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. The league took on its current name in 1922. The NFL was the first professional football league to successfully establish a nationwide presence, after several decades of failed attempts. Only two founding members are still in the league, the Decatur Staleys (now the Chicago Bears) and the Racine Cardinals (founded in 1898, joined the NFL in 1920, now the Arizona Cardinals), which is the oldest NFL franchise.

League membership gradually stabilized throughout the 1920s and 1930s as the league adopted progressively more formal organization. The first official championship game was held in 1933. The NFL stopped signing black players in 1927 but reintegrated in 1946 following World War II. 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. 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. 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.

The rival American Football League was founded in 1960. It was successful enough to facilitate a merger with the far more established NFL, which resulted in an expanded league and the creation of the Super Bowl, currently the most-watched annual sporting event in the United States. 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 United States since 1990 to avoid a work stoppage that resulted in the loss of regular-season games.

Beginnings

American football first became a professional sport in 1892, when Pudge Heffelfinger and Ben "Sport" Donnelly each received sizable sums of cash to play for the Allegheny Athletic Association of the Western Pennsylvania Senior Independent Football Conference. Throughout the 1890s and the early part of the 20th century, professional football was primarily a regional sport, with most informal circuits centered around one state or region with only limited play outside the state lines. There were no national leagues or tournaments for the professional game, despite lots of tries: an earlier National Football League (backed by what would become today's Major League Baseball) was unable to expand beyond Pennsylvania in the year of 1902, the New York City-based World Series of Pro Football tournament disbanded after two seasons and lack of fan interest, and other attempts to either combine existing circuits or create new ones from scratch never materialized.

The regional circuits had coalesced into more or fewer leagues of varying degrees of organization. One of the most prominent at the time was the Ohio League, which boasted the services of legendary Native American athlete Jim Thorpe, among other stars. Another was the somewhat lower-caliber, but better-organized, New York Pro Championship; two of the New York circuit's best teams, the Rochester Jeffersons and the Buffalo All-Stars, went on a barnstorming tour of Ohio in 1917. After the Jeffersons lost to Thorpe's Canton Bullfrogs in a 1906 match, Jefferson's owner Leo Lyons suggested to Thorpe that a league be formed. Lyons believed that the foundation of a league could build a sport that rivaled baseball, which at the time was the most popular professional sport in the country.Carroll, Bob. THE CITY THAT HATED PRO FOOTBALL. Professional Football Researchers Association Coffin Corner. 1981.

Lyons' vision of a national league of existing football clubs (which, at the time, was competing with another proposed league, again backed by baseball) was cut short by the United States' entry into World War I and further hampered by a flu pandemic in 1918, which forced most of the Ohio League teams to suspend operations due to either travel restrictions or loss of players to the war effort. New York's teams, although they were forced to reduce their schedules, continued and (along with the few other remaining teams that survived the suspension, including the OL's Dayton Triangles and Michigan's Detroit Heralds) picked up many of the stars that remained stateside. A particularly important team that played the 1918 season was the Great Lakes Navy Bluejackets football team, which included future Hall of Famers Paddy Driscoll, George Halas, and Jimmy Conzelman, all of whom were in the armed forces together and, despite some of them being professionals, competed against college football squads and won the 1919 Rose Bowl.

These factors had the effect of spreading out the talent across a broader geographic area. Over the course of 1919, as professional football had increased in parity, teams began reaching out and participating in more barnstorming tours. By then, two informal but distinct interstate circuits had developed: one around the Eastern Seaboard (particularly New York City, New Jersey, and Philadelphia) that played mostly on Saturdays due to blue laws, and another centered around the Great Lakes region (Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, and upstate New York) that played on Sundays. It was the latter that formed the basis of what would eventually become the modern National Football League.

