Global InformationCanadian Football League in the United States information
The Canadian Football League (CFL), which features teams based Canada, has made efforts to gain further audience in the United States, most directly through expansion into the country from the 1993 CFL season through the 1995 CFL season. The CFL plays Canadian football, a form of gridiron football which is somewhat different from the more common American football played in the United States and other parts of the world.
The first American team, the Sacramento Gold Miners, joined in 1993. The league added three more American teams in 1994, after which two more teams joined, one re-located and one folded to bring the total to five in 1995. In the latter year, the teams were aligned into a new South Division. The three years saw numerous ownership debacles on both sides of the U.S.–Canada border. The Baltimore Stallions became the only American-based team to win the Grey Cup championship, in 1995.
With the exception of Baltimore, all of the American teams consistently lost money. Tension also arose between the American and Canadian contingents over rule changes, scheduling, import rules, and marketing. Facing these difficulties, the league returned to being exclusively Canadian beginning with the 1996 season.
While expansion was the most notable CFL effort in the United States, the league had also made previous inroads. Eleven neutral-site CFL games (including exhibition games) have been held in the United States. In earlier decades when the CFL season started much later than it does today (i.e. around the same time as that of the National Football League), NFL teams were occasionally invited northward for exhibition interleague play.
The CFL has also attempted to find a television audience in the United States, with one notable venture coinciding with the NFL players' strike in 1982, and more recently on ESPN. While the CFL's presence on U.S. television has consistently been limited to cable TV networks and streaming services, its U.S. TV audience was enough to account for about 20% of the league's total North American viewership during the 2018 season.