New England Patriots
National Football League franchise in Foxborough, Massachusetts
The New England Patriots (colloquially known as the Pats) are a professional American football team based in the Greater Boston area. The Patriots compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member of the American Football Conference (AFC) East division. The team plays its home games at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, which is 22 miles (35 km) southwest of Boston. The franchise is owned by Robert Kraft, who purchased the team in 1994. As of 2025, the Patriots are the seventh-most valuable sports team in the world and have sold out every home game since 1994.
Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team was a charter member of the American Football League (AFL) before joining the NFL in 1970 through the AFL–NFL merger. The Patriots played their home games at various stadiums throughout Boston, including Fenway Park from 1963 to 1968, until the franchise moved to Foxborough in 1971. As part of the move, the team changed its name to the New England Patriots. Home games were played at Foxboro Stadium until 2002 when the stadium was demolished alongside the opening of Gillette Stadium. The team began using Gillette Stadium for home games the same year.
“New England Patriots” enters the record as national Football League franchise in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what England, Patriots and National can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“New England Patriots” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, England, Patriots and National provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q193390. VIAF identifies the subject as 152400362. The Library of Congress control number is n82010743. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1994, 2025, 1959 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “New England Patriots” 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.