Ohio's teams went along with the idea in the face of escalating costs: several bidding wars in the early 1900s, both in Pennsylvania and Ohio, had damaged the sport significantly, and another bidding war was about to erupt if something was not done. One such team was the "$20,000 Beauties," the nickname of the 1919 Hammond Bobcats, a team that employed Halas and Driscoll and played mainly in the Chicago metropolitan area. By forming a national league, teams reasoned that it would eliminate the practices of looting other teams' rosters and concentrating top talent in only a few teams, thus distributing talent more evenly and efficiently, thereby reducing costs for each individual team while still keeping a top-level product on the field.

Birth of a new league

Teams in the 1920–1932 era Akron Pros Buffalo Canton Bulldogs Chicago Cardinals Chicago Tigers Cleveland Tigers Columbus Panhandles Dayton Triangles Green Bay Packers Rock Island Independents Toledo Maroons Kenosha Maroons Decatur Staleys Detroit Hammond Pros Muncie Flyers Racine Legion Rochester Jeffersons

On August 20, 1920, at a Hupmobile dealership in Canton, Ohio, the league was formalized, originally as the American Professional Football Conference, initially consisting only of the Ohio League teams, although some of the teams declined participation. One month later on September 17, the league was renamed the American Professional Football Association, adding Buffalo and Rochester from the New York league, and Detroit, Hammond (a suburban Chicago squad), and several other teams from nearby circuits. The eleven founding teams initially struck an agreement over player poaching and the declaration of an end-of-season champion. Thorpe, while still playing for the Bulldogs, was elected president. Only four of the founding teams finished the 1920 schedule, and the undefeated Akron Pros claimed the first championship. Membership of the league increased to 22 teams – including more of the New York teams – in 1921, but throughout the 1920s the membership was unstable and the league was not a major national sport. On June 24, 1922, the organization, now headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, changed its title a final time to the National Football League.National Football League "NFL History by Decade" 2009.

Two charter members, the Chicago Cardinals (now the Arizona Cardinals) and the Decatur Staleys (now the Chicago Bears), are still in existence. The Green Bay Packers franchise, founded in 1919, is the oldest team not to change locations, but did not begin league play until 1921. The New York Football Giants (now known as New York Giants) joined in 1925, followed by the Portsmouth Spartans in 1930, who relocated to Detroit in 1934 to become the Lions.Footballresearch The heritage of the Indianapolis Colts includes several predecessors, including one of the league's founding teams, the Dayton Triangles. However, both the Colts and the NFL recognize the Colts as a separate franchise which was founded as the Baltimore Colts in 1953. Although the original NFL teams representing Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit no longer exist, replacement franchises have since been established for those cities.

Early championships were awarded to the team with the best won-lost record, initially rather haphazardly, as some teams played more or fewer games than others, or scheduled games against non-league, amateur or collegiate teams; this led to the title being decided on a tiebreaker in 1921, a disputed title in 1925, and the scheduling of an impromptu indoor playoff game in 1932. The lack of a firm league structure meant that numerous teams regularly were added and removed from the league each year; a franchise owner might trade in his franchise in one city for one in another (as was the case with the Canton Bulldogs, Cleveland Bulldogs and Detroit Wolverines), and if a larger-market or more established team wanted a player on a smaller-market upstart, it could buy out the team outright and fold it to gain rights to that player, as the New York Giants did to the Wolverines in 1928 to get Benny Friedman.

In league meetings prior to the 1933 season, three new teams, the Pirates, the Cincinnati Reds, and the Eagles, were admitted to the NFL.Note: Willis writes their entrance was approved on July 8, 1933. Willis, 2010, p. 310–311.Coenen, 2005, p. 237. Ten teams were then in the NFL and, at George Preston Marshall's urging, with Halas' support, the NFL was reorganized into an Eastern Division and a Western Division. In the Eastern Division were the Philadelphia Eagles, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, Boston Redskins (now the Washington Commanders), and the Pittsburgh Pirates (now the Pittsburgh Steelers). In the Western Division were the Chicago Bears, Portsmouth Spartans, Chicago Cardinals, Green Bay Packers, and the Cincinnati Reds. Furthermore, the two owners convinced the league to have the two division winners meet in an NFL Championship Game.Lyons, 2010 pg. 50