America has mastered free enterprise like no other civilization to date.   The tradition of economic freedom in America has yielded a sense of competitiveness and economic success unparalleled in the world.  The American sports industry is certainly no exception to the competitiveness of the American free market, which has given way to some of the best sports products the world has to offer.

The National Football League (NFL) is widely accepted as the authority in gridiron football worldwide.  However, even the NFL has a long history of competition that has forced the league to rise to the occasion at various points in its development.  Throughout parts of the 1920’s and 1930’s, the NFL remained an unstable venture and struggled to establish itself as a major sports league.  In fact, only five of the NFL’s original fourteen teams remained by the close of the 1926 season.

From 1926 to 1941, the NFL would face competition from three different professional football leagues all by the name of the American Football League (one in each decade).  Although each of these leagues were short-lived, they produced financial challenges to the NFL that resulted in additional turnover of NFL franchises, movement of NFL franchises, and mergers with teams from competing leagues.  The NFL would later face stiffer competition from the All American Football Conference (AAFC) of the 1940’s and the American Football League (AFL) of the 1960’s.  During these respective eras the NFL had achieved greater stability, but the success of the AAFC and AFL still resulted in partial or complete absorption into the NFL.  Well known franchises of the AAFC, the Cleveland Browns and the San Francisco 49ers, remain in the NFL still today.

Several other would-be professional football leagues came and went over the years (e.g., the World Football League from 1974 to 1975, the United States Football League from 1983 to 1985, and the XFL in 2001).  Although each of these leagues were unsuccessful in posing a real challenge to the NFL, they all contributed to the development of players and coaches that would later find success in the NFL, as well as brought innovations that still have an impact on the game today.  The World Football League brought field goals in the back of endzones (instead of the front), the United States Football League influenced a myriad of NFL rule changes to include instant replay and the two-point conversion, and the XFL brought the overhead camera and microphones on the players and coaches.  Regardless of how we value some of these contributions from competing leagues, the decades long pattern still illustrates an evolution of the NFL product by way of competition.

In this respect, the American sports industry is often unique from the rest of the world because foreign sports industries typically do not have the benefit of competing major leagues.  Major foreign sports do sometimes have lower ranking divisions or minor leagues that, by design, exist solely for the purpose of player development.  But, the European model (such as the Union of European Football Associations) lacks the ingenuity potential of competition on a business level.

The UFL is the next competitor in a long line of NFL challengers.  Whether or not the UFL will achieve its goals remains to be seen, but regardless of how the masses view the UFL, consumers should root for the  concept.