The Arizona Cardinals are a professional American football team based in Glendale, Arizona, just outside of Phoenix. The Cardinals are currently members of the Western Division of the National Football Conference (NFC) in the National Football League (NFL).

The Cardinals have never made a Super Bowl appearance; it is currently one of six NFL teams never to have done so (the Cleveland Browns, Detroit Lions, Houston Texans, Jacksonville Jaguars, and New Orleans Saints being the others). The team's lone NFL championship game victory, in 1947, while based in Chicago, came two decades before the first Super Bowl Game was played. The club's other NFL championship, in 1925, occurred eight years before the league began holding a championship game. In the six-plus decades since winning the championship in 1947, the team has qualified for the playoffs only five times and has won but a single playoff game (a record for futility approached only by the Detroit Lions).

In 1988, the team moved to Arizona from St. Louis, Missouri. In 2006 the club began playing all home games at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, after spending 17 years at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe.

Overview

The Cardinals is the oldest professional American football club in the United States.Arizona Cardinals team history, azcardinals.com This should not be confused with the longest original city team (the Green Bay Packers) because the team known now as the Arizona Cardinals was originally formed in 1898 as the Morgan Athletic Club in Chicago. The club was then called the Racine Normals since they were originally located in Normal Park on Chicago's Racine Avenue (not Racine, Wisconsin, as mistaken in the notes from an early APFA meeting). They then changed their name to the Racine Cardinals after they started wearing dark reddish uniforms, inherited from the collegiate Chicago Maroons. This hand-me-down, low-budget situation would prove to be a good metaphor for the team's chronology.

After becoming a charter member of the NFL in 1920, the club was renamed the Chicago Cardinals, in part to distinguish them from a new franchise that was actually placed in Racine, Wisconsin. In 1944, during the lean years of World War II, the Cardinals temporarily merged into the Pittsburgh Steelers and became one franchise, usually referred to as Card-Pitt, for that one season. The Cardinals moved to St. Louis, Missouri in 1960 becoming the St. Louis Cardinals, often called the "Football Cardinals" or the "Grid Birds" to distinguish them from the baseball team, and also sometimes called "The Big Red" during some brushes with success in the 1970s. After an unsuccessful campaign for a new football-only stadium in St. Louis, the club relocated to the Phoenix metropolitan area in 1988, first playing at Sun Devil Stadium in the suburb of Tempe. The team was known as the Phoenix Cardinals before it started using "Arizona" in its name in 1994.