National Football League

• 1. Introduction

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  The National Football League did not begin in a stadium. It began on the 20th of August, 1920, inside an automobile showroom in Canton, Ohio. Representatives from four Ohio clubs gathered at the Jordan and Hupmobile dealership with a goal that sounded almost modest at the time: to raise the standard of professional football and stop teams from poaching each other's players. From that meeting, a game that had been fragmented, informal, and regionally scattered would eventually become the wealthiest professional sports league in the world.

  By 2015, Super Bowls occupied the top five positions on Nielsen's all-time list of most-watched American television broadcasts. The average NFL team is now valued at more than seven billion dollars. The league's highest average attendance of any professional sports league in the world sits at 67,591 per game. How did an organization formed in an auto showroom grow into something of that scale? The answers involve a bidding war with a rival league, a fight over television rights worth billions, a decades-long struggle over racial inclusion, and a trophy made by Tiffany and Co. that no winning team ever has to give back.

• 2. A League Takes Shape

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  Jim Thorpe, one of the most celebrated athletes of his era, was elected as the first president of the American Professional Football Association at the 17th of September 1920 meeting. Fourteen teams made up the league in that inaugural year, though the organization did not even maintain official standings. The first recorded game in league history took place on the 26th of September, 1920, when the Rock Island Independents defeated the non-league St. Paul Ideals 48-0 at Douglas Park.

  The championship that first year went to the Akron Pros, awarded by virtue of their record. Of all the clubs that played in 1920, only two remain in the NFL today: the Decatur Staleys, now the Chicago Bears, and the Chicago Cardinals, now the Arizona Cardinals. The league changed its name to the National Football League on the 24th of June, 1922.

  The first real structural crisis came in 1932, when the Chicago Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans ended the season tied for first. No tiebreaker mechanism existed in the standings formula for such a situation. The league hastily arranged a playoff game, originally set for Wrigley Field in Chicago, but a combination of heavy snow and extreme cold forced it indoors to Chicago Stadium. That arena lacked a regulation-size field, so the rules were altered to fit the space. The Bears won 9-0. Fan interest in that improvised championship game persuaded the NFL to split into two divisions beginning in 1933 and to hold a dedicated championship game between division winners going forward.

• 3. Exclusion and Integration

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  The 1934 season marked the beginning of twelve consecutive seasons in which African Americans were entirely absent from the NFL. The de facto ban was not rescinded until 1946, a shift that coincided with public pressure and with Major League Baseball lifting a similar restriction around the same time.

  Decades later, exclusion remained a live issue at the management level. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, whose 17-year tenure ended in 2006, introduced league initiatives aimed at increasing the number of minorities in league and team management roles. His successor, Roger Goodell, continued in that direction. On the 21st of May, 2024, the league announced the NFL Source initiative, designed to increase the number of minority- and women-owned businesses working with the NFL. Under the program, businesses that are 51% owned or led by a veteran, woman, minority, person with disabilities, or LGBTQ+ individual would be supported in obtaining the certifications needed to do business with the league. Participation would be mandatory for teams hosting major events such as the Super Bowl and the NFL draft.

  A separate issue about racial fairness emerged from the NFL's handling of the billion-dollar concussion settlement. Prior to 2021, the league had used race-based adjustments when evaluating dementia claims, a practice critics condemned. The NFL eventually ended what was called race-norming after sustained public criticism.

• 4. The AFL Merger

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  A fourth American Football League began play in 1960, and unlike the earlier rival leagues that had withered against the NFL, this one held on. The AFL signed lucrative television contracts and launched a bidding war with the NFL for college players and free agents. The competition drove up player salaries and forced both leagues to confront the costs of fighting each other.

  The two leagues announced a merger on the 8th of June, 1966, with full effect in 1970. In the meantime, they agreed to hold a common draft and a joint championship game. That game, the Super Bowl, was played four times before the merger was complete. The NFL won Super Bowl I and Super Bowl II; the AFL won Super Bowl III and Super Bowl IV. After the merger, the NFL reorganized into the National Football Conference, made up mostly of the pre-merger NFL teams, and the American Football Conference, consisting of all former AFL clubs plus three teams that had played in the old NFL.

