American football is the most popular sport in the United States. The National Football League has the highest revenue and average attendance of any sports league in the world. In the United States, the game is most often referred to as simply "football". Organization in the United States There is no single national governing body for American football in the United States or a continental governing body for North America. There is an international governing body, the International Federation of American Football, or IFAF. Befitting its status as a popular sport, football is played in leagues of different size, age and quality, in all regions of the country. A team / academy may be referred to as a 'football program' – not to be confused with football program. Professional The governing body for American football in the United States is USA Football. The 32-team National Football League (NFL) is currently the only major American football league in the United States. There have been numerous attempts over the past several decades to create a second major or high-level professional league, most of which failed within a few years or, in the cases of the All-America Football Conference and 1960s American Football League, merged with the NFL. The NFL has not operated any developmental minor leagues since the folding of the NFL Europe League in 2007. From the time of the Spring Football League's 2000 collapse until the founding of the independent United Football League in 2009, there were no minor American football leagues (independent or affiliated) anywhere in the country. Since then, there has been the Stars Football League (which ran from 2011 through 2013), Fall Experimental Football League (which played from 2014 to 2015 before it was reformatted as the non-paying The Spring League from 2017 to 2022, then into the paying new United States Football League in 2022), and the Alliance of American Football, which played one abbreviated season in 2019 before collapsing in a management dispute. The AAF positioned itself as an upper-level minor league serving to transition between the college game and the NFL. The XFL, a revamp of a league of the same name that played one season in 2001, began play in February 2020. In contrast to the former AAF, it does not position itself as a minor league, but an independent alternative league. But the COVID-19 pandemic five weeks into the season caused the