Through the 1890s and the early part of the 20th century, professional football was primarily a regional sport, with most informal circuits centered around a single state or region with only limited play outside state lines. ( November 2012) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)įootball was first professionalized in 1892, when Pudge Heffelfinger and Ben "Sport" Donnelly each received a large sum of cash to play for the Allegheny Athletic Association of the Western Pennsylvania Senior Independent Football Conference. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This section needs additional citations for verification.
since 1990 to avoid a work stoppage that resulted in the loss of regular-season games.
NFL FOOTBALL STORY SERIES
A series of labor agreements during the 1990s and increasingly large television contracts have helped keep the league one of the most profitable in the U.S., and the only major league in the U.S. The league continued to expand to its current size of 32 teams. It was very successful, and forced a merger with the older NFL that resulted in a greatly expanded league and the creation of the Super Bowl, which has become the most-watched annual sporting event in the United States. The rival American Football League was founded in 1960. By 1958, when that season's NFL championship game became known as "the most exciting game ever played", the NFL was on its way to becoming one of the most popular sports leagues in the United States. Teams became more financially viable, the last team folding in 1952 and the league absorbing teams from the briefly more successful All-America Football Conference in 1950, of which only the San Francisco 49ers and the Cleveland Browns survive to the present day.
Other changes followed after the war the office of league President evolved into the more powerful Commissioner post, mirroring a similar move in Major League Baseball. The NFL stopped signing black players in 1927 but reintegrated in 1946 following World War II. The first official championship game was held in 1933. League membership gradually stabilized throughout the 1920s and 1930s as the league adopted progressively more formal organization. The Green Bay Acme Packers, founded in 1919 (joined the NFL in 1921, now the Green Bay Packers) is the oldest NFL franchise with continuous operation in the same location. Only two founding members, the Decatur Staleys (now the Chicago Bears) and the Chicago Cardinals (now the Arizona Cardinals), are still in the league. The NFL was the first professional football league to successfully establish a nationwide presence, after several decades of failed attempts. The league took on its current name in 1922. The National Football League (NFL) was founded in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association (APFA) with ten teams from four states, all of whom existed in some form as participants of regional leagues in their respective territories.
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