Minor league football (gridiron)

Minor league football, also known as alternative football or secondary football, is an umbrella term for professional gridiron football that is played below the major league level.

The National Football League and Canadian Football League are both designated as major leagues, but contrary to the four other major sports leagues in North America—Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League—no formal development farm system was in use after the NFL severed ties with all minor league teams in 1948.^[1][2][3] The developmental league concept was shuttered again with the cancellation of NFL Europe in 2006.^[4]

Since 2018, the CFL has had a partnership agreement with the Professional American Football League of Mexico (LFA) for player development,^[5] but does not consider it a minor league in the traditional sense.^[6] In 2023, the NFL signed a collaboration agreement with the XFL on rules, equipment, and safety testing, but the agreement does not cover sharing players for developmental purposes.^[7]

There have been professional football leagues of varying levels since the invention of the sport, and over the years there have been attempts to organize development or farm leagues such as the Association of Professional Football Leagues^[8][9][10] and the World League of American Football, later known as NFL Europe and then NFL Europa, but they failed to produce profits and were eventually shut down.^[11] As a result, over time the North American leagues settled into an informal hierarchy, with many aspiring entrepreneurs trying to establish rival, alternative, or supplemental leagues to the NFL, similar to baseball's independent leagues. Apart from the All-America Football Conference and the American Football League, which merged with the NFL, none of the other leagues have succeeded,^[12] particularly because the leagues' inability to generate television revenue to keep them afloat in their first years of existence.^[13][14]

In modern times, the NFL has developed players not ready for the active roster through each team's practice squad, or relied on college football^{[15][16][17][18]} and separate entities like the now-defunct Arena Football League^[19][20][21] as their feeder organizations. Since the beginning of the 21st century, three fledgling pro football leagues—the United Football League,^[22] the Fall Experimental Football League^[23][24] and the Alliance of American Football (AAF)^[25][26]—had hoped to create a relationship with the NFL as developmental minor leagues, but all folded without any such connection being made. Nevertheless, some players did find a path to the NFL through those leagues, especially the high-level ones like the AAF, XFL, and United States Football League (USFL).^[27]

Currently, there are four active minor leagues in North America: the United Football League (UFL), the Gridiron Developmental Football League, the Rivals Professional Football League, and the Liga de Fútbol Americano Profesional, with the latter the only Mexican league. The UFL is considered a high-level league, and the rest are viewed as low-level leagues.