The National Football League (NFL) is the most popular sports league in the United States, football surpassing baseball in the 1970s as America’s favorite spectator sport.

The organization has thirty franchised teams organized into the American and National Football Conferences. These teams are separately owned, but share about three-quarters of their revenues with each other, most significant of which is the money deriving from 1998 television contracts with CBS, FOX, ABC and ESPN to the tune of nearly $18 billion over eight years.

American football developed in the middle of the nineteenth century out of rugby. The American game developed new rules at the beginning of the twentieth century ostensibly to make it safer (too many college boys were getting injured and killed), but the longterm effect of these reforms was the establishment of a game with few rivals in terms of lethalness. Football is a veritable Rollerball (1975), in which part of the attraction is seeing an opposing team’s player spearheaded and taken out of the game.

If baseball is the game that harks back to a preindustrial age of artisans, football embodies industrial society No other game has achieved the time-work discipline and intense division of labor as football. In football each person is given a few specified tasks to learn by rote. Only one player combines several functions on the field—the foreman quarterback. It is his job to ensure that each player gets his production schedule and performs his task properly. The linemen will hold the opposing line, blockers will block, wide receivers will run down field, turn their heads and bodies to make a catch, run five to ten more yards (if they are lucky), and be brought crashing to the ground by several defenders. The foreman will make adjustments in the huddle, management will call in a new play from the sideline and the workers will set off to perform their tasks once more.

Such a division of labor also shapes the training required to play the sport. A linebacker’s job is to lift weights and eat, bulking up with the ingestion of various body-building drugs. He needs to study film of his opposing linemen to learn their moves, and he needs to learn the play book. Like an industrial worker, he will suffer the hardest knocks and will have the shortest life expectancy Kickers, meanwhile, will strengthen their kicking legs on an adjacent field.

Football has become the mainstay of sports television, dwarfing all other contenders.

Indeed, it is the success of football in its relationship with TV that accounts for its hold on the public attention. As a game of downs, of precision plays performed with brief intervals for reorganization, football is a very easy sport to present. The camera technician seldom has to chase after a ball in a freeflowing game. Instead, just as players are returned to positions after every play so every camera can be redirected to its preassigned position. Moreover, the time between downs means that each play can be presented several times with commentary covering every minute detail.

The National Football League came into existence in 1922 around a few East Coast and Midwest teams—the Washington Redskins, Green Bay Packers, New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles and Chicago Bears. The league did not attract large crowds (like college games) until it became truly national, absorbing teams established in San Francisco, CA and Los Angeles, CA in 1950, and until the success of CBS and NBC’s television coverage (see sports media).

In 1959 a competing professional league, the American Football League, was brought into existence as a result of the efforts (supported by the ABC network) of two young Texas multi-millionaires, Lamar Hunt and Bud Adams, whose bids for franchises for their hometowns of Dallas, TX and Houston had been rejected. Although many of the teams in the AFL were not profitable, the league managed to survive long enough to threaten the NFL, until an agreement was brought about that united the leagues in 1967, and created the season finale, Superbowl Sunday. Since then the NFL has been able to fight off any challenges, such as that of the United States Football League in the mid-1980s, using its congressional exemption from antitrust legislation to ensure its continued monopoly Racial practices in football have followed a pattern more akin to basketball than to baseball. There are many African American (but few Asian American) athletes in the sport (over 50 percent of the players), but they still face obstacles. Often blacks have been competitive or excellent quarterbacks at the university level, only to be put at wide receiver in the professional game. The unwritten rule against selecting black quarterbacks was broken to some extent when Doug Williams led the Redskins to victory in Superbowl XXII, but Williams was sidelined a season after winning the Superbowl, something that would have been unlikely in the case of a white quarterback. Other black quarterbacks have often faced hostile home crowds, and have been traded earlier than might have been the case with their white counterparts. Likewise, there have been few black coaches in football, and men like Ray Rhodes at the Philadelphia Eagles were not given the freedom to purchase players that might have been accorded a white coach.

Injury is almost inevitable in football, if not from the common playing surface of astroturf, then from the fact that players wear protective padding and helmets. Whereas in the game of rugby a tackler generally pulls an opposing player down to avoid injuring him or herself, in football the aim is to knock the player down. Padding makes this possible, and injuries to the knees, which cannot be protected, are one consequence.

Since games are often determined by a quarterback’s efforts, he receives much of the defense’s attention. Many quarterbacks, like San Francisco 49’ers’ Steve Young or Denver Broncos’ John Elway, have been sidelined with concussions, while others, like Green Bay Packers’ Brett Favre, have had to fight addiction to the painkillers that make playing possible. There are few quarterbacks like 49’ers Joe Montana, who, in the words of a Chicago Bears linebacker, could just “get up, spit out the blood and wink at you, and say that was a great hit.” The plight of the average quarterback is nicely chronicled in North Dallas Forty (1979).

Violence is a common feature of football, one of its objectives being to knock an opposing player out of the game even when he may not have the ball. In recent years, this violence has spread to the bleachers, though it has not reached the proportions witnessed in soccer stadiums around the world. In cities where the fans are most notorious, city administrations have decided to open courts at the stadiums so that a judge can immediately punish any violent fans. Organizations tracking cases of domestic abuse have also made claims that the highest incidence of such violence occurs on Superbowl Sunday.