A football player or footballer is a sportsperson who plays one of the different types of football. The main types of football are association football, American football, Canadian football, Australian rules football, Gaelic football, rugby league, and rugby union.
The National Football League (NFL) is a professional American football league composed of 32 teams, divided equally between the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). The NFL is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada and the highest professional level of American football in the world. Each NFL season begins annually with a three-week preseason in August, followed by the 18-week regular season, which runs from early September to early January, with each team playing 17 games and having one bye week. Following the conclusion of the regular season, seven teams from each conference, including the four division winners and three wild card teams, advance to the playoffs, a single-elimination tournament, which culminates in the Super Bowl, played in early February between the winners of the AFC and NFC championship games.
Professional wrestling is a form of athletic theater centered around mock combat and based on the premise that performers are competitive wrestlers. Professional wrestling is distinguished from amateur wrestling by its scripted outcomes and emphasis on entertainment and storytelling over genuine competition. The staged nature of matches is an open secret: Through a practice known as kayfabe, both wrestlers and spectators—as well commentators and journalists—maintain the pretense that the performances are bona fide competitions, which is likened to the suspension of disbelief employed when engaging with fiction.
A sports governing body is a sports organization that has a regulatory or sanctioning function.
An athlete is most commonly a person who competes in one or more sports involving physical strength, speed, power, or endurance. Sometimes, the word "athlete" is used to refer specifically to sport of athletics competitors, i.e. including track and field and marathon runners but excluding e.g. swimmers, footballers or basketball players. However, in other contexts it is used to refer to all athletics participants of any sport. For the latter definition, the word sportsperson or the gendered sportsman or sportswoman are also used. A third definition is also sometimes used, meaning anyone who is physically fit regardless of whether or not they compete in a sport.
Women and girls have participated in sports, physical fitness, and exercise throughout history. However, the extent of their involvement has varied depending on factors such as country, time, geographical location, and level of economic development. The modern era of organized sports, with structured competitions and formalized activities, did not fully emerge for either women or men until the late industrial age. This shift marked a significant change in how sports were structured and practiced, eventually leading to more inclusive opportunities for female participation.
In professional sports, as opposed to amateur sports, participants receive payment for their performance. Professionalism in sport has come to the fore through a combination of developments. Mass media and increased leisure have brought larger audiences, so that sports organizations or teams can command large incomes. As a result, more sportspeople can afford to make sport their primary career, devoting the training time necessary to increase skills, physical condition, and experience to modern levels of achievement. This proficiency has also helped boost the popularity of sports. In most sports played professionally there are many more amateur than professional players, though amateurs and professionals do not usually compete.
Esports, short for electronic sports, is a form of competition using video games. Esports often takes the form of organized, multiplayer video game competitions, particularly between professional players, played individually or as teams.
Amateur sports are sports in which participants engage largely or entirely without remuneration. The distinction is made between amateur sporting participants and professional sporting participants, who are paid for the time they spend competing and training. In the majority of sports which feature professional players, the professionals will participate at a higher standard of play than amateur competitors, as they can train full-time without the stress of having another job. The majority of worldwide sporting participants are amateurs.
An athletic coach is a person coaching in sport, involved in the direction, instruction, and training of a sports team or athlete.
A general manager (GM) is an executive who has overall responsibility for managing both the revenue and cost elements of a company's income statement, known as profit & loss (P&L) responsibility. A general manager usually oversees most or all of the firm's marketing and sales functions as well as the day-to-day operations of the business. Frequently, the general manager is responsible for effective planning, delegating, coordinating, staffing, organizing, and decision making to attain desirable profit making results for an organization.
Semi-professional sports are sports in which athletes are not participating on a full-time basis, but still receive some payment. Semi-professionals are not amateur because they receive regular payment from their team, but generally at a considerably lower rate than a full-time professional athlete. As a result, semi-professional players frequently have full-time employment elsewhere. A semi-pro player or team could also be one that represents a place of employment that only the employees are allowed to play on. In this case, it is considered semi-pro because their employer pays them, but for their regular job, not for playing on the company's team.
David Allen Meltzer is an American journalist who reports on professional wrestling and mixed martial arts. Since 1983, Meltzer has been the publisher and editor of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter (WON), a dirtsheet primarily addressing professional wrestling. He has also written for the Oakland Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Yahoo! Sports, SI.com, and The National Sports Daily. He has extensively covered mixed martial arts since UFC 1 in 1993 and also covers the sport for SB Nation. He has been called "the most accomplished reporter in sports journalism" by Frank Deford of Sports Illustrated.
Sports in the United States are an important part of the nation's culture. Historically, the most popular sport has been baseball. However, in more recent decades, American football has been the most popular spectator sport based on broadcast viewership audience. Basketball has grown into the mainstream American sports scene since the 1980s, with ice hockey and soccer doing the same around the turn of the 21st century. These sports comprise the "Big Five".
Pro Football Reference (PFR) is a statistics database for professional American football maintained by Sports Reference. The site provides career statistics for players, teams, and games, as well as records and NFL draft history. The company also publishes similar statistics websites for basketball, baseball, and hockey. PFR was established independently by Doug Drinen in 2000, and became part of Sports Reference in 2007.
A sports club or sporting club, sometimes an athletics club or sports society or sports association, is a group of people formed for the purpose of playing sports.
Sport industry is an industry in which people, activities, business, and organizations are involved in producing, facilitating, promoting, or organizing any activity, experience, or business enterprise focused on sports. It is the market in which the businesses or products offered to its buyers are sports related and may be goods, services, people, places, or ideas.
Scout Media was an integrated sports publishing company that produced Internet content covering hundreds of professional and college teams across America. The company was founded in 2001 and was acquired by Fox Sports in 2005. In 2013, Fox Sports sold Scout to North American Membership Group which later rebranded to Scout Media. Scout filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2016 and was then acquired by CBS Corporation in February 2017 for $9.5 million after submitting the only bid for the bankrupt company. Paramount later folded Scout into 247Sports, with Scout.com redirecting to the site.
Sport is a form of physical activity or game. Often competitive and organized, sports use, maintain, or improve physical ability and skills. They also provide enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators. Many sports exist, with different participant numbers, some are done by a single person with others being done by hundreds. Most sports take place either in teams or competing as individuals. Some sports allow a "tie" or "draw", in which there is no single winner; others provide tie-breaking methods to ensure one winner. A number of contests may be arranged in a tournament format, producing a champion. Many sports leagues make an annual champion by arranging games in a regular sports season, followed in some cases by playoffs.
The Scottish Premiership, known as the William Hill Premiership for sponsorship reasons, is the top division of the Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL), the league competition for men's professional football clubs in Scotland. The Scottish Premiership was established in July 2013, after the SPFL was formed by a merger of the Scottish Premier League and Scottish Football League. There are 12 teams in this division, with each team playing 38 matches per season. Sixteen clubs have played in the Scottish Premiership since its creation in the 2013–14 season. Celtic are the current league champions, having won the 2023–24 Scottish Premiership.