Major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada
The Canadian Football League is the highest level of play in Canadian football. The league was organized in 1956 as a cooperative agreement between two regional leagues, the Big Four (which dated to 1907) and the WIFU (which was founded in 1936), and became independent from Football Canada in 1958. The league now consists of nine teams, all based in Canada. The Grey Cup is awarded annually to the champion every November and is the highest attended sporting event in the nation. The oldest extant teams, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Toronto Argonauts, trace their origins to the late 1860s and early 1870s, which ranks them amongst the oldest professional sports teams of any kind still in existence on the continent. The CFL attempted an expansion into the United States in cities that had no NFL team between 1993 and 1995, though the expansion teams all either folded or relocated to Canadian cities.
Canadian Soccer League
After the demise of the Canadian Soccer League (CSL) in 1992 Canada was without a Division I national professional league. The Canadian soccer landscape was fractured into several different foreign and regional senior leagues. When the CSL ceased operations three of their clubs the Vancouver Whitecaps, Toronto Blizzard, and Montreal Supra joined the American Professional Soccer League, which at the time constituted as the highest tier league in the Canadian soccer structure. While the remaining clubs with the exception of London Lasers joined the National Soccer League (NSL) the country's oldest and only exclusively Canadian professional league. After the addition of the Winnipeg Fury it changed its name to the Canadian National Soccer League (CNSL).