Association of Professional Football Leagues

The Association of Professional Football Leagues was a compact formed in 1946 among the National Football League and three minor leagues of professional American football: the American Association (which subsequently changed its name to the American Football League), the Dixie League, and the Pacific Coast Professional Football League. While the NFL had an informal farm system in the pre-World War II AA, this was the first time in which it had a working arrangement with multiple leagues whose local popularity rivaled that of the major league. The agreement lasted less than two years, its termination triggered by the folding of the Dixie League after one of its members jumped to the American Football League one week into the 1947 season.

In the years immediately before the beginning of US involvement in World War II, the local popularity of the Dixie League, the American Association, and the Pacific Coast Professional Football League rivaled that of the NFL (which, in 1940-1941, was battling with an upstart "major league," the third American Football League, which had been raiding the rosters of NFL teams to stock its own), and the NFL had working arrangements with five of the six teams in the AA. The PCPFL benefited from the absence of the NFL west of the Mississippi River and fierce rivalries in the Los Angeles area; similarly, the Dixie League had its strength of support in Virginia and North Carolina (half of the teams were based in the Hampton Roads area), away from the presence of the NFL.

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