The N.F.-Board (Nouvelle Fédération-Board, NFB), unofficially Non-FIFA-Board, is a football association established on 12 December 2003. It is made up of teams that represent nations, dependencies, unrecognized states, minorities, stateless peoples, regions and micronations not affiliated to FIFA. The NFB seeks to work with FIFA to be a temporary organisation for football teams before they acquire membership in FIFA. Founder and current NFB General Secretary is Luc Misson, a lawyer who represented Belgian footballer Jean-Marc Bosman in a case that led to the Bosman ruling that established greater freedom of movement for professional players in Europe.

The N.F.-Board organises matches between its member teams, stating a belief in the "right to play competitive football", and organises the VIVA World Cup, which took place for the first time in November 2006, in Occitania. The inaugural VIVA World Cup was won by Sápmi who defeated Monaco 21-1. Occitania also took part. A fourth team, Southern Cameroons, were expected to participate but failed to appear. The second edition of the tournament was played in Sápmi in 2008 and was contested by 5 teams, representing Sápmi, Aramean-Syriac people, Iraqi Kurdistan, Padania and Provence. The cup was won by Padania after a 2-0 win in the final against the Aramean Syriac team.

The National Football League (NFL) is the highest level of professional American football in the United States, and is considered the top professional American football league globally. It was formed by eleven teams in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, with the league changing its name to the National Football League in 1922. The league currently consists of thirty-two teams from the United States. The league is divided evenly into two conferences – the American Football Conference (AFC) and National Football Conference (NFC), and each conference has four divisions that have four teams each, for a total of 16 teams in each conference. The NFL is an unincorporated 501(c)(6) association, a federal nonprofit designation, comprising its 32 teams.

The regular season is a seventeen-week schedule during which each team plays sixteen games and has one bye week. The season currently starts on the Thursday night in the first full week of September and runs weekly to late December or early January. At the end of each regular season, six teams from each conference (at least one from each division) play in the NFL playoffs, a twelve-team single-elimination tournament that culminates with the championship game, known as the Super Bowl. This game is held at a pre-selected site which is usually a city that hosts an NFL team.