For all of the football fans that believe the game starts with the Super Bowl this is the book that they need to read. To learn about Joe Carr the first commissioner who saw the growth of the league from the ’20s and ’30s. He created officials, he also created standard contracts for players, got a team in New York City and started to move other smaller teams to the larger cities knowing that the league would only succeed that way. You find out just who much power Halas, Preston Marshall, and Mara had early on. After his passing there was no guidance then they voted in Bert Bel former owner of the Eagles. Really the pro game started to change in the ’40s especially with the passing game where you could throw the anywhere behind the line of scrimmage. The college game you had to be five yards behind and they also did not have hash marks in the college game also. The author also takes you through some of the stars of the day Luckman, Baugh, Baugh is still the only player to be an All-Pro at three different positions in the same year, quarterback, defense back and punter. Even Don Hutson the split end for the Packer who had 99 touchdowns until Jerry Rice broke his record it stood for 44 years, his four receiving touchdowns in a quarter still stands. On defense, he played safety had 30 interceptions one season he had eight in a ten-game season. He also had 172 extra points and seven field goals. You will read about Red Grange, and many, many other players which made the league along with the owners. The book takes you up to when Pete Roselle takes over and you also get a look at the game which really changed everything for football, the 1958 championship which went into overtime and was televised. Though I already knew a lot of the early history I still enjoyed reading this book and the interviews with the family members are what took this book over the top. A very good.

Wonderful book on the early days of the NFL, illustrating that it has not always been the sports giant it is today. Indeed, many of today's football fans would be very surprised to see how many teams failed early in the league's history and how these five pioneers (Halas, Mara, Bell, Marshall, Rooney) were fierce competitors but would band together to make changes that may hurt their individual teams in the short term but would benefit the league in the long run. All of the bad, such as Marshall's blatant racism that helped keep his team all white for a long time, as well as the good is illustrated here. Eisenberg has written a book that every professional football fan should read to learn what the NFL went through before becoming what it is now.

Veteran sportswriter John Eisenberg has penned an exceptional history of the early NFL with his new release, The League.

Many books have looked at the early days of pro football and its growth towards the behemoth we know today, but Eisenberg expertly tells the story through the lens of five of the NFL's early power brokers- Bert Bell, George Halas, Tim Mara, George Preston Marshall, and Art Rooney. The story of the NFL through the 1950's is the story of these men, and Eisneberg deftly weaves together the stories of these five into the tapestry that was the League and its ascendency.

Eisenberg focuses on each of the five and their spirit of unity and prioritization of the league over their individual interests that gave the NFL the fuel it needed to move forward. He's not a Pollyanna about history though- not every decision worked out, and these men each had their flaws, most glaringly in the case of George Preston Marshall's retrograde views on race. But the story of the league's rise, through franchise failure and relocation, rules changes, fighting off rival leagues, creation of the amateur draft, and so on, is told in an accessible and exciting fashion by an excellent guide to the subject. In the early stages of the book the NFL is a disorganized association of small-town Midwestern clubs and at the end, because of Bell, Halas, Mara, Marshall, and Rooney, the framework of what we know today as the NFL is clearly present. Any fan of football will enjoy this book.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Really nice informative book about the history of football that i personally found fascinating not being an american and a football fan for years!
Defiantly worth a look and a read if you are a football fan!

As a longtime member of the NFL media, I'm quite familiar with the basics of the league's origin story. What surprised me about Eisenberg's fantastic book was how much more detail there is to the story that I was *not* aware of.

Through an in-depth look at the lives of the NFL's founding fathers, Eisenberg gives us a rich history of the league's infancy that goes beyond the typical chronicling of rule changes and on field storylines that usually populate early NFL narratives.

Eisenberg's blend of careful and thorough research with fascinating contextual history makes this a can't miss for industry types as well as casual fans of the game.

Wrigley Field, Chicago, December 1937. A fight breaks out in the NFL Championship Game between the Bears and the Redskins. George Preston Marshall, Redskins owner, takes to the field – not to help break up the fight but to join in. He ends up face-to-face with George Halas, who owns the Bears, and the pair almost come to blows. Here’s how John Eisenberg finishes the story:

"When tempers finally cooled, Marshall returned to his box. His wife was livid. 'That man Halas is positively revolting!' Corinne Griffith sputtered.
Marshall roared back at her, actually shaking a finger under her nose. 'Don’t you dare say anything against Halas! He’s my best friend!'"

As well as being a brilliant moment of comedy, the story helps explain a significant factor in the NFL’s eventual success. The owners of the clubs that made up the struggling league were vicious competitors on the field but staunch allies off it. It’s a theme that runs through Eisenberg’s book, The League, which examines the early decades of the NFL through the careers of five key figures who helped to shape it.

