In the United States and Canada, the term professional football () includes the professional forms of American and Canadian gridiron football. In common usage, it refers to former and existing major football leagues in either country. Currently, there are multiple professional football leagues in North America: the two longest-running leagues are the National Football League (NFL) in the United States, and the Canadian Football League (CFL) in Canada. American football leagues have existed in Europe since the late 1970s, with competitive leagues all over Europe hiring American imports to strengthen rosters. The Austrian Football League and German Football League top division are known as the best leagues in Europe. The Japanese X-League is also a strong league that has a long history since 1971. The NFL has existed continuously since being so named in 1922.
The best American football players are among the highest paid athletes in the world, with the highest salaries reaching tens of millions of dollars per year.
Organization Compared to the other major professional sports leagues of the United States and Canada, football has comparatively few levels of play and does not have a well-developed minor league system or pyramid, either official or otherwise.
In North America, the top level of professional football is the National Football League, with the Canadian Football League second to the NFL in prominence and pay grade. Despite the much lower level of pay, the CFL has greater popularity in Canada because of its long history in the country, the NFL's limited presence in Canada, and a general environment of Canadian cultural protectionism.
Indoor football has also developed in the United States, beginning with the Arena Football League, which formed in 1987. The AFL is the second longest running professional football league in the United States after the NFL, although its current incarnation is a separate entity from the original, which folded due to bankruptcy in 2008. From its debut until 1997, the Arena Football League operated with a monopoly on the indoor game, due to a broad interpretation that virtually all of the league's rules, collectively known as arena football, were covered under its patent; the Professional Indoor Football League successfully defeated the AFL's legal action against it in 1997, opening the possibility for other indoor football leagues to form. Only one significant aspect of the patent, the large rebound nets the AFL has used since its debut to keep balls in play, was fully protected; the patent expired in 2007, although no other professional indoor league has adopted rebound nets since. As of 2011, two national leagues (the AFL and the Indoor Football League), along with several regional professional and semi-pro leagues, are in operation. As of 2011, no professional indoor football league has had any significant presence in Canada (despite an abundance of hockey arenas that are ideal for the game); only one indoor team, the AFL's short-lived Toronto Phantoms (2000 to 2002), has ever played its games in Canada. The all-female Lingerie Football League had operations in Canada from 2011 to 2014, but that league dropped to amateur level by the time the LFL entered the country.
Up until the 1970s, semiprofessional and minor football leagues would often develop lower end players into professional prospects. Though there are still numerous teams at the semi-pro level in both the United States and Canada, they have mostly dropped to regional amateur status, and they no longer develop professional prospects, in part due to the rise of indoor football.
Though Japan (X-League) and Europe (Austrian Football League and German Football League) have professional football leagues composed primarily of national citizens along with a limited number of American Imports, these leagues are generally of a lower level of play than the Western Hemisphere counterparts and have only recently begun contributing players to the NFL on a regular basis.
Player development
Professional football is considered the highest level of competition in gridiron football. Whereas most of the other major sports leagues draw their players from the minor leagues, the NFL currently draws almost all of its players directly from college football. College football, in turn, recruits players from high school football, with most potential stars receiving athletic scholarships to play. The source for the vast majority of professional football players is the Division I Bowl Subdivision, with most coming from the five conferences with automatic bids into the College Football Playoff bowl games. Under current regulations, players must be at least three years removed from high school graduation to qualify to play in the NFL. Because of these barriers to entry, players who do not play college football have very few options for breaking into the league.
The college football development system is a unique feature in the professional football system, stemming from the fact that the game of American football originated at the college level, unlike other sports that were products of independent clubs. Although ostensibly amateurs, college athletes are compensated with five years of free undergraduate college education (more than enough time to pursue a bachelor's degree), room and board for their time. As a result of the college system, first-time players (rookies) enter professional football older, more mature and more prepared for the professional game than players in other sports.
The Canadian Football League has a special requirement that a minimum of half of each team's roster be composed of persons who were Canadian citizens at the time they first joined the league (prior to 2014, the restrictions were much tighter in that the person also had to be resident in Canada since childhood). As such, Canadian Interuniversity Sport feeds players to the CFL to meet these quotas, much as the NCAA does in the United States. The remaining half of the roster may be filled by either Canadians or by internationals (formerly imports; these are typically American players who play in the CFL).
The NFL has, over the course of its history, recruited rugby union, association football and Australian rules football players from other countries (particularly those who are retired from competition in their home countries) to play in the league, almost always as kickers and punters.
Broadcasting Broadcasting is an integral part of professional football. Not only does it provide the sport with exposure to an audience wider than just the audience attending at the stadium, but it can also provide revenue in the form of rights fees.
The NFL relies on television for nearly half of its revenue; this is in part because the league only plays one game each week, leaving fewer opportunities for ticket sales than the other professional sports (in turn, however, NFL stadiums have among the highest per-game attendance thanks to large stadium capacities, figures only exceeded or matched by some of the major college football teams and by the NASCAR Sprint Cup, both of which are also weekly events) and because the expense of the game (it has the largest rosters of any professional sport) makes the cost highly prohibitive. The NFL has sold broadcast rights to each of the major television networks, who pay large annual fees on top of the cost of production for the rights to air the game. The networks make back much of their money through advertising and retransmission consent fees. The use of multiple broadcasters dated to before the NFL's merger with the American Football League; each competing league had its own broadcaster, both of which kept the rights to their respective conference after the merger, while additional networks were sold showcase packages of once-a-week games held at night.
In Canada, where the threat of competing sports leagues is far less, the CFL opts instead for an exclusive contract with TSN, available only by subscription to a cable or satellite service, to carry all of the league's games. The CFL on TSN exclusive contract began in 2008; previously, like the NFL, it split its broadcasts up between two providers.
Other leagues have found it much more difficult to find an outlet on American television, much less one that pays a rights fee large enough to make it worthwhile. One of the reasons for the United Football League's failure was its having to pay for television coverage instead of being paid for the rights to it, along with its use of networks that were not widely available. Similarly, the Continental Football League only had one of its games televised nationally in its five-year existence, and the American Football Association blamed its failure on an inability to secure television coverage.
Virtually all professional football teams broadcast at least some of their games on local radio.
Rules The rules of professional football are more likely to vary from league to league than the high school and college levels. Since interleague play is extremely rare, there is no need for a nationwide standard for all leagues, and each league will adopt and discard rules as they see fit. The Arena Football League had a patent on several of its rules that expired in 2007. Several professional leagues have experimented with rules in an effort to improve the quality of the game or to create a novelty. Nevertheless, the rules of professional football at the outdoor level are nearly identical to those at the high school and college levels, with some minor exceptions (such as the locations of hash marks, procedures for overtime, and the number of feet required to be in-bounds to catch a forward pass). Indoor football's rules are closely based on outdoor football but are heavily altered to compensate for the smaller field.
American professional football history
The first professional football player Professional football evolved from amateur "club" football, played by general interest athletic clubs or associations. These clubs began playing football in the late 1870s, approximately ten years after the game took form in American colleges. Amateur club football established itself as a somewhat lower quality alternative to the more popular college football; some of the better teams would play against college teams. Eventually, some ostensibly amateur teams would secretly begin paying players a small sum to cover their expenses on an under-the-table basis, or arrange for amateur athletes to receive jobs in a company connected to the team (the Olympic Club of San Francisco, California is believed to have done the latter, thus creating the designation of "semi-pro" football in 1890, before football had gone professional); in most cases, the practice was within the rules of amateurism at the time. Many of the early semi-professional and professional teams were works teams consisting mostly of employees of the companies that sponsored them.