Professional gridiron football

• 1. Introduction

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  Professional gridiron football in North America traces its roots not to a stadium or a championship, but to a single payment: $500 slipped to a player named Pudge Heffelfinger in 1892, for a single game between the Allegheny Athletic Association and the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. Both Heffelfinger and the second paid player, Ben "Sport" Donnelly, denied the payments for most of their lives. That first transaction sparked more than a century of leagues rising and folding, rival owners bidding wars, landmark court battles, and broadcast contracts worth tens of billions of dollars. How did a clandestine cash arrangement in Pittsburgh become the NFL, the CFL, and an industry whose top players earn tens of millions of dollars each year? And why does Canadian football still play on a 110-yard field with three downs, while the game across the border evolved in a different direction entirely? The answers stretch from the amateur athletic clubs of the 1870s to a pandemic-shortened season in 2020.

• 2. From Club Grounds to Ohio Leagues

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  John Brallier accepted $10 to play for the Latrobe Athletic Association, becoming the first openly professional player; Latrobe soon became the first all-professional club. William Chase Temple took the next step by directly bankrolling the Duquesne Country and Athletic Club himself, in either 1898 or 1899. Throughout the 1890s, the Western Pennsylvania Professional Football Circuit served as the de facto major league for the sport, not a formal organization but an informal association of teams willing to play each other and anyone else who showed up. Ohio pioneered Sunday games to sidestep blue laws and avoid competing with college football, a scheduling move that eventually became the professional standard. Teams like the Massillon Tigers went on buying sprees to attract talent, pulling top players west from Pennsylvania, including Blondy Wallace, who signed with the Canton Bulldogs. A fabricated betting scandal and rising player costs effectively wrecked the Ohio League by 1907. The Canton Bulldogs resurfaced in 1915, when they signed multi-sport superstar Jim Thorpe. World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic shut down most teams, but those that kept playing picked up the talent that stayed stateside, breaking the Ohio League's decade-long grip on professional football. The oldest surviving professional club, the Arizona Cardinals, originally played on Racine Street in Chicago and has operated near-continuously since 1913, counting an earlier team from 1898 to 1906 as part of its lineage.

• 3. Forming a National League

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  In 1920, Ohio League teams organized into the American Professional Football Conference; two months later, after absorbing teams from surrounding regional circuits, the league renamed itself the American Professional Football Association. A showcase game between Canton and Buffalo was staged at the Polo Grounds in New York City in December 1920, with Buffalo winning. The APFA set its championship not by a playoff but by a vote of the league's owners, which bred controversy from the start. The Akron Pros had the best record in 1920, and the Chicago Staleys claimed the 1921 title, though not without dispute. In 1922, the APFA changed its name to the National Football League. The confusion over who was champion peaked in 1925, when the Pottsville Maroons were hailed as NFL champions by several newspapers after defeating the Chicago Cardinals on the 6th of December, yet two weeks of the season remained. The Cardinals scrambled to play two extra games and claimed the title; the league canceled games, suspended Pottsville's franchise, and the question was never cleanly resolved. In 1933, the league finally split into Eastern and Western divisions and instituted an actual championship game between division winners. The first professional football draft followed in 1936, with the Philadelphia Eagles selecting the University of Chicago's Heisman Trophy-winning running back Jay Berwanger first overall. Berwanger chose not to play.

• 4. Rival Leagues and Racial Exclusion

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  George Preston Marshall moved his Boston franchise to Washington, D.C. as the Washington Redskins in 1936 after being driven out of Boston by a competing league, and he introduced the marching band and a team song to professional football. He also refused to have black players on his team. His influence resulted in the entire NFL excluding black players after 1934. The Pacific Coast Professional Football League, formed in 1940, openly embraced black talent that had been blacklisted from the NFL since the 1930s. When the All-America Football Conference launched in 1946, its dominant franchise, the Cleveland Browns, became the first modern professional football team to sign black players. Browns players such as fullback Marion Motley, quarterback Otto Graham, and kicker Lou Groza starred during the AAFC's existence; the San Francisco 49ers featured running back Elroy 'Crazylegs' Hirsch, and the Baltimore Colts fielded quarterback Y. A. Tittle. Head coach Paul Brown brought year-round coaching staffs, precision pass patterns, face masks, the use of messenger guards, and film study into professional football. After the NFL admitted only three AAFC teams in a 1949 merger, the Browns went on to win the NFL championship in three of their first six years in the league, humbling an organization that had dismissed them as an inferior product. The Los Angeles Rams added black players in 1946, required by their stadium lease to integrate, making that integration a contractual obligation rather than a voluntary choice.

