Canadian football

• 1. Introduction

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  Canadian football traces its roots to a November afternoon in 1861, when students at the University of Toronto gathered for what became the first documented football match in the country's history, played approximately 400 yards west of Queen's Park. One of those participants was Sir William Mulock, who would later serve as chancellor of the university. What drew those young men to that field, and what would their informal practice game eventually grow into? The sport that emerged from those early gatherings would develop its own distinct rules, its own championship trophy, and a passionate following across a country that refers to it simply as football. It would borrow from rugby, negotiate with its American neighbor, and spend nearly a century searching for a name that fit.

• 2. Origins on Two Continents

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  Rugby football arrived in Canada as early as the 1860s, brought by British immigrants, with some accounts suggesting the game may have reached Canadian soil as far back as 1824. The first written record of an actual game comes from the 15th of October, 1862, when the First Battalion Grenadier Guards faced the Second Battalion Scots Fusilier Guards on the Montreal Cricket Grounds, with the Grenadier Guards winning by 3 goals and 2 rouges to nothing. Two years later, at Trinity College Toronto, three men named F. Barlow Cumberland, Frederick A. Bethune, and Christopher Gwynn sat down to codify rules based on rugby football, giving the game its earliest formal structure. From that point, clubs multiplied: the Hamilton Football Club formed on the 3rd of November, 1869, Montreal Football Club on the 8th of April, 1872, the Toronto Argonaut Football Club on the 4th of October, 1873, and the Ottawa Football Club on the 20th of September, 1876. Of those four founding clubs, only the Toronto club has remained in continuous operation to this day. The game soon attracted attention beyond local clubs. McGill University challenged Harvard University to a two-game series in 1874, using a hybrid game of English rugby that would carry Canadian football's influence south of the border.

• 3. Governing Bodies and the Long Road to the CFL

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  Canada's football administrators spent decades trying to organize the sport under a single roof. The Foot Ball Association of Canada was organized on the 24th of March, 1873, representing the first attempt to establish a proper governing body. The Canadian Rugby Football Union followed on the 12th of June, 1880, drawing together teams from Ontario and Quebec. The Ontario Rugby Football Union and Quebec Rugby Football Union were both formed in January 1883, and later the Interprovincial Football Union in 1907 and the Western Interprovincial Football Union in 1936 joined the growing structure. The Canadian Rugby Football Union reorganized into the Canadian Rugby Union in 1891. The immediate predecessor to the modern Canadian Football League took shape in 1956, when the Interprovincial and Western Interprovincial Football Unions formed the Canadian Football Council. Just two years later, in 1958, that Council left the Canadian Rugby Union and became the Canadian Football League. The Grey Cup had been part of this administrative story since 1909, donated by Albert Grey, 4th Earl Grey, who served as Governor General of Canada, and originally awarded for the Rugby Football Championship of Canada. The competition began as an amateur event and only became fully professional during the 1940s and early 1950s, with the last amateur organization, the ORFU, withdrawing after the 1954 season.

• 4. Rules That Set the Game Apart

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  The Burnside rules, incorporated in 1903 by the Ontario Rugby Football Union, made an early push to distinguish Canadian football from the rugby-oriented game it had grown from. Those rules reduced teams to 12 men per side, introduced the snap-back system, required the offensive team to gain 10 yards on three downs, and eliminated the throw-in from the sidelines. The Canadian and American games share common roots, but a series of divergences created two distinct sports. Originally both used three downs, goal posts on the goal lines, and unlimited forward motion. The Americans modified those rules; Canadians did not. Forward passes were not allowed in the Canadian game until 1929, and touchdowns were worth five points until 1956 when they were raised to six, both changes arriving several decades after the Americans had made the same adjustments. The unique scoring system reflects the game's rugby heritage most visibly in the single, or rouge, a one-point score awarded when a kicked ball becomes dead in the opponent's goal area. The term rouge, French for red, is thought to derive from the early practice of signaling such a score with a red flag. A rouge also appears in the Eton field game, where the term dates back to at least 1815.

• 5. The Name Question

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  From the 1860s well into the 1950s, the sport now known as Canadian football was consistently called rugby football, a name reflected in the organizations that ran it, from the Canadian Rugby Union to the Ontario Rugby Football Union. By the mid-twentieth century, though, the game Canadians were playing looked far more like what Americans played south of the border than anything recognizable to rugby fans elsewhere in the Commonwealth. When the CFL was formed in 1958, it chose the name Canadian football, while amateur play remained under the Canadian Rugby Union. That union finally removed rugby from its name in 1967, becoming the Canadian Amateur Football Association. Newspapers and fans had already started using Canadian football as early as the 1910s, when growing public attention to college football and later the NFL made comparisons to the domestic game common enough to require a distinguishing label.

• 6. American Expansion and Atlantic Reach

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  Canadian football has largely remained within Canada's borders, with one notable exception. The CFL attempted to expand into the United States in 1995, placing teams there to play under Canadian rules in what came to be officially known as the South Division. The experiment lasted three years before collapsing under continuing financial losses, a shortage of stadiums large enough to accommodate the longer and wider Canadian field, a widespread belief that the American teams were being used to generate expansion fee revenue for struggling Canadian franchises, and the return of the NFL to Baltimore. The Baltimore Stallions were the most successful of the American teams, winning the 83rd Grey Cup before the expansion ended. Within Canada, Atlantic coverage has grown incrementally. The CFL hosted the Touchdown Atlantic game in Nova Scotia in 2005 and in New Brunswick in 2010, 2011, and 2013. In 2013, Newfoundland and Labrador became the last province to establish football at the minor league level, with teams on the Avalon Peninsula and in Labrador City. Prince Edward Island, Canada's smallest province, has never hosted a CFL game.

• 7. A Field Unlike Any Other

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  The Canadian football field measures 150 yards in total length and 65 yards wide, with goal areas 20 yards deep and the goal lines 110 yards apart, giving the playing surface a total area of 87,750 square feet. The goalposts stand at the goal line rather than at the back of the end zone as in American football, and rise to 40 feet, with a crossbar 10 feet above the ground. Until 1986, end zones ran 25 yards deep, making the total field length 160 yards. The first field to use the shorter 20-yard end zone was BC Place in Vancouver, home of the BC Lions, which opened in 1983. The end zones at Toronto's BMO Field are even shorter at just 18 yards. Beginning in 2027, the CFL plans to shorten the playing field from 110 to 100 yards, reduce end zones from 20 to 15 yards, and move the goal posts from the goal line to the end line, the most significant structural change to the playing surface in decades.

• 8. The Game Today

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  Canadian football is now played across multiple levels, from the nine-team professional CFL whose regular season begins in June and runs through Grey Cup playoffs in late November, down through university, junior, and semi-professional competitions. At the university level, 27 teams compete in four conferences under U Sports for the Vanier Cup. Junior football draws players aged 18-22 through the Canadian Junior Football League, which fields 19 teams in three conferences competing for the Canadian Bowl, while the Quebec Junior Football League plays for the Manson Cup. Women's football has grown steadily, with the Maritime Women's Football League becoming the first Canadian women's league when it began operations in 2004. On the 13th of February, 2023, Football Canada and the International Federation of American Football announced jointly that the Canadian Amateur Football Rulebook would be recognized as an accepted rules code for international play, opening the door, in the words of Football Canada president and IFAF General Secretary Jim Mullin, for international friendlies and tournaments to be staged in Canada.