Sports league

A sports league is a group of sports teams or individual athletes that compete against each other in a specific sport. At its simplest, it may be a local group of amateur athletes who form teams among themselves and compete on weekends; at its most complex, it can be an international professional league making large amounts of money and involving dozens of teams and thousands of players.

In many cases, organizations that function as leagues are described using a different term, such as association, conference, leaderboard, or series. This is especially common in individual sports, although the term "league" is sometimes used in amateur individual sports such as golf.

The term "league" is also sometimes applied to competitions that would more traditionally be called tournaments, such as the UEFA Champions League, which is organized with multiple small round-robin competitions followed by a single elimination tournament to choose an overall winner.

"League" and its synonyms may be used to encompass either a single competition or a related group of competitions. In the United States, leagues are often divided into subdivisions on historical or geographical lines. These may be referred to as conferences or divisions, as with the National Football Conference and American Football Conference in the National Football League, or the Eastern and Western Conferences of the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League. The NFL's "AFC" was formed largely from the remnants of the American Football League, though it also contains three original NFL teams and three expansion teams.

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