Arizona Cardinals
National Football League franchise in Glendale, Arizona

The Arizona Cardinals are a professional American football team based in the Phoenix metropolitan area. The Cardinals compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member of the National Football Conference (NFC) West division. The team plays its home games at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, a suburb northwest of the state capital of Phoenix.
The team was established in Chicago in 1898 as the Morgan Athletic Club, and joined the NFL as a charter member on September 17, 1920. The Cardinals are the oldest continuously run professional football franchise in the United States, and, along with the Chicago Bears, are the only NFL charter member franchises still in operation.
In 1960, the team moved to St. Louis, where it was commonly referred to as the "Football Cardinals", the "Gridbirds", or the "Big Red" to avoid confusion with Major League Baseball's (MLB) St. Louis Cardinals.
Before the 1988 season, the team moved to Tempe, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, where it played home games for the next 18 seasons at Sun Devil Stadium on the campus of Arizona State University. In 2006, the team moved to their current home field in suburban Glendale.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Arizona Cardinals” is national Football League franchise in Glendale, Arizona. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Arizona, Cardinals and National, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “national Football League franchise in Glendale, Arizona” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q224164. VIAF identifies the subject as 149086866. The Library of Congress control number is n95098885. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1898, 1920, 1960 and 1988.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
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This entry incorporates text from “Arizona Cardinals” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.