 | |
| Nicknames | Arena football, indoor football, football, gridiron football |
|---|---|
| First played | 1980's |
| Characteristics | |
| Contact | Full |
| Team members | 8 at a time |
| Type | Indoor pro football |
Arena football is a variety of gridiron football designed to be played indoors. The game is played on a smaller field than American or Canadian football, designed to fit in the same surface area as a standard North American ice hockey rink, and features between six and eight players for each team playing at any given time depending on the league, resulting in a faster and higher-scoring game that can be played on the floors of indoor arenas. The sport was invented in 1981, and patented in 1987, by Jim Foster, a former executive of the National Football League and the United States Football League. The name is trademarked by Gridiron Enterprises and had a proprietary format until its patent expired in 2007.
Three leagues have played under official arena football rules: the Arena Football League, which played 32 seasons in two separate runs from 1987 to 2008 and 2010 to 2019; arenafootball2, the AFL's erstwhile developmental league, which played 10 seasons from 2000 through 2009; and the China Arena Football League, which played two abbreviated seasons in 2016 and 2019 but was not directly affiliated with the now-defunct AFL. A 2024 reboot of the Arena Football League uses the original league's rulebook with minor variations.
Through the late 1990s, the Arena Football League was the only league playing any variant of the sport designed for indoor play. A clarification limiting the scope of its patent allowed for competing indoor football leagues (sometimes known as arena leagues) to use the same size field and most other aspects of the game. Arena football is distinguished from the other indoor leagues by its use of large rebound nets attached to the side of each goalpost, which keep any missed field goal or overthrown ball in the field of play and allow the ball to remain live; the rebound nets were the only part of the patent that was upheld until it expired. As a result, some non-AFL arena leagues that formed after the patent expired like the National Arena League have used rebound nets, while other leagues such as the Indoor Football League and American Indoor Football opt to not use them.