When the championship game for the Italian Football League touched down in Toledo in June 2025, it brought with it competition between the region’s best Italian restaurants, most athletic mayors, and overqualified football coaches.
But the week of festivities that brought over $1.9 million to the local economy would likely never have happened were it not for University of Toledo Quarterback Gene Stauber, whose contributions to a football game played in the midst of World War II brought football into the Italian consciousness.
As Allied forces prepared for the final year of the war, Corporals from America’s 5th Army and 12th Air Force Services met in secret for weeks. On New Year’s Day, they debuted their confidential project: to put on the largest game of American Football in Italian history in the “Spaghetti Bowl.”
Although the game took place just 100 miles from the front, civilians snuck into the Florian Municipal Stadium (the present-day Stadio Artemi Franchi), eager for a peek at NFL players alongside a spectacle of college stars.
“Guys that had been All-Americans at regular colleges and universities were sitting on the bench because [the military] had amassed such talent … because guys didn’t want to fight in the war,” Joseph Vasquez, professor of political science at the University of Central Florida, said.
Unknowns laced up alongside established stars. Capt. Cecil Sturgeon, a Philadelphia Eagles Tackle, led a defensive line for the Army that featured four high schoolers and a farmer from Wisconsin.
Sturgeon’s side practiced hard to learn the “Spears’ Shift” offense, the first in the game’s history to utilize “pull blocking,” a technique that used misdirection before plays to confuse opponents. At the time, the practice was highly unusual, having only been invented only a decade before by Coach Clarence Spears.
Even more unusually, the defense practiced with a man who helped create it: Spears’ understudy, University of Toledo Quarterback Eugene Stauber. Stauber served as the Army’s backup Quarterback, helping to prepare the defense in the weeks leading up to the game.
So, on January 1, 1945, Stauber’s boys played in a game that would be one of the first European introductions to the game of American Football. Anchored by their well-rehearsed offensive misdirections, the Army shut out the Twelfth Air Force in a dominant 20-0 victory.
Upon returning home, Stauber picked up a War medal from the Senate, as well as his old job at the University of Toledo as a Lineman coach. Over a Hall of Fame coaching career, Stauber would find success teaching young athletes what he taught his comrades in the Italian Bowl: the “Spears” offense, with its “pull blocking” techniques.
Without Stauber, football may have never evolved into a sport that focuses on sending the pigskin spiraling through the air. Misdirection proved instrumental to the creation of the modern “West Coast” offense, and today, every NFL team incorporates the misdirection technique into their playbook.
“Defying the prediction that it would cause the sport’s demise, the forward pass instead made football America’s most popular sport,” football historian Christopher Klein said.
It was this high-flying playstyle that attracted the attention of Bruno Beneck, an Italian World War II veteran who had introduced the sport of baseball to Italy and made millions selling its broadcasting rights.
Eager to import another lucrative American pastime, Beneck created Europe’s first football team in 1972, the Rome Gladiators, for $37,000. In doing so, he also established the Federazione Italiana di American Football (FIFA).
Enamored by watching his father Ercole play Running Back, Andrea Fimiani became a part of the first generation of Italian youth who were inspired by Beneck’s broadcasts. In the ‘80s, games drew crowds of over 20,000.
“In Italy, a lot of people don’t know football like we know football … but my dad used to play in the ‘80s in Italy. And so that’s how I really got into the sport,” Fimiani said. “It’s something that’s always been in my life. [My dad] used to let me run routes before going to bed, and I wasn’t going to bed until I completed every route.”
Still, the IFL’s profitability pales in comparison to its American counterpart.
In 1973, the year the IFL was founded, the NCAA signed a $38 million deal with ABC to broadcast 24 games of college football. 40 years later, ESPN’s contract to broadcast the College Football Playoff was nearly 500 times that, netting the NCAA more than a billion dollars a year for its annual coverage of just 11 games.
And rising price tags for ‘exclusive’ contracts are taking viewers away from local broadcasting. Providers like Buckeye Broadband Sports Network can’t afford to stream the University of Toledo’s games to more than 250,000 local customers despite being just 8 miles from the stadium.
