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.
Major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada
The Canadian Football League has teams in all seven current NHL markets, in addition to Hamilton, Ontario, and Regina, Saskatchewan. At least eight of these nine markets have hosted CFL teams every year since the league's officially listed inception in 1958, and no other Canadian market has ever had a CFL team of its own. In 2015, the CFL commenced Northern Kickoff, originally slated to be one preseason game and later expanded to a regular season game as well, both of which were played in Fort McMurray, an oil sands boomtown with a metro area population of less than 70,000, the smallest market to host major professional football in the modern era. Fort McMurray is in relatively close proximity to Edmonton, which was expected to boost attendance, but fewer than 5,000 fans attended the regular season game, and no games have been held in the city since (the city was devastated by a wildfire shortly thereafter). Regular season games have been played in Moncton in 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2019 to gauge expansion to the Maritime provinces in the Touchdown Atlantic; the expansion team, the Atlantic Schooners, has been proposed twice, once unsuccessfully in the 1980s, and another in the late 2010s that is still being considered. Hamilton, in addition to hosting the 2013 Touchdown Atlantic, played the rest of their 2013 season in Guelph during the construction of Tim Hortons Field.