NFL History | Wrigley Field, Chicago — Fifty Years on a Handshake

The first championship game the NFL arranged on purpose was played in a baseball park, on a field that did not really fit.

On 17 December 1933 the Chicago Bears beat the New York Giants 23–21 here, in the first title game produced by the league's new two-division structure. Both that structure and the rules the game was played under came out of the improvised indoor playoff at Chicago Stadium twelve months earlier.

The Bears were tenants at Wrigley Field from 1921 through 1970. The club counts fifty years; the Hall of Fame counts fifty-one seasons. George Halas renewed the arrangement annually on a handshake with the Cubs' owners, and by his own account in his autobiography the baseball club took fifteen per cent of the ticket profits in return. There was no lease to renegotiate and no stadium to finance, which is a large part of why a professional football club could survive as the second tenant of somebody else's ballpark.

A baseball park is the wrong shape for it. The gridiron ran across the infield with the end zones pressed up against the walls, and photographs of Wrigley set up for football show the same compromise now that they did then.

What ended the arrangement was arithmetic rather than sentiment. After the 1970 merger the league set a minimum of fifty thousand seats for a home stadium. Wrigley was below it and had no lights. The Bears played their last game here on 13 December 1970, beating Green Bay 35–17, spent an unsettled season looking for somewhere else, and moved to Soldier Field in 1971.

Hold on to that seating rule, because it appears again. It is the same requirement that made Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington obsolete a decade later. Two historic stadiums were emptied of professional football by a number written into a merger agreement rather than by anything that happened on the field.

Status, 3 September 2026. Wrigley Field still stands. The football played here after the Bears left was college football — Northwestern has used the ballpark since 1923 and returned for a run of Big Ten fixtures in the 2020s — and that has now ended too. Yahoo Sports reported on 14 November 2025 that the Michigan and Minnesota games of that month were likely to be the last college football played at Wrigley, because the university was moving into a rebuilt stadium in Evanston. Northwestern's own venue announcement of 3 February 2026 lists only Martin Stadium and the new Ryan Field as its 2026 home grounds, with the Ryan Field opener against Penn State on 2 October 2026. Wrigley is not among them. On the published record the ballpark's football era has closed twice: professional in 1970, college in 2025.

Coordinate: Wrigley Field. Wikidata's P625 and the OpenStreetMap way for the ballpark are separately maintained entities and agree to within about 15 m. The US Census TIGER geocoder for 1060 West Addison Street returns 41.947270, -87.656132, roughly 100 m south — the mailing-address-versus-footprint offset that recurs across this vertical. Three sources, converging on the same block. Precision ±30 m.

Cover: Wrigley Field laid out for football, photographed from above in November 2024. This is a Northwestern University college game, not the Bears. It is here because it shows the geometry the Bears played inside for fifty seasons: the gridiron crossing the infield, the end zones hard against the stands. It also shows a use of the ballpark that has since ended. Photo: rabesphoto, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.