Back Arena Football German Arena piedpilkado Esperanto Arena football Finnish Sepak bola Amerika arena ID Football a 8 Italian アリーナフットボール Japanese 아레나 풋볼 Korean अरिना फुटबॉल Marathi Arena football Polish Futebol americano de arena Portuguese
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| 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 eight-man indoor gridiron football. The game is played indoors 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, 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 and is planned to return for a third time in 2024; arenafootball2, the AFL's erstwhile developmental league, which played 10 seasons from 2000 through 2009; and the China Arena Football League, which began play in 2016 but was not directly affiliated with the now-defunct AFL. The CAFL, which operated on a heavily abbreviated schedule solely in China, was the most recent league in the world playing by arena rules.
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 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 indoor 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.