Pittsburgh Steelers
professional American football team based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The Pittsburgh Steelers are a professional American football team based in Pittsburgh. The Steelers compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member of the American Football Conference (AFC) North division. Founded in 1933, the Steelers are the seventh-oldest franchise in the NFL, and the oldest franchise in the AFC.
In contrast with their status as a perennial losing franchise in the pre-merger NFL, where they were the oldest team never to have won a league championship, the Steelers of the post-merger (modern) era are among the most successful NFL franchises, especially during their dynasty in the 1970s. The team is tied with the New England Patriots for the most Super Bowl titles, with six, and holds the NFL record with 16 conference championship game appearances and 11 hosted. The Steelers have also won eight AFC championships, tied with the Denver Broncos and trailing only the Patriots' record 12. They are also tied with the Broncos, the Dallas Cowboys, and the San Francisco 49ers for the second-most Super Bowl appearances, with eight.
The Steelers, whose history may be traced to a regional pro team that was established in the early 1920s, joined the NFL as the Pittsburgh Pirates on July 8, 1933. The team was owned by Art Rooney and took its original name from the baseball team of the same name, as was common practice for NFL teams at the time. To distinguish them from the baseball team, local media took to calling the football team the Rooneymen, an unofficial nickname that persisted for decades after the team had adopted its current nickname. The ownership of the Steelers has remained within the Rooney family since the organization's founding.
The public source identifies “Pittsburgh Steelers” as professional American football team based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Pittsburgh, Steelers and professional.
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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 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q191477. VIAF identifies the subject as 159434289. The Library of Congress control number is n79059347. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pittsburgh Steelers” 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.