• 5. The AFL's Lasting Imprint

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  Texas oilmen Lamar Hunt and Bud Adams were turned away when they sought NFL franchises for Texas, so in 1960 they joined six other businessmen to form the fourth American Football League. The new league signed half of the NFL's 1960 first-round draft choices on its first try, including Billy Cannon of the Houston Oilers. The AFL actively recruited from predominantly black colleges and small colleges, ground the NFL had virtually ignored. That recruiting approach produced several firsts: the first black number one draft choice in Buck Buchanan of the Chiefs; the first black middle linebacker, Willie Lanier, also of the Chiefs; and the first modern black starting quarterback, Marlin Briscoe of the Broncos. Coaches like Hank Stram of the Dallas Texans and later the Kansas City Chiefs, and Sid Gillman with the Los Angeles and San Diego Chargers, brought a more risk-oriented style of play. The AFL introduced official scoreboard clocks, player names on jerseys, the two-point PAT conversion, gate and TV revenue-sharing, and the first cooperative television plan in which broadcast proceeds were split equally among all member clubs. Six of the original eight AFL teams won at least one championship before the merger with the NFL was agreed to in 1966. The AFL's ten franchises entered the merged league intact, the first time a major sports league had merged with another without losing a single franchise. The two-point conversion, which the AFL had introduced, was not adopted by the NFL until 1994.

• 6. Broadcasting and Revenue

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  NBC broadcast the first-ever televised professional football game from Ebbets Field on the 22nd of October 1939, a contest between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Eagles, captured by two fixed monochrome iconoscope cameras with a single play-by-play commentator named Skip Walz. The NFL now relies on television for nearly half of its revenue, in part because the league plays only one game per week, reducing ticket-sale opportunities compared with other professional sports. In 1994, Fox Broadcasting Company outbid CBS for the right to air NFC games with a bid of $395,000,000, bringing total broadcast rights fees to over $1,000,000,000 for the first time. When CBS outbid NBC for AFC rights in 1998, total rights fees doubled to over $2,000,000,000. The 2006 television contract expanded annual broadcast rights to over $3,000,000,000, and the 2011 renewal pushed that annual total to nearly $5,000,000,000. Between 2006 and 2022, the networks committed to paying the NFL nearly $70,000,000,000, a sum exceeding the resale value of all thirty-two NFL teams combined. The CFL chose a different path: beginning in 2008, it signed an exclusive contract with TSN, available only by cable or satellite subscription, to carry all of its games rather than splitting broadcasts between multiple providers. One of the reasons cited for the United Football League's failure was that it paid for television coverage rather than receiving rights fees, using networks that were not widely available.

• 7. Canada's Parallel Path

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  Canadian football evolved alongside the American game but on its own timeline. The forward pass, adopted in American football in 1906, did not come to the Canadian game until 1929, after significant pressure from American coaches. The touchdown was worth five points in Canada until 1956, when it changed partly because Canadian professional football held an American television contract; the same scoring adjustment had occurred in the United States back in 1912. Several structural relics remain in the Canadian game: goal posts on the goal line, a 110-yard field, more liberal rules for the drop kick, and only three downs. By 1954, the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union and the Western Interprovincial Football Union had gone professional, in part spurred by an NBC television contract that paid the Big Four more than the DuMont deal being offered to the NFL at the time. The two unions eventually merged into the Canadian Football League, recognizing 1958 as its founding year. The CFL has shown greater long-term stability than its American counterparts: for all but three years of its history, the league has had either eight or nine teams, all in the same nine markets, and has never moved a Canadian franchise from one city to another. An Atlantic franchise for Halifax called the Atlantic Schooners was approved in 1984, conditional on a stadium with sufficient capacity being built; no such stadium was ever constructed, and the only outdoor facility in Halifax, Huskies Stadium, seated less than half of what CFL rules mandate before it was demolished. The Baltimore Stallions remain the only American team to win the Grey Cup, a distinction that contributed to the CFL's American expansion experiment ending after the 1995 season.

• 8. Challengers, Bankruptcies, and New Leagues

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  The United States Football League, which began play in the spring of 1983, was the most significant challenger to the NFL since the American Football League. Donald Trump, owner of the New Jersey Generals, led a push to abandon the spring schedule and compete directly with the NFL in the fall. That shift drove away fans from teams that were clearly lame-duck franchises. The USFL sued the NFL on antitrust grounds and won, but the jury awarded damages of only $3. Several USFL quarterbacks later played in the NFL, including Steve Young, Jim Kelly, Bobby Hebert, Doug Flutie, and Doug Williams. The Arena Football League launched in 1987 under James F. "Jim" Foster, playing on a 50-yard field built around high-scoring offensive play. The AFL held a patent on most of its rules, which it interpreted broadly enough to block competition until the Professional Indoor Football League defeated that legal claim in 1997. The league's original incarnation filed for bankruptcy after the 2008 season, was bought by a coalition of its own teams, and relaunched in 2010. A second collapse followed after the 2019 season. The XFL launched in 2001, played one season, then relaunched in 2020 before a coronavirus pandemic cut that season short and the league filed for bankruptcy again; it was sold to a consortium led by Dany Garcia and Dwayne Johnson. The XFL and the revived United States Football League ultimately merged in 2024 to form a new league named the United Football League, carrying forward the century-long pattern of rival leagues seeking a foothold alongside the NFL.