Oldest NFL Teams: Every Franchise in Order of Founding
The oldest NFL teams in order, from the Cardinals of 1898 to the Houston Texans of 2002, with the Bears, the Packers and why founding dates are disputed.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NFL History & Records27 min read
- Oldest franchise
- Cardinals, 1898
- Charter members still playing
- 2
- Packers founded
- August 11, 1919
- Newest franchise
- Houston Texans, 2002
The jerseys were secondhand and the color had gone out of them. Chris O'Brien, who ran a neighborhood football club on the South Side of Chicago, bought them around 1901 from the University of Chicago, whose teams wore maroon. Someone remarked that the shirts looked faded. O'Brien answered that they were not maroon at all but cardinal red, and the club had a name it has now carried through three cities and well over a century.
That club is the oldest team in the NFL. The Arizona Cardinals trace their start to 1898, twenty-two years before there was a league, and no other franchise comes within two decades of them. The Green Bay Packers were founded in 1919 and the Chicago Bears, as the Decatur Staleys, are dated by the league to 1920. The Cardinals and the Bears are also the only two clubs from the league's founding season still playing. Everything after those three arrives in clusters: a handful of survivors from the 1920s and 1930s, two clubs from a rival league in 1950, ten more from another in 1970, and the expansion teams, the last of them the Houston Texans in 2002.
The oldest NFL team is the Cardinals, and two charter clubs remain
Start with the plain ranking, because the arguments come later.
By the year a club was first organized, the three oldest franchises are the Cardinals (1898), the Packers (1919) and the Bears (1920). By the year a club joined the league, the Cardinals and the Bears are level at 1920, both having been represented at the founding meeting in a Canton automobile showroom that September, and the Packers follow in 1921. The story of that meeting is told in our piece on when the NFL was founded.
Fourteen clubs played in that first season. Twelve are gone. Most of them were from small industrial cities, Akron and Canton and Rock Island and Muncie, and they dropped away one at a time through the 1920s as the league moved toward larger markets. The two that lasted were the two from the Chicago area, which is not a coincidence. Chicago was the biggest city represented in the league in 1920 and had the ballparks to prove it.
- 1898Year the Cardinals were founded
- 1919Year the Packers were founded
- 14Clubs in the 1920 season
- 2Of those still in the league
Founding years are those the league and the clubs use. The count of charter members refers to clubs that took part in the 1920 season.
A word about what "oldest" is measuring. A franchise, in the league's usage, is the membership itself, the legal right to field a team, and it can change its city, its name and its owners and remain the same franchise. That is why the Arizona Cardinals are older than the Green Bay Packers even though the Packers have never left the town where they started. Age follows the franchise. It does not follow the address.
Three claims get tangled in conversation as a result: the oldest franchise, which is the Cardinals; the oldest franchise that has stayed put, which is the Packers; and the oldest member of the league, a distinction the Cardinals and Bears share. Those are three different questions, and each has a clean answer.
From the Morgan Athletic Club to Arizona: the Cardinals' long line
O'Brien was a painting and decorating contractor, and in 1898 he and a group of neighborhood players formed the Morgan Athletic Club, an amateur team of the sort that existed in every American city ward at the time. When it took up a home field at Normal Park, on Racine Avenue, it became known as the Racine Normals. Then came the jerseys, and the Racine Cardinals.
The line from there to the present is continuous as an organization, though not as a schedule, and an honest account says so. The club disbanded in 1906 because it had run out of local teams worth playing. O'Brien revived it in 1913. It stopped again in 1918, when the war and the influenza epidemic shut down sport across the country, and resumed once both had passed. The same man ran it the whole time, under the same name, which is the basis for the 1898 date.
In 1920 O'Brien took the train to Canton and came home a charter member of the new association. The "Racine" in the name caused confusion once a team from Racine, Wisconsin, joined the league, and the club became the Chicago Cardinals in 1922, the year it moved its home games to Comiskey Park.