  The Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers, both originally from the rival All-America Football Conference of the 1940s, also trace their histories through that earlier wave of competition. The Los Angeles Rams came from a 1936 iteration of the American Football League. The NFL absorbed or outlasted them all.

• 5. Pete Rozelle's Machine

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  Pete Rozelle led the NFL from 1960 to 1989, and the league that existed when he left was barely recognizable as the same organization he inherited. Annual attendance climbed from roughly 3 million at the start of his tenure to 17 million by its end. The NFL established NFL Properties in 1963 under his watch, creating a licensing operation that now earns the league billions of dollars annually. He also created NFL Charities and built a national partnership with United Way.

  The Super Bowl became a global event under Rozelle's tenure. By 1989, the final year of his commissionership, 400 million viewers around the world watched Super Bowl XXIII. The league's television strategy, built on distributing rights across multiple networks and demanding a share of primetime, transformed professional football into a reliable fixture of American weekly life.

  Tagliabue, who succeeded Rozelle, continued expanding the business. His 17-year tenure brought large increases in television contracts and added four expansion teams. Then Goodell, elected in 2006, focused on player safety and the legal exposure that came with it. A class-action lawsuit filed in 2015 by NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers alleged that an exclusive arrangement with DirecTV violated antitrust law. On the 27th of June, 2024, a Los Angeles jury found the NFL liable, ordering a penalty of more than 4.7 billion dollars. With triple damages permitted under federal antitrust law, the league's potential total liability reached 14.39 billion dollars.

• 6. Television and Money

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  NFL games now appear on eight networks across seven media partners in the United States, including ESPN and ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, Prime Video, Netflix, and NFL Network. In 2023, a single 30-second advertisement during Sunday Night Football cost more than 882,000 dollars. The Monday Night Football rate was more than 562,000 dollars, and Thursday Night Football drew more than 440,000 dollars per spot.

  The most recent rights deal, announced on the 18th of March, 2021, runs through the 2033 season. ESPN and ABC are paying 2.7 billion dollars per year. CBS, Fox, and NBC each pay more than 2 billion dollars annually. Amazon pays 1 billion dollars a year for the exclusive rights to the Thursday Night Football package, which it had begun streaming as early as 2018 through Twitch. Starting in 2024, Netflix holds global streaming rights for at least one Christmas Day game per season as part of a three-year agreement.

  Revenue from television contracts flows through a notable structure: the NFL distributes its shared income equally among all 32 teams. Economist Richard D. Wolff described this model as contrary to the typical corporate structure, since it prevents a single wealthy club from pulling so far ahead that the competition becomes meaningless. Roger Noll offered a counterpoint, calling the revenue sharing the league's most important structural weakness, because teams face no financial penalty for losing. In 2025, the NFL moved further into ownership of its media partners, acquiring a 10% stake in ESPN as part of a deal to sell NFL Network and NFL RedZone to ESPN Inc.

• 7. Trophies and Records

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  The Brunswick-Balke-Collender Cup, the NFL's first championship trophy, was donated in 1920. Its appearance is known only from a description of it as a silver loving cup. The trophy was meant to become permanent once a team had won it at least three times, but it was discontinued, and its current location is unknown.

  The Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy replaced it and was awarded from 1934 to 1967. Ed Thorp was a referee and a friend to many of the league's early owners; the trophy was created upon his death in 1934. The main trophy would travel with each new champion, while a smaller replica was given to each winner to keep. The original is believed to be in the possession of the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame, though it was long thought to be lost.

  The current championship trophy, the Vince Lombardi Trophy, was officially renamed in 1970 to honor the Green Bay Packers head coach who led the team to victories in the first two Super Bowls. Unlike its predecessors, a brand-new Vince Lombardi Trophy is made for each year's champion and never reclaimed. Tiffany and Co. manufactures each one from sterling silver. The Green Bay Packers hold the most overall NFL championships with thirteen, nine of which came before the Super Bowl era. Since the Super Bowl began, the New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers are tied for the most victories with six each.