 La Arena Football, La Arena Football is a variety of indoor-gribbed iron football played by the Arena Football League AFL and China Arena Football League CAFL. The game is played indoors on a smaller field than American or Canadian outdoor football, resulting in a faster and higher scoring game. The sport was invented in 1981, and patented in 1987, by Jim Foster, the former executive of the National Football League and the United States Football League. It was a proprietary game the rights to which were owned by good ironed enterprises until 2007, when the patent expired. Though not the only variant of indoor-American football, it is the most widely known, and the one on which most of their forms of modern indoor football are at least partially based. Three leagues have played under Arena Football rules, the AFL, which played 22 seasons from 1987-2008 and resumed play under new ownership in 2010, