Arena football is a variety of gridiron football played by the Arena Football League (AFL). It is a proprietary game, the rights to which are owned by Gridiron Enterprises, and is played indoors on a smaller field than American or Canadian outdoor football, resulting in a faster and higher-scoring game. The sport was invented in 1981, and patented in 1987, by James F. Foster, Jr., a former executive of the National Football League and the United States Football League. Though not the only variant of Indoor American football, it is the most widely known, and the one on which most other forms of modern indoor football are at least partially based.
Two leagues have played under the official arena football rules: the AFL, which played 22 seasons from 1987 to 2008 and resumed play under new ownership in 2010, and arenafootball2, the AFL's erstwhile developmental league, which played 10 seasons from 2000 through 2009.
Read more about Arena Football: History, Graduates To The NFL, Other Media, Fatalities
Famous quotes containing the words arena and/or football:
“[I]t forged ahead to become a full-fledged metropolis, with 143 faro games, 30 saloons, 4 banks, 27 produce stores, 3 express offices—and an arena for bull-and-bear fights, which, described by Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune, is said to have given Wall Street its best-known phrases.”
—For the State of California, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)