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 the United States
Major League Soccer (MLS) is the professional first-division league in the United States. It currently has 24 teams — 21 in the U.S. and 3 in Canada. With careful cost controls and the construction of soccer-specific stadiums, some MLS clubs became profitable for the first time in the mid-2000s, and "Forbes" magazine found that three clubs were already valued at $40 million or more, with the Los Angeles Galaxy worth $100 million. 
The establishment of the Designated Player Rule in 2007 has led to the signings of international superstars such as David Beckham and Thierry Henry, and Cuauhtémoc Blanco.