Championship is a term used in sport to refer to various forms of competition in which the aim is to decide which individual or team is the champion.

Various forms of competition can be referred to by the term championship.

In this system, a competitor has to challenge the current champion to win the championship. This form of championship is used in wrestling, boxing, and other combat sports.

The term championships (in the plural) is often used to refer to tournament competitions, either using a knockout format, such as at Wimbledon and other championships in tennis, or a mixed format with a group stage followed by knockout rounds, such as used in the European Football Championships.

A variation of the knockout format is the "best-of-X" or series format where two teams face other for a specified number of times until one team wins the majority of specified games, most of the time the remaining games are not played anymore; only then is the losing team eliminated from contention and the winning team advances to the next level. This format is predominant in American sports such as baseball, ice hockey and basketball, and on test cricket.

The American Football Conference (AFC) Championship Game (also unofficially referred to as the AFC Title Game) is one of the two final playoff matches of the National Football League, the largest professional American football league in the United States. The game is played on the penultimate Sunday in January and determines the champion of the American Football Conference. The winner then advances to face the winner of the National Football Conference (NFC) Championship Game in the Super Bowl.

The game was established as part of the 1970 merger between the NFL and the American Football League (AFL), with the merged league realigning into two conferences. Since 1984, each winner of the AFC Championship Game has also received the Lamar Hunt Trophy, named after the founder of the AFL and longtime leader of the Kansas City Chiefs.

The first AFC Championship Game was played in 1970 after the merger between the NFL and the AFL. The game is considered the successor to the former AFL Championship, and its game results are listed with that of its predecessor in the annual NFL Record and Fact Book. The original AFC was formed by joining the ten former AFL teams with three pre-merger NFL teams: the Baltimore Colts, the Cleveland Browns, and the Pittsburgh Steelers. The realignment was done in order to create two conferences with an equal number of teams, as the pre-merger NFL consisted of six more teams than the AFL.