Two titles and two moves
The Cardinals have never been a rich club or, for long stretches, a good one. They were awarded the 1925 championship in circumstances that are still argued over, and they won the 1947 title on the field, beating the Philadelphia Eagles at Comiskey Park. Through the 2025 season they have not won another, the longest wait of any franchise in the league.
O'Brien sold in 1929. In 1932 the club passed to Charles Bidwill, a Chicago businessman who had been an officer of the Bears, and his family has owned it since. Sharing a city with George Halas's Bears was a losing proposition by the 1950s, and in 1960 the Bidwills took the team to St. Louis, where for 28 seasons it shared a nickname with the baseball club and was known locally as the football Cardinals. In 1988 it moved again, to the Phoenix area, playing first as the Phoenix Cardinals and from 1994 as the Arizona Cardinals.
Why the name survived both moves is part of our guide to how each NFL team was named.
The Bears: a starch company's team that moved to Chicago
The Bears began as an employee benefit.
A.E. Staley manufactured corn starch in Decatur, Illinois, and like many industrialists of the period he sponsored athletic teams to advertise the firm and keep the workforce content. His company fielded a football team in 1919. In 1920 he hired George Halas, 25 years old, a former University of Illinois end who had also had a brief trial in the outfield with the New York Yankees, to work at the plant and turn the football team into a serious one. Halas recruited former college players with the offer of a factory job and paid time to practice.
The Decatur Staleys lost once in thirteen games in 1920 and finished second. They also lost money. Decatur was a town of modest size with a small field, the starch business slumped in 1921, and Staley concluded that a professional football payroll was not something the company could carry.
His solution was generous. He turned the team over to Halas, gave him $5,000 to get started in Chicago, and asked one thing in return: that the club keep the name Staleys for one more season, as advertising. Halas agreed, took on a teammate, Dutch Sternaman, as his partner, and arranged to rent Cubs Park on the North Side from the baseball club.
The Chicago Staleys won the 1921 championship. In 1922, the year of obligation over, the club became the Chicago Bears.
Why the league says 1920 and not 1919
There is a 1919 date available for the Bears, the year the Staley works team first played, and almost nobody uses it. The club and the league both count from 1920, when Halas arrived, professionals were hired and the team entered the new association. The earlier side was a company recreation team, and the Bears have never claimed it.
This matters for one question only, which is whether the Bears or the Packers are older. On the dates each club accepts for itself, Green Bay is.
The Bears played at Wrigley Field, as Cubs Park was renamed, through 1970 and have been at Soldier Field since, apart from the 2002 season, played at the University of Illinois in Champaign while the stadium was rebuilt. The franchise has never left Chicago, and Halas's descendants still control the franchise he was handed in 1921. Nine league championships, eight of them before the Super Bowl existed, make the Bears second on the all-time list behind their oldest opponent to the north.
The Packers: $500 from a meat packer and no change of address
On August 11, 1919, a group of young men met in the editorial room of the Green Bay Press-Gazette to organize a football team. The meeting had been called by Earl "Curly" Lambeau, a local high school star who had spent one season at Notre Dame, and George Calhoun, the paper's sports editor. Lambeau worked as a shipping clerk at the Indian Packing Company, a meat cannery, and he had talked his employer into putting up $500 for jerseys and into lending its field for practice. In exchange the team carried the company's name.
That is the whole origin of "Packers," and the sponsor was gone almost at once. Indian Packing was absorbed by the Acme Packing Company within two years, and for a short time the jerseys read "Acme Packers."
The team spent 1919 and 1920 beating other town teams in Wisconsin and Michigan, passing a hat through the crowd for expenses. On August 27, 1921, backed by the packing company's owners, it was admitted to the American Professional Football Association, the league that became the NFL the following year.
The season the franchise was lost
Green Bay's membership has one blemish on it, and it came immediately. Late in 1921 the Packers used college players under assumed names in a game, which was precisely the practice the league had been formed to stop. The franchise was surrendered in January 1922. Lambeau applied for a new one that summer, promised to obey the rules and was readmitted in time for the season.
