American football is a form of gridiron football and the most popular sport in the United States. In the United States, the game is most often referred to as simply "football". Football is played in leagues of different size, age and quality, in all regions of the country.
There is no single national governing body for American football in the United States or a continental governing body for North America. There is an international governing body, the International Federation of American Football, or IFAF. The National Football League has the highest revenue and average attendance of any sports league in the world.
Description American football is the most popular sport in the United States. It is a form of gridiron football. In the United States, the game is most often referred to as simply "football".
Organization in the United States Befitting its status as a popular sport, football is played in leagues of different size, age and quality, in all regions of the country. A team is sometimes referred to as a "football program".Division III football programs There is no single national governing body for American football in the United States or a continental governing body for North America. There is an international governing body, the International Federation of American Football (IFAF). The governing body for American football in the United States is USA Football. The Super Bowl is the final championship of American football in the NFL.
Professional National Football League
The 32-team National Football League (NFL) is currently the only major professional American football league in the United States. There have been numerous attempts over the past several decades to create a second major or high-level professional league, most of which failed within a few years or, in the cases of the All-America Football Conference and 1960s American Football League, merged with the NFL. The National Football League has the highest revenue and average attendance of any sports league in the world.
The NFL has not operated any developmental minor leagues since the folding of the NFL Europe League in 2007. There are some "independent" leagues operating in the US, but they are not overseen by the NFL and the teams has no affiliation to NFL franchises.
These figures reflect the popularity of professional American football as a spectator sport: Team 2016 2017 2018 2019 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 Arizona Cardinals 62,410 62,622 62,622 62,622 62,622 62,622 62,864 67,850 63,975 Atlanta Falcons 68,115 67,586 67,944 67,944 67,944 67,586 67,944 67,679 70,995 Baltimore Ravens 70,745 70,537 70,537 70,537 70,537 70,589 70,681 68,979 70,294 Buffalo Bills 71,240 67,816 67,763 67,816 67,816 68,431 68,660 69,953 70,695 Carolina Panthers 74,418 72,211 72,211 72,211 71,906 71,351 71,951 69,905 72,311 Chicago Bears 60,618 60,834 60,488 60,834 60,834 60,834 61,769 67,831 58,282 Cincinnati Bengals 60,866 60,325 60,492 60,125 60,325 60,325 64,148 68,791 66,040 Cleveland Browns 67,522 67,431 67,431 67,681 67,431 67,431 67,681 67,431 67,431 Dallas Cowboys¹ 91,767 92,125 91,619 90,929 93,421 93,465 93,594 92,972 92,991 Detroit Lions 63,004 63,423 63,877 63,423 63,423 63,423 68,741 72,389 64,850 Denver Broncos 76,446 76,446 76,446 75,937 76,236 75,980 76,388 73,969 75,313 Green Bay Packers 77,707 77,875 77,834 77,845 77,991 76,180 77,829 78,003 77,875 Houston Texans 66,748 66,811 66,812 66,811 66,811 66,811 67,960 68,024 70,782 Indianapolis Colts 62,616 62,475 62,515 62,475 62,475 62,475 65,230 70,616 65,041 Jacksonville Jaguars 58,818 59,968 60,370 60,370 60,370 59,968 60,370 66,162 65,764 Kansas City Chiefs 75,850 75,850 75,850 75,237 73,227 73,499 73,499 72,972 73,512 Las Vegas Raiders 54,584 57,775 57,919 52,549 61,185 61,185 61,185 69,489 62,362 Los Angeles Chargers 71,598 71,402 71,598 71,240 71,598 72,734 72,205 70,603 73,411 Los Angeles Rams 70,900 70,700 70,800 70,500 71,365 71,598 72,205 70,413 69,736 Miami Dolphins 67,115 64,374 64,207 64,374 64,374 64,230 64,374 67,909 65,922 Minnesota Vikings 67,120 66,701 66,650 66,701 66,701 66,701 67,810 69,088 66,286 New England Patriots 62,616 62,475 62,515 62,475 62,475 62,475 65,230 70,616 65,041 New Orleans Saints 65,845 64,929 65,697 64,929 64,929 64,929 65,712 69,823 70,012 New York Giants 76,423 76,940 76,940 74,664 73,882 76,474 79,307 78,470 80,557 New York Jets 77,763 76,113 77,982 78,523 71,676 78,009 77,890 78,789 73,666 Philadelphia Eagles 69,296 69,796 69,913 69,797 69,796 69,869 69,794 73,857 69,879 Pittsburgh Steelers 59,775 60,488 60,173 60,488 60,488 60,488 60,488 67,960 67,440 San Francisco 49ers 71,629 71,629 71,466 71,048 71,629 71,629 71,122 70,572 71,422 Seattle Seahawks 68,302 68,408 68,402 68,408 68,735 68,735 68,408 71,482 68,740 Tampa Bay Buccaneers 60,624 59,952 54,356 50,728 65,372 65,000 67,046 63,689 67,202 Tennessee Titans 68,366 68,566 68,368 68,566 68,616 68,616 64,520 67,085 59,221 Washington Commanders 52,377 52,751 54,034 53,991 52,751 52,751 63,950 73,793 64,279 League average 66,018 65,856 65,798 65,714 65,759 65,820 66,792 66,631 69,424
¹ ~80,000 without people watching on screens at the party decks
Minor leagues
The eight-team United Football League is the predominant professional spring football league. It originated with the XFL and the USFL, each originally founded and played as separate eight-team leagues in 2020 and 2022 respectively before agreeing to a merger with each other. Both conferences bore the names of leagues before them: the USFL was named after a 1980s major professional league known as the United States Football League and reached a settlement with the remaining rightsholders to that league; the XFL was a revival of a 2001 league of the same name from the same founder, Vince McMahon, who sold the league and brand with its 2020 season unfinished. The XFL and USFL brands continued as conferences after the merger until Mike Repole took over the league and abolished the brands during the 2025 offseason. A third-tier league, the Continental Football League, is slated to launch in 2026.
