Canadian Football League
The Canadian Football League (CFL; ) is a professional sports league in Canada. The CFL is the highest level of competition in Canadian football. Its nine teams, which are located in nine separate cities throughout Canada, are divided into two divisions: the East Division, with four teams, and the West Division with five teams.
Expansion of major sports leagues in the United States and Canada
The NFL is the only one of the major leagues to not have any teams based in any Canadian city; the closest teams to Canada are the Buffalo Bills, whose stadium is located south of the Canada–US border, and the Detroit Lions, whose stadium is located from Windsor, Ontario. Both border teams consider portions of Southern Ontario part of their markets, with the Lions drawing from Southwestern Ontario and the Bills from the Golden Horseshoe, which includes Toronto and Hamilton. In the 1950s and 1960s, selected NFL teams would travel north to Canada to play a CFL team in pre-season interleague games (as did the Bills, at the time in the American Football League). From 2008–13 the Bills played one regular-season game each year and sporadic pre-season games in Toronto. The Bills were drawing about 15,000 Canadian fans per game during the time the Toronto Series ran, and the Bills' then-owner, Ralph Wilson, saw Toronto's corporate market as key to securing the franchise's future; the Bills have effectively maxed out their revenue potential in the economically struggling Western New York region. (Wilson's successor, Terrence Pegula, canceled the Bills' Toronto games.) The league also has agreements with the CFL that date to the 1990s regarding the honoring of player contracts.