The league treats this as an interruption in ownership and not in the franchise, and the Packers' membership is counted from 1921 without a gap.
What followed is the part every fan knows in outline. In 1923, close to bankruptcy, the club was reorganized as a nonprofit corporation financed by the sale of stock to local residents, an arrangement described in full in our guide to who owns the Green Bay Packers. It is the reason a city of roughly 100,000 people still has a team when Akron, Canton, Dayton and Rochester do not.
The Packers are the oldest franchise never to have moved and never to have changed its name. They did play a share of their home games in Milwaukee from 1933 through 1994, a concession to the larger stadium and population there, but the club's home has been Green Bay for every one of its seasons. Thirteen league championships, counting those won before and after the Super Bowl began, is the most of any franchise.
Founded versus joined: why lists of the oldest NFL franchises disagree
Search for this list and the order changes from page to page. The Packers are second on some lists and third on others. The Lions are dated 1929, 1930 or 1934. The Browns appear as a 1946 team or a 1950 team. Nobody is making the dates up. They are answering two different questions.
One question is when the club was first organized, in any league or none. The other is when it entered the NFL. For half of the 32 franchises there is no difference, because the club was created as an NFL team. For the other half the gap ranges from one year to 22.
| Franchise | Club first organized | Entered the NFL |
|---|---|---|
| Cardinals | 1898, as an amateur club in Chicago | 1920, charter member |
| Packers | 1919, as an independent town team | 1921 |
| Lions | 1929 by most accounts, as the independent Portsmouth Spartans | 1930 |
| Rams | 1936, in a short-lived rival American Football League | 1937 |
| Browns | 1946, in the All-America Football Conference | 1950 |
| 49ers | 1946, in the All-America Football Conference | 1950 |
| The ten AFL clubs | 1960, 1966 or 1968, in the American Football League | 1970, by merger |
Neither convention is wrong. This page orders the franchises by the year the club itself began, which is the convention the clubs use on their own letterheads and anniversary patches, and gives the league entry date beside it wherever the two differ.
A second source of disagreement is relocation. Some lists date a team from its arrival in its present city, which makes the Lions a 1934 team and the Commanders a 1937 one. The league does not count that way. A franchise that moves keeps its history, its records and its founding date, with a single exception discussed below.
And a third is the Bears, who can be dated 1919 or 1920 for the reasons already given. The clubs settled it by convention, and so does this page.
The survivors of the 1920s and 1930s
Dozens of franchises were granted between 1921 and 1939. Leaving the Packers aside, six of them are still here, and each one filled a gap that the league president, Joe Carr, had identified on the map.
The first gap was New York. A league without a team in the country's largest city was a regional curiosity, and in 1925 Carr found Tim Mara, a New York businessman who admitted he knew little about football and thought any franchise in New York was worth the modest fee. The Giants played at the Polo Grounds, lost heavily at the gate in their first autumn, and were saved in December when Red Grange and the Bears drew an enormous crowd there.
The Detroit Lions started in Portsmouth, Ohio, a river town with a population well under 50,000, as the Spartans. They entered the league in 1930 and were good enough by 1932 to play the Bears for the title in a specially arranged game. A Depression-era town that size could not sustain the payroll. In 1934 a Detroit radio executive, George A. Richards, bought the franchise, moved it north and gave it a new name. Detroit had already failed with three earlier league teams. This one stayed, helped by Richards's decision to schedule a home game every Thanksgiving, the origin of the tradition covered in our guide to the NFL's Thanksgiving games.
Boston, then Washington
George Preston Marshall and three partners were granted a Boston franchise in 1932. It played one season as the Braves, was renamed the next year and struggled for attention in a college football town. After the 1936 season, in which Marshall was so disgusted with local support that he moved the championship game his own team was hosting to New York, he took the franchise to Washington. It won the title in its first season there.
Pennsylvania's two clubs of 1933
Pennsylvania law had long prohibited professional sports on Sunday, which is when the league played. In 1933 the state moved to loosen that law, and two franchises were granted on the strength of it.
