The Arizona Cardinals are a professional American football team based in the Phoenix metropolitan area. The Cardinals compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the National Football Conference (NFC) West division. The team was founded as the Morgan Athletic Club in 1898, and is one of the oldest continuously run professional football teams in the United States.[2][6] The Cardinals play their home games at State Farm Stadium, which opened in 2006 and is located in the northwestern suburb of Glendale.
The team was established in Chicago in 1898 as an amateur football team and joined the NFL as a charter member on September 17, 1920.[5] Along with the Chicago Bears, the club is one of two NFL charter member franchises still in operation since the league's founding (the Green Bay Packers were an independent team until they joined the NFL a year after its creation in 1921). The club moved to St. Louis in 1960 and played there through 1987. The team in St. Louis was commonly referred to as the "Football Cardinals", the "Gridbirds" or the "Big Red" to avoid confusion with the Major League Baseball team of the same name. Before the 1988 season, the team moved west to Tempe, Arizona, a college suburb east of Phoenix, and played their home games for the next 18 seasons at Sun Devil Stadium on the campus of Arizona State University. In 2006, the club moved to their current home field in Glendale, although the team's executive offices and training facility remain in Tempe.