The National Football League (NFL) has been playing games in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, since 1959 when an interleague game between the Chicago Cardinals of the NFL and the Toronto Argonauts (often shortened as Argos) of the Canadian Football League (CFL) took place at Exhibition Stadium. Subsequently, a number of neutral site preseason and regular season games between NFL teams have been staged in the city. Toronto is one of four cities outside the United States, along with London, Mexico City, and Munich, which have hosted regular season NFL games.
There have long been efforts to establish an NFL franchise in Toronto due to its market size. Toronto is among the largest cities in the United States and Canada, and the largest that is not home to an NFL team. The city hosts franchises in all of the other US-based major professional North American sports in the United States and Canada. As of 2020, the league has expressed interest in establishing a team in the city provided certain conditions are met, the most crucial being the construction of a new football-specific stadium.
Games played in Toronto
The first professional U.S. football team to play a home game in Toronto was the Los Angeles Wildcats of the American Football League of 1926, the first major competitor to the National Football League for the dominance of professional football. While the Wildcats nominally represented Los Angeles, travel to the west coast posed a major obstacle at the time so the team was instead a traveling team based in Illinois. They played most of their games in the home stadiums of their opponents, with the exception of the Toronto game. The Wildcats lost the regular season game to the New York Yankees (which would join the NFL the following year) 28–0 in front of 10,000 fans at Maple Leaf Stadium on 8 November 1926. The game was relatively popular; at the time Canadian football still more closely resembled rugby football and would not adopt the forward pass until three years after the game.
In 1955, Eric Cradock, who would later become part owner of the Argos, stated that he was considering bringing two NFL teams to the city to play a game to test the market's interest in a full-time NFL franchise; this was four years after the second of two games, featuring the NFL's New York Giants, had been played in Ottawa against the local Canadian football team, the Ottawa Rough Riders. The NFL played its first game in Toronto in 1959, when the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League hosted the first of three NFL teams in a three-season span. The first ever appearance of an NFL team in Toronto was in August of that year during the Chicago Cardinals–Toronto Argonauts exhibition game, hosted to celebrate the grand opening of Exhibition Stadium; it broke the record for exhibition attendance in Canada at 27,770. These interleague exhibition games, which had been first tried in Ottawa in 1950 and were later staged in Montreal, were typically played by CFL rules in the first half and NFL rules in the second. The Argos lost all three games. The nearby Hamilton Tiger-Cats also hosted a game against the Bills, then an American Football League team. Buffalo lost the game 38–21, the only time a current or future NFL team would lose to a CFL team. In 1960 the New York Giants and Chicago Bears played an exhibition game at Varsity Stadium in the first game featuring two NFL teams to be played outside the United States.
During the 1982 NFL season the NFL players went on strike. In the absence of regular season NFL games, the National Football League Players Association scheduled a series of All-star games across the continent to raise funds. A game between the AFC East and NFC East was scheduled for Toronto's Varsity Stadium for October 24. However, the game was cancelled following a court ruling that permitted players who participated in the games to be sued by their clubs for violating their contracts.