National Football League

Between the late 1890s and 1910s, the sport of professional team football in America was chaotic, disorganized and in disarray. This scenario had primarily occurred because of three unique factors. Those were first, the inflation of teams’ salaries; second, professional football players’ unwillingness to make long-term commitments to, and remain with one club; and third, professional teams’ employment of college and university football players who were still enrolled as students in their schools. As a result of this unstable situation, in 1920 an organizational meeting was held that included the representatives of four independent professional football teams, which were each located in the U.S. Midwest. At that Canton, Ohio meeting the group reached an agreement. That is, the representatives decided to establish the American Professional Football Conference, which was renamed later that year as the American Professional Football Association (APFA). After a reorganization of teams, in 1922 the APFA changed its name to the National Football League (NFL), which then consisted of 18 U.S.-based teams that included a Native American club titled the Oorang Indians and its great player Jim Thorpe, who was a double gold medal winner at the 1912 Summer Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden. Based on that background information about the formation of the league, the NFL is the focus of this chapter in Sports Capitalism ¹