Other active minor league are the Gridiron Developmental Football League and the Rivals Professional Football League which are viewed as low-level or semi-pro leagues.
Indoor American football
There are several professional and semi-professional indoor American football leagues, played at hockey-sized arenas. The largest and oldest operating league is the Indoor Football League which has 13 teams spanning from Ohio to California mostly in markets with other major or high-minor professional sports franchises. Historically the Arena Football League, which launched in 1987 was the most prominent league but as the league had operational issues following its 2008 bankruptcy, teams folded and left for other leagues before the Arena Football League folded in 2019. An attempt at reviving the Arena Football League collapsed a few weeks into its only season in 2024, with the remaining teams reorganizing to play out the season; this league abandoned the AFL brand to become Arena Football One (AF1), which plays in mostly suburban and mid-sized cities.
Other pro leagues include the second-tier National Arena League, the Great Plains and Mississippi Valley-based The Arena League (a league originally playing six-man football), and the third-tier regional and semi-professional leagues such as American Indoor Football (Iowa and Michigan) and the American Arena League (East Coast). AF1 accepted the champions of both TAL and the NAL following their 2025 seasons, while sending two of their rural franchises to the NAL.
Indoor football leagues play by significantly different rules that accommodate a field of play half the width and length of a traditional football field.
Other professional football leagues
Some American players compete in the Canadian Football League in Canada, which operates professionally on a somewhat older rule system with a number of differences from the American game but still recognizable as "football" to the casual American football observer. The CFL allocates half of its teams' rosters for players born and raised in Canada but allows the rest of the players to be foreign born (in practice, these spots are almost always filled by Americans); the CFL also has television presence in the United States and as recently as 1995 played games in the U.S.
College football
In the United States, college football is governed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Many colleges and universities have football teams, often with dedicated football stadiums. These teams mostly play other similarly sized schools, through the NCAA's divisional system, which divides collegiate sports teams into four divisions (I-FBS, I-FCS, II and III). The largest, most popular collegiate teams routinely fill stadiums larger than 75,000.
Among college football stadiums, eight, the University of Michigan's Michigan Stadium, Penn State's Beaver Stadium, Ohio State's Ohio Stadium, Texas A&M's Kyle Field, the University of Tennessee's Neyland Stadium, LSU's Tiger Stadium, Alabama's Bryant–Denny Stadium, and Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium at the University of Texas at Austin, seat over 100,000 fans and typically sell out. The weekly autumn ritual of college football, which includes marching bands, cheerleaders, homecoming, parties, tailgate parties, form an important part of college football's culture. Football is a major source of revenue to the athletic programs of schools, public and private, in the United States. Top college football players enter the NFL draft after their college careers are over, in hopes of signing with an NFL team.
"FBS" and "FCS" are abbreviations for the Football Bowl Subdivision and Football Championship Subdivision, two sections of Division I that exist only in football. These two subdivisions were formerly known as Divisions I-A and I-AA respectively. The Championship Subdivision, consisting mostly of smaller schools than the FBS but larger than D-II, has a multiple-round playoff system just like Divisions II and III, while the Bowl Subdivision has only a limited, and unofficial, twelve-team playoff and has historically only featured division championships and bowl games. FBS and FCS teams can, and often do, play against each other. Unofficially, the Bowl Subdivision is divided into two further subdivisions, "major conferences" (also known as "Power Five conferences", since reduced to four with the breakup of the Pac-12 Conference) and "mid-majors" (known in modern parlance as the "Group of Five"). In practice, only major conference teams are eligible to compete for the national championship and receive significant favor in the opinion polling over mid-majors, and it was not until the addition of the BCS National Championship Game that mid-majors had a realistic chance at appearing in one of the major bowls. Although the FCS has a playoff, three conferences do not participate (the Ivy League does not allow its teams to play in the postseason, and the historically black SWAC and MEAC instead play each other in a bowl of their own). Division III teams do not offer scholarships to their players; two Division I FCS leagues also do not offer scholarships—the Ivy League, which prohibits athletic scholarships in any sport, and the Pioneer Football League, which only competes in football and whose members all offer scholarships in non-football sports.
With the exception of the annual Army–Navy Game, only Power Five conference teams air on national broadcast television, although mid-majors, FCS teams, D-II and D-III games can see more limited coverage on cable and local television.