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.
Sports in North America
The men's professional soccer league systems in both the U.S. and Canada instead primarily use the closed, franchise model which primarily always has the same teams playing. Major League Soccer (MLS) represents the highest level, while the second level consists of the North American Soccer League (NASL) and the United Soccer League (USL). Although MLS, NASL, and USL all have teams in both countries, they are only sanctioned by the United States Soccer Federation (USSF), the governing body of soccer in the United States. The Canadian Soccer Association, the governing body in Canada, instead sanctions two third-level all-Canadian leagues at the third level: League1 Ontario and Première Ligue de soccer du Québec. There are no USSF sanctioned leagues at the third level. For women' professional soccer, the National Women's Soccer League is at the top level, and National Women's Soccer League and Women's Premier Soccer League are at the second level. College soccer is played both in the U.S. and Canada, with top players often going on to play professional.