The five include Halas and Marshall, plus Tim Mara, owner of the New York Giants, Art Rooney, owner of the Steelers, and Bert Bell, co-owner of the Philadelphia Eagles and later NFL commissioner. From today’s perspective, it’s easy to believe that the NFL’s success was inevitable but success was by no means certain. In fact, the league that is such a money-making juggernaut today was frequently on the brink of disaster in its early days.

Eisenberg, a longtime journalist and author, whose football titles include That First Season, about Vince Lombardi and the Packers, and Ten-Gallon War, about the Cowboys-Texans rivalry in the 1960s, shows how those five key figures formed a core that kept the NFL together during its first decades.

They kept putting money in, propping up their teams when fans weren’t coming and, in the case of Halas, even once giving his players IOUs when he couldn’t pay them. That stubbornness was critical. They didn’t just believe they had a product that fans would eventually want, they also simply loved their game.

But there was more to the league’s success. Eisenberg explains how the owners continually tweaked the rules to make the game more exciting. Once they stopped following the rules of the college game, the NFL began to differentiate itself and build a following in its own right.

In that sense, says Eisenberg, this is a business book as much as a sports book. But it also documents the league’s path through a succession of social factors that shaped mid-20th Century America. The Depression, for example, hit even the rich owners and made it harder for fans to afford tickets, while The Second World War saw many players join the armed forces, leaving the NFL struggling to field teams.

The League struggled with racism, too. Marshall was an unapologetic racist and even more enlightened owners, such as Rooney, tolerated a league that excluded black players between 1933 and 1946. The colour bar was broken only because the Rams, relocating from Cleveland to Los Angeles, wanted to lease the taxpayer-funded Memorial Coliseum and were only permitted to do so if they promised not to exclude black players.

The league’s racial tensions continue today, of course, but in different ways. In fact, many of the themes Eisenberg sets out are still present in today’s league. For example, he explains how the draft was instituted not only as a way to distribute talent but also to keep player wages down. A player’s rights were owned by the team that drafted him and he could either agree terms with them or not play football. It’s a position that is echoed in today’s NFL whenever a player holds out rather than sign a franchise tag.

The league’s control over players was threatened by the emergence of the AAFC, a rival pro league which was driving wages up by bidding against the NFL for players. It’s a theme that would emerge again, first with the AFL in the 1960s and later in the 1980s with the USFL. In 1949, the NFL owners negotiated a merger, bringing into the league the Cleveland Browns, whose coach, Paul Brown, would be a major force for innovation in pro football.

The Browns had dominated the AAFC but the NFL owners assumed they would struggle in the older league. They did not. The Browns contested the first six Championship Games after, winning three.

The League ends with the 1958 NFL Championship Game – widely viewed as the birth of the modern NFL – though the epilogue takes us forward to the final years of Eisenberg’s five key figures.

A good historian always finds the parallels with the modern day and that’s what Eisenberg does here. I started this book unsure about how interested I was in the lives of five early NFL team owners but I found myself captivated by these men, their actions and their decisions. Though it’s a book set mostly in meeting rooms, it’s certainly not dry. It’s full of extraordinary and often very funny stories – for example, Pirates coach Johnny Blood forgetting that his team has a game and going to watch the Bears instead.

Eisenberg has described The League as a prequel of sorts to America’s Game and it fulfills that role very well indeed.

It is difficult to imagine the National Football League as something of a curiosity in the sports world. We've gotten used to full stadiums, maxed-out television broadcasts, and overwhelming media coverage.

As you may have guessed, it wasn't always that way.

The NFL didn't draw a straight line to success. There were all sorts of bumps along the way - times when it looked as if the concept of pro football wasn't going to quite make it.

That's what John Eisenberg covers in his worthwhile book, "The League."

It's probably an oversimplification to say that "five rivals created the NFL and launched a sports empire." But - it's not a huge exaggeration. Certainly, the story of the NFL's history can not be told without giving a large amount of credit to such men as George Halas, George Preston Marshall, Art Rooney, Bert Bell and Tim Mara.

Halas was there at the creation, at the now-famous car dealership in Canton, Ohio, where the league was first formed. He was a player, coach and owner of the Bears. Marshall brought showmanship to the league with the Redskins. It's also fair to say that he added more than a touch of racism to the story. Rooney was always a beloved figure with the Steelers, although it took him decades to field a consistent winner in Pittsburgh. Bell, a child of privilege, unexpected became an owner and eventually the commissioner of the league. A case could be made that Bell is one of the most underrated figures in pro football history, and Eisenberg makes it. The author points out that Bell brought a lot of organizational skills and common sense to the league, qualities that were not always in large supply.