“[Colleges] get money from other sources, so they’re not gonna let us broadcast their content. Even the Mid-American Conference — the conference that Toledo has been playing in — has other relationships,” Mathew Beredo, general counsel for Buckeye Broadband, said.
While the sport is becoming less popular, particularly amongst wealthy Americans, it remains a cornerstone for community connection in working-class towns like Toledo.
“Ohio football, high school level, [is the] best of the best. You go to college, Ohio State’s a top-tier school year in, year out. You go to the pro level, there’s 2 teams. As much as people say football is the biggest in the South … I would argue against that every single day … football is an Ohio sport,” University of Toledo Football megafan Alex Pisanti said.
It was this Ohioan passion for football that brought IFL President Raffaello Pellegrini to Northwest Ohio in 2021 to visit Toledo native Nick Eyde. While Eyde tore across countless Italian fields playing in Pellegrini’s league, the IFL president had never seen Stauber’s old stomping grounds.
“He said, ‘Nick, you know, the Italian Bowl has never been played outside of Italy. Wouldn’t it be fun to do a destination Italian bowl and play it in Ohio?’ I thought it was a great idea,” Eyde said.
Their decision killed two birds with one stone. While the IFL president got more eyes on his sport, Toledo would bring a new attraction to town for local broadcasters: America’s first foreign football championship.
In a way, it felt like football was returning to its roots: In IFL football, there is no media mob demanding answers after every loss; there are no megastars making millions from commercials aired at half-time; the only gladiators present are part-timers competing for four-figure paychecks and passion.
“There’s a little bit more soul in [the IFL], even more than you could find in D1 or professional football games,” Eyde said.
The humble pay of the IFL forces players to split time between their dreams and day jobs. The night before winning the league’s Most Valuable Player award, Fimiani clocked into his 9-5 as a banker, before driving three and a half hours to practice.
“I sacrifice all my free time, because when I’m not working, I’m practicing — period. I don’t party. I don’t go out much. And I like it that way,” Fimiani said.
His teammate, Andre Poglietelli, pulls off a more precarious balancing act working as a waiter, security guard and receptionist in order to pursue his dreams on the gridiron.
“Sometimes I felt tired, devastated, destroyed, sometimes with very few hours of sleep, but then I think about how great the desire I have to achieve my goals [is],” Poglietelli said.
The team’s focus has paid off. Behind Fimiani’s dual-threat playstyle and a strong defensive scheme, Firenze Guelfi went undefeated (10-0) through the regular season — en route to a spot in the IFL’s Championship game against the dynastic Ancona Dolphins.
But the Italian League’s Super Bowl doesn’t only bring glory to the winning team. It also draws an influx of tourists to Toledo.
“It’s not always that we have 2,000 Italian tourists living in our city for five days,” Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz said in a 2024 interview with the Toledo Blade.
Hours before the game kicked off on June 28, the University of Toledo parking lot was packed full of tailgaters.
“I think this is a great way to show your Italian heritage,” Pisanti said at the pregame tailgate. “It’s a different market, where you’re not surrounded by guys who come from the same background, [so] when you can see everybody come together with the same background, it’s really cool.”
While the fans enjoyed refreshments in 95-degree weather, players anticipated the culmination of a lifelong dream.
“It is beautiful to play football in the land where this sport was born. For us, it is a real honor to play under the eyes of the Americans,” Poglietelli said
In 1941, Gene Stauber took to the field over 4,000 miles away from home as part of a team that was motivated not by money, but by a passion for the game.
80 years later, clad in royal purple, Guelfi’s second-generation superstar used that same passion to overwhelm the opposition. Guelfi beat Ancona 49-17, and Fimiani was announced as the game’s MVP, prompting an outbreak of celebratory chants throughout the stadium.
“Here, we’ve been treated like professionals,” Fimiani said. “We’re not working. We focus on football. [It] makes us feel like we are living our dream, even if it’s just for a week.”
