The Philadelphia Eagles are a professional American football team based in Philadelphia. The Eagles compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member of the National Football Conference (NFC) East division. The team plays its home games at Lincoln Financial Field in the South Philadelphia Sports Complex. The franchise was established in 1933 as a replacement for the bankrupt Frankford Yellow Jackets when a group led by Bert Bell secured the rights to an NFL franchise in Philadelphia. Since their formation, the Eagles have appeared in the playoffs 31 times, won 16 division titles (including 13 in the NFC East), appeared in four pre-merger NFL Championship Games, winning three of them (1948, 1949, and 1960), and appeared in five Super Bowls, winning Super Bowls LII and LIX.
The Philadelphia Eagles rank among the best teams in the NFL for attendance and have sold out every home game continuously since the 1999 season.
The Eagles are owned by Jeffrey Lurie, who bought the team in 1994 for $185 million. In December 2024, the Eagles became one of the first teams in the NFL to sell an ownership stake to outside investors. The deal sold 8% of the franchise at a valuation of $8.3 billion.
History
NFL in Philadelphia (1899–1931)
The Frankford Athletic Association was organized in May 1899 in the parlor of the Suburban Club. The cost of purchasing a share in the association was $10. However, there also were contributing memberships, ranging from $1 to $2.50, made available to the general public. The Association was a community-based non-profit organization of local residents and businesses. In keeping with its charter, which stated that “all profits shall be donated to charity”, all of the team’s excess income was donated to local charitable institutions. The original Frankford Athletic Association apparently disbanded prior to the 1909 football season. Several of the original players from the 1899 football team kept the team together, and they became known as Loyola Athletic Club. In keeping with Yellow Jackets tradition, they carried the “Frankford” name again in 1912, to become the Frankford Athletic Association.
In the early 1920s, the Frankford Athletic Association’s Yellow Jackets gained a reputation as being one of the best independent football teams in the nation. In 1922, Frankford absorbed the Philadelphia City Champion team, the Union Quakers of Philadelphia. That year, Frankford captured the unofficial championship of Philadelphia. During the 1922 and 1923 seasons, the Yellow Jackets compiled a 6–2–1 record against teams from the National Football League. This led to the Association being granted an NFL franchise in 1924, thus becoming the Frankford Yellow Jackets. In spite of winning the NFL championship in 1926, midway through the 1931 season, the Yellow Jackets went bankrupt and were forced to cease operations.
Bell and Wray era (1933–1940)
After more than a year of searching for a suitable replacement for the Yellow Jackets in the lucrative Philadelphia market, the National Football League granted an expansion franchise to an ownership group headed by Bert Bell and Lud Wray, who were also awarded the liquidated assets of the defunct Yellow Jackets organization. The Bell–Wray group had to pay an entry fee of $3,500, or roughly US$67,000 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars and assumed a total debt of $11,000 the Yellow Jackets owed to three other NFL franchises. Drawing inspiration from the Blue Eagle logo of the National Recovery Administration, a centerpiece of President Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s New Deal policies, Bell and Wray named their new franchise the Philadelphia Eagles. While it could seem as if the Yellow Jackets simply rebranded as the Eagles, both the Eagles organization and the NFL officially regard the teams as two separate entities. Not only was there no Philadelphia NFL team for a season and a half, but almost no players from the 1931 Yellow Jackets appeared on the Eagles’ first roster.
In the 1933 NFL season, the Eagles were one of three teams, along with the Pittsburgh Pirates (now the Pittsburgh Steelers) and the now-defunct Cincinnati Reds, to join the NFL as expansion teams. Wray became the Eagles’ first head coach after being persuaded to assume the position by Bell, his former teammate at Penn. The Eagles originally intended to play their home games at Shibe Park, which was the home of the Philadelphia Athletics professional baseball in Philadelphia. When negotiations for the use of Shibe Park fell through, however, the Eagles struck a deal with the Athletics’ crosstown rival, the Philadelphia Phillies, to begin playing at the Baker Bowl.
The Eagles played their first game on October 15, 1933, against the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds in New York City, and lost the game 56–0. The Eagles struggled over the course of their first decade, never winning more than four games in any of their first ten seasons. Their best finish was in 1934, the second season for the Eagles, when they tied for third in the East. The Eagles’ early rosters largely consisted of former Penn, Temple, and Villanova players who played for the Eagles for a few years before going on to other things.
In 1935, Bell proposed an annual college draft to equalize talent across the league. The draft was a revolutionary concept in professional sports. Having teams select players in inverse order of their finish in the standings, a practice still followed today, strove to increase fan interest by guaranteeing that even the worst teams would have the opportunity for annual infusions of the best college talent. Between 1927, when the NFL changed from a sprawling Midwestern-based association to a narrower, major-market league, and 1934, three teams, the Chicago Bears, New York Giants, and Green Bay Packers, won all but one title with the exception of the Providence Steam Roller, which won in 1928. By 1936, the Eagles suffered significant financial losses and were sold through a public auction. Bert Bell was the only bidder and became the sole owner of the team. Wray refused a reduction in his salary and left the team. Bell assumed the head coaching position and led the team to a record of 1–11, last place in the league.
From 1936 to 1939, the Eagles played at Municipal Stadium in South Philadelphia. In 1940, Bell balked at a 66% rent increase plus 10% of the gate receipts proposed by the City of Philadelphia for the use of Municipal Stadium and signed a lease for Shibe Park, which was renamed Connie Mack Stadium in 1954. At Connie Mack Stadium, the Eagles were also able to play night games, since lights were installed at the stadium the year before. In the 1941 season, the Eagles played their home opener at Municipal Stadium, and then moved to Shibe Park. To accommodate football at Shibe Park during the winter, management erected stands in right field, parallel to 20th Street. Some 20 feet high, these east stands included 22 rows of seats. The goalposts stood along the first base line and in left field. The uncovered east stands enlarged the park’s capacity to over 39,000, but the Eagles rarely drew more than 25,000 to 30,000. The Eagles finished the 1937 season 2–8–1 and continued to struggle over the next three seasons