Bert Bell and Lud Wray took Philadelphia, picking up the territory left vacant when the Frankford Yellow Jackets collapsed in 1931; the league regards the Eagles as a new franchise and not a continuation of Frankford. Art Rooney took Pittsburgh for a franchise fee reported at $2,500 and called his team the Pirates, after the baseball club. It became the Steelers in 1940.
The last of the six, the Rams, began in Cleveland in 1936 in a minor rival league and transferred to the NFL a year later. They won a championship in Cleveland in 1945 and left for Los Angeles weeks afterward.
Mergers, swaps and suspended seasons that break the line
A founding date implies a straight line from then to now. Several of the oldest franchises have a kink in theirs, and three of the kinks came in a four-year span.
The strangest is the Pennsylvania exchange of 1941. Late in 1940 Art Rooney sold the Steelers to a young steel heir named Alexis Thompson and bought a half share of the Philadelphia Eagles from his friend Bert Bell. Thompson, who lived in New York, soon decided he would prefer the club nearer home. So the two ownership groups traded cities: Thompson's organization went to Philadelphia and became the Eagles, and Rooney and Bell's went to Pittsburgh and became the Steelers. In corporate terms the franchise founded as the Eagles has been in Pittsburgh since 1941 and the one founded as the Pirates has been in Philadelphia. The league ignores this entirely, and so does everyone else. Each city kept its team's name, colors and records, and that is how the histories are written.
Then the war. With rosters stripped by the draft, clubs did what they had to.
| Year | Clubs | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 1941 | Eagles and Steelers | The two ownership groups exchanged franchises, each keeping the local name and history |
| 1943 | Rams | Suspended operations for the season with their owners in military service, then resumed in 1944 |
| 1943 | Eagles and Steelers | Combined for one season as Phil-Pitt, known to fans as the Steagles, finishing 5-4-1 |
| 1944 | Cardinals and Steelers | Combined for one season as Card-Pitt and lost all ten games |
| 1996 to 1998 | Browns | Franchise held inactive for three seasons after its owner moved the team's personnel to Baltimore |
None of these is treated as ending a franchise.
The Browns' three missing years
The modern case is Cleveland, and it set a precedent. When the Browns' owner announced in November 1995 that he was taking the team to Baltimore, the city sued, and the settlement reached early in 1996 separated things that had always traveled together. The players and the organization went to Baltimore, where they became a new franchise, the Ravens, with a history beginning in 1996. The Browns' name, colors, records and championships stayed in Cleveland, held in trust by the league, and the franchise was "deactivated" until a new team took the field in 1999.
So the Browns are a 1946 franchise with three seasons in which they did not exist, and the Ravens, who inherited the 1995 Browns' players and coaches, are officially a team with no ancestors. It is a legal fiction. It is also the arrangement Cleveland wanted, and other cities have cited it since. The background to every move is in our history of NFL relocations.
The franchises that came from rival leagues
Twelve of the 32 clubs came in from the two big postwar rival leagues, the All-America Football Conference and the American Football League. They were created to compete with the NFL, and were absorbed when competing became too expensive for both sides.
The first two came from the All-America Football Conference, which played from 1946 through 1949. The AAFC had money, stadiums and one team so far ahead of the others that it won all four of the conference's championships. That was the Cleveland Browns. When the leagues made peace in December 1949 the NFL took three AAFC clubs, the Browns, the San Francisco 49ers and the original Baltimore Colts, and left the others to fold. The Colts lasted one season. The Browns, widely assumed to be the product of a weak league, won the NFL championship in their first year in it.
The league's record book has long left AAFC statistics out, a slight that Cleveland in particular resented.
