981, the Rome and Milan scenes had converged into Italy’s first true federation, the Associazione Italiana Football Americano (AIFA), headed by Colombo, who was also president of the Rhinos. The national team debuted that year, losing to Germany by a score of 12 to 6, before going on to win two European titles, in 1983 and 1987. Those were the years when American football was gaining widespread popularity in the Italian mainstream. Games were broadcast both locally and nationally, advertisements heavily featured gridiron football and, above all, NFL games aired on Sunday mornings alongside basketball and wrestling. These images remain etched in the collective memory of a generation that, forty years ago, was young and eager to explore a different world.
In 1988, AIFA joined CONI, the Italian National Olympic Committee, and was renamed FIAF, Federazione Italiana American Football. What followed, however, were nearly two lost decades. FIAF lost CONI’s support in 1999 and was formally dissolved in 2000, although it limped on, organizing championships through 2002.
Its natural successor, NFL Italia (NFLI), was formed that year under the AICS umbrella, specifically to allow Italian clubs to keep competing in Europe. Chief among them was Lions Bergamo, the dominant side of the era, with eleven consecutive titles and a couple of Eurobowls under its belt. The arrangement collapsed when EFAF, then the governing body of American football in Europe, discovered that FIAF had been defunct for years and that NFLI itself had never been recognized by CONI. Club presidents met in three assemblies between Florence and Bologna in September and October 2007 to find a way to fill the void left by FIAF. NFLI was dissolved in 2008 to make room for FIDAF. FIDAF, as it turned out, had already existed since 2002. It had been founded by southern clubs such as Elephants Catania, which ran their own unrecognized nine a side and eleven a side championships to fill the same gap. When NFLI folded, FIDAF inherited national jurisdiction over the sport, formalized in 2009. It remains the sport’s federation today, and CONI recognized it as a national federation in 2023.
Two smaller bodies have operated alongside it since. The first is FIF, founded in 2009 under AICS to replace NFLI. It has been inactive since 2014 and was succeeded by IAAFL, which organized eight a side amateur leagues until 2020. The second is CSI, which since the 2017/2018 season has run five a side and seven a side championships. FIDAF does not formally recognize them, and the two structures coexist roughly the way the NCAA’s FBS and FCS do within Division I.
Over the years, the top flight has changed names almost as often as the federation above it. FIDAF hosted it as a private league, the IFL, from 2008 to 2016, which is why the federation’s website statistics only begin in 2009. It then became the Prima Divisione from 2017 to 2021 and the IFL again from 2022 to 2025, before reverting to a private league in 2026. The second tier, LENAF, launched in 2008, with play beginning the following year. It was renamed Seconda Divisione in 2015 and is known today as IFL2. The Nine Football League, formerly CIF9 (Campionato Italiano Football a 9), is the third tier of Italian football. It was born in 2003 and has been under the FIDAF umbrella since 2008.
Through every reorganization, Lions Bergamo set the benchmark of the era. The club won three Eurobowl titles, a mark matched by only one other European club, and twelve domestic championships, with crowds once reaching 30,000. Italian clubs carried that momentum into the ELF era, joining the league’s European expansion in 2023.
Today FIDAF counts roughly 100 teams and more than 10,000 players across men’s and women’s, senior, youth and flag football. That scale would have been unimaginable to the handful of Romans who gathered around Beneck in 1978, or to the clubs that, three decades later, had to rebuild their federation from scratch just to keep the sport alive.
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