In hindsight, it seems like the concept of professional football should have been a slam dunk, to mix a metaphor for a moment. In the 1920s, college football was packing people in big stadiums throughout the country. When those players graduated, they should have brought a following along with them to the pro game. But that didn't really happen too often in that era, with the odd exception like Red Grange. The pro game also suffered from instability, frequently caused by weak ownership and a lack of organization. Check the record book, and you'll see how teams played one game in the NFL and then disappeared from view.

The five men profiled here persisted. Sometimes they were willing to do what was best for the league instead of what was best for their team, even if that attitude didn't extend to the playing field. They had some major obstacles thrown in their way. The 1930s featured the depression, of course, and money was hard to find. That led into World War II, where many of the players crossed the oceans to fight for their country. The end of the war marked the birth of the All-American Football Conference, and dueling leagues chasing limited dollars means losses for just about everyone. Along the way, a color line was created by the NFL, kicking African Americans out in the early 1930s and keeping them out until after WW2.

Eventually, the big city teams - New York in particular - became major players in their areas in the sports scene. By the Fifties, pro football was waiting for a match to ignite - and it found one with the 1958 NFL championship game. That was the overtime classic between the Giants and Colts, and there was no turning back from there.

Eisenberg does a good job of telling the story here, with plenty of details that aren't common knowledge even for football fans. If you've ever wondered about the evolution of some rules or the adoption of the college draft, the subjects are covered here. And the personalities of the five men certainly come alive.

The thought comes to mind while reading this that it might be a little difficult to attract a young audience with this book. It's been 60 years since that 1958 game, and there's plenty of dust on the tales revealed here that came before that. So it's not for every taste.

Those who do read "The League," though, will find it rewarding. Eisenberg, who has done several other books on sports history, is good at making the details come alive. After finishing it, readers will certainly realize that the NFL's current success was far from inevitable.

Even Non-Fans of Football Should Read This Book

It will be far easier to tell you why you should read this book than to give you a rundown, chapter by chapter. Seldom is a book on sports history printed that contains entertainment as well as wisdom for so many.

Pro football came about due to the efforts of a handful of visionaries, men who could see a future in a game while others thought they were wasting their time. These men were not merely dreamers, they were businessmen who understood that something worthwhile is bound to cause pain, that overnight success is the exception to the rule. This is a story about dedication and sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds.

Definitely for anyone seeking a book that is inspirational, goal-oriented, and yes, one with a happy ending (no spoiler here, we all know how big the NFL is, right?).

For those interested in writing books on any kind of history, this one could serve as a training manual. Author John Eisenberg’s research is outstanding, and his desire to stay within the boundaries of absolute truth is commendable. In the author’s own words: “I have not invented conversations; everything that appears within quotation marks is cited, as are numbers that are not commonly in the public record, such as financial profit and loss figures.” With this statement as his guide, Mr. Eisenberg places us in the midst of that action, sharing the professional wins and losses while demonstrating just how many times the NFL could have crumbled, leaving us with nothing more to watch on Sunday afternoons than old movies.

If you haven’t guessed, this isn’t a book about football dynasties nor is it centered on incredible football games that shouldn’t be forgotten. While stories of games and football seasons are shared, they are not the focus. Rather, it is on the determination of men who believed in something that they felt was bigger than all of them. In today’s world where business sometimes seems to be nothing more than dog-eat-dog and survival of the fittest, their personal histories and interaction with each other is entertaining, impelling, and motivating. Five stars.

As a long distance fan of the NFL I have often wondered about how the league began and built up its strength and popularity.

Finally all my questions have been answered in John Eisenberg's thorough examination and assessment of the role that five major pathfinders played.

This book details the exploits of Art Rooney, George Halas, Tim Mara, George Preston Marshall and Bert Bell and is never less than fascinating with so many vignettes and stories.

This is a masterpiece of research and is also well written and compelling.

Intriguing look at the humble beginnings of America's most popular sports league. Eisenberg chronicles the struggles, sacrifices, and ingenuity of Art Rooney, George Halas, Tim Mara, George Preston Marshall, and Bert Bell, and how the actions of these five men led to this multi-billion dollar entity we know today.

I loved this book about the origins of the National Football League. The bigger than life personalities of Art Rooney, George Halas, Tim Mara, George Preston Marshall, and Bert Bell are thoroughly discussed, and the actions they took to form and solidify what is today's NFL are explored.