- NFL members by 193728.1%
- All-America Football Conference6.3%
- NFL additions, 1953 to 196715.6%
- American Football League31.3%
- New franchises since 197618.8%
Each franchise is counted once, by the route it took into the NFL. The Colts are counted as a 1953 NFL club, following the league's own record, and the Rams, who spent 1936 in a minor rival league, are counted with the NFL clubs of the 1930s.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| NFL members by 1937 | 9 |
| All-America Football Conference | 2 |
| NFL additions, 1953 to 1967 | 5 |
| American Football League | 10 |
| New franchises since 1976 | 6 |
Ten clubs from the American Football League
The second rival was bigger and lasted longer. The American Football League began play in 1960 with eight teams, organized by Lamar Hunt after the NFL declined to give him a franchise for Dallas. Those eight are today's Bills, Broncos, Chiefs, Raiders, Chargers, Patriots, Jets and Titans, five of them under a different name or in a different city from the one they started with. The AFL added Miami in 1966 and Cincinnati in 1968.
The two leagues agreed to merge in June 1966 and completed the job for the 1970 season, when all ten AFL clubs entered the NFL together. To make two conferences of thirteen, three old NFL franchises, the Colts, the Browns and the Steelers, agreed to cross over and join them. The negotiation is the subject of our history of the AFL-NFL merger.
Unlike the AAFC's, the AFL's records were folded into the NFL's from the start, so a rushing title won in the AFL in 1962 counts in the official book.
The NFL's own response to the AFL produced three more of today's teams. Dallas was given a franchise for 1960 to block Hunt's club in the same city. Minnesota's owners had committed to the AFL and were lured away with an NFL franchise for 1961. And Atlanta's bid for 1966 was accepted in a hurry when the AFL showed interest in the city.
The Colts and the Dayton Triangles ancestry the league does not recognize
There is an argument, made seriously by football historians, that a third charter franchise of 1920 is still playing. It runs through seven cities and requires some patience.
The Dayton Triangles were one of the four Ohio clubs at the very first organizing meeting in August 1920, and they hosted what the league counts as its first game between two members. They lasted through 1929, by which time they were a road team that rarely won. In 1930 the franchise was sold to interests in Brooklyn.
- Dayton Triangles, 1920 to 1929A charter club of the league. The franchise is sold after the 1929 season and moved east.
- Brooklyn Dodgers and Tigers, 1930 to 1944The club plays fifteen seasons in Brooklyn under two names.
- Boston Yanks, 1945 to 1948Brooklyn merges with the newer Boston Yanks in 1945, and the combined club continues in Boston.
- New York Bulldogs and Yanks, 1949 to 1951The Boston owner moves his club to New York, where it fails beside the Giants and is sold back to the league.
- Dallas Texans, 1952The league places the players and assets with a new Dallas ownership group. The team fails within months and finishes its only season as a ward of the league.
- Baltimore Colts, 1953A new franchise is granted to Baltimore and stocked largely with the Texans' players.
- Indianapolis Colts, 1984The Colts leave Baltimore for Indianapolis, where they remain.
Each step is a documented sale, merger or transfer of players. The league treats the chain as broken in 1952 and dates the Colts from 1953.
The players really did pass down that chain. Men who finished 1952 as Dallas Texans opened 1953 as Baltimore Colts, in the same blue and white. If a franchise is its roster and its assets, the Colts descend from the Triangles and are a charter club.
The league's answer is that a franchise is neither of those things. It is a membership, and the memberships along this chain were canceled and reissued more than once. The Brooklyn franchise was merged out of existence in 1945. The New York Yanks were sold back to the league. The Dallas Texans are listed in the record book as the last NFL franchise to fold. What Baltimore received in 1953 was, on paper, a new grant, awarded after the city met a league challenge to sell a set number of season tickets in a matter of weeks. The Colts themselves count from 1953 and have never claimed Dayton.
Notice the inconsistency, because it is real. In 1996 the league decided that a roster moving from Cleveland to Baltimore was a new franchise while the history stayed behind. In 1953 it decided that a roster moving from Dallas to Baltimore was a new franchise and the history simply ended. The principle in both cases is that history belongs to whoever the league says it belongs to. That is tidy for record-keeping and unsatisfying for anyone who thinks a team is the people on it.
The charter clubs that did not survive
Twelve of the first fourteen are in the ground. Their names are worth setting down, since several were champions and one was the best team in the country.
| Club in the 1920 season | Last league season | What became of it |
|---|---|---|
| Akron Pros | 1926 | The first champions; suspended play in 1927 and never returned |
| Canton Bulldogs | 1926 | Champions in 1922 and 1923; cut when the league shrank in 1927 |
| Dayton Triangles | 1929 | Franchise sold and moved to Brooklyn |
| Rock Island Independents | 1925 | Left to join a rival league that lasted one season |
| Rochester Jeffersons | 1925 | Suspended operations and did not resume |
| Hammond Pros | 1926 | Cut in 1927 |
| Muncie Flyers | 1921 | Played only a few league games in two seasons |
| Buffalo All-Americans | 1929 | Played on under other names before folding |
| Columbus Panhandles | 1926 | Cut in 1927 |
| Chicago Tigers | 1920 | Folded after one season |
The Cleveland and Detroit entries of 1920 complete the dozen, and both were finished by the end of 1921.
The causes were ordinary. A club in Rock Island or Hammond depended on a few thousand paying customers at a small field, and from that gate it had to cover salaries, travel and the guarantee owed to the visiting team. One rained-out Sunday could erase a season's profit. The better the league became, the more the good players cost, and a factory town could not raise ticket prices to keep up with Chicago and New York.
Several of these teams became road clubs before they died, playing nearly all their games away because the visitor's share in a big ballpark was worth more than a home gate. Hammond was one. Dayton was another by the late 1920s. A team that never plays at home has no supporters, and a team with no supporters is waiting for the meeting at which it is voted out.
That meeting came after the 1926 season. The league had swollen to 22 members to fend off a rival, the rival collapsed, and Carr pruned the membership to twelve for 1927. Four of the 1920 clubs went in that one cut. The Depression took most of the small-city teams that were left. By 1934, when Portsmouth's team left for Detroit, Green Bay was the only town of its size still in the league, kept there by the community ownership that no other club had thought to try.
All 32 current franchises in order of founding
The table below lists every current franchise by the year the club began, with its original identity where that differs from today's. Clubs that started in the same year are listed alphabetically; no order of days or months within a year is implied.
| Founded | Franchise | Began as | Entered the NFL |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1898 | Arizona Cardinals | Morgan Athletic Club, Chicago | 1920 |
| 1919 | Green Bay Packers | Green Bay Packers | 1921 |
| 1920 | Chicago Bears | Decatur Staleys | 1920 |
| 1925 | New York Giants | New York Giants | 1925 |
| 1929 | Detroit Lions | Portsmouth Spartans | 1930 |
| 1932 | Washington Commanders | Boston Braves | 1932 |
| 1933 | Philadelphia Eagles | Philadelphia Eagles | 1933 |
| 1933 | Pittsburgh Steelers | Pittsburgh Pirates | 1933 |
| 1936 | Los Angeles Rams | Cleveland Rams | 1937 |
| 1946 | Cleveland Browns | Cleveland Browns, AAFC | 1950 |
| 1946 | San Francisco 49ers | San Francisco 49ers, AAFC | 1950 |
| 1953 | Indianapolis Colts | Baltimore Colts | 1953 |
| 1960 | Buffalo Bills | Buffalo Bills, AFL | 1970 |
| 1960 | Dallas Cowboys | Dallas Cowboys | 1960 |
| 1960 | Denver Broncos | Denver Broncos, AFL | 1970 |
| 1960 | Kansas City Chiefs | Dallas Texans, AFL | 1970 |
| 1960 | Las Vegas Raiders | Oakland Raiders, AFL | 1970 |
| 1960 | Los Angeles Chargers | Los Angeles Chargers, AFL | 1970 |
| 1960 | New England Patriots | Boston Patriots, AFL | 1970 |
| 1960 | New York Jets | Titans of New York, AFL | 1970 |
| 1960 | Tennessee Titans | Houston Oilers, AFL | 1970 |
| 1961 | Minnesota Vikings | Minnesota Vikings | 1961 |
| 1966 | Atlanta Falcons | Atlanta Falcons | 1966 |
| 1966 | Miami Dolphins | Miami Dolphins, AFL | 1970 |
| 1967 | New Orleans Saints | New Orleans Saints | 1967 |
| 1968 | Cincinnati Bengals | Cincinnati Bengals, AFL | 1970 |
| 1976 | Seattle Seahawks | Seattle Seahawks | 1976 |
| 1976 | Tampa Bay Buccaneers | Tampa Bay Buccaneers | 1976 |
| 1995 | Carolina Panthers | Carolina Panthers | 1995 |
| 1995 | Jacksonville Jaguars | Jacksonville Jaguars | 1995 |
| 1996 | Baltimore Ravens | Baltimore Ravens | 1996 |
| 2002 | Houston Texans | Houston Texans | 2002 |
The year given for expansion teams is the first season on the field. Franchises are awarded earlier, sometimes by two or three years, and a list built on award dates would shuffle a few neighbors without changing the shape.
Reading the waves
The shape is lopsided. Nine franchises date from before 1940 and fourteen from a single decade, the 1960s, when the fight with the AFL forced both leagues to plant teams in every large city that lacked one. Georgia, Louisiana and Colorado had never had a major league football team before then, and Texas and Florida had each had one that failed inside a season.
After the merger, expansion became slow and deliberate. Two teams in 1976. Then nothing for nineteen years, a gap filled with relocations instead, and then Carolina and Jacksonville in 1995, both new markets. Baltimore's 1996 franchise and Houston's in 2002 were each a replacement for a team the city had lost. Houston's brought the league to 32, an even number that divides into eight divisions of four, and the membership has not changed since. How those divisions are drawn is covered in our guide to NFL divisions and conferences.
No franchise has folded since the Dallas Texans in 1952. A league that lost a dozen charter clubs in its first decade has gone more than seventy years without losing one.
The oldest rivalries: Bears-Cardinals from 1920, Bears-Packers from 1921
The oldest clubs produced the oldest fixtures, and the oldest of all is one most fans have forgotten.
The Bears and the Cardinals first met on November 28, 1920, when they were the Decatur Staleys and the Racine Cardinals. The Cardinals won 7-6, the only defeat the Staleys suffered all year, and a result that may have cost Halas the first championship. The Staleys won the return 10-0 a week later. No two current franchises have a longer shared history.
For four decades it was a crosstown series, North Side against South Side, played once or twice every season and usually won by the Bears. Its most famous afternoon belonged to the other side. On Thanksgiving Day in 1929 the Cardinals' fullback Ernie Nevers scored every one of his team's points in a 40-6 win, six touchdowns and four extra points, a single-game scoring record that has stood ever since and is the oldest individual record in the league's book.
Then the Cardinals left town. Since 1960 the two clubs have had no geographic reason to dislike each other, and they have long played in different divisions, so the oldest rivalry in the league now comes around only as often as the schedule rotation happens to pair them.
The series played more than any other
The Bears and the Packers first met on November 27, 1921, at Cubs Park. The Staleys, in their one Chicago season under that name, won 20-0. The clubs have played nearly every year since, twice a year for most of that time as members of the same division, and the series passed its 200th game in 2019. No pairing in the league has been played more often.
It has always been personal. Halas and Lambeau each ran their clubs for decades and coached against each other for most of them. Yet the relationship had another side. When Green Bay's voters were asked in 1956 to approve the financing of a new stadium, without which the franchise would probably have been forced to leave, Halas traveled north and spoke at a rally in favor of it. He understood that the Bears were worth more with the Packers than without them.
The lead in the series has changed hands over the years and the running total moves twice a season, so it is not given here. What does not move is the starting point. Two company teams, one named for a starch maker and one for a meat packer, met on a baseball field in Chicago three years after the First World War, and their successors are still at it. The rest of the league's history is set out across our United States sports guides.