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.
Soccer in Canada
Soccer in Canada is the most popular sport in terms of participation rate. According to FIFA's Big Count, 2,695,712 people played in Canada in 2006. Professional soccer in Canada is played in Major League Soccer, the United Soccer League, and the Canadian Premier League. Canada also has many semi-professional and amateur soccer leagues. Canada's men's and women's national soccer teams are ranked 79th and 5th respectively in the FIFA World Rankings, as of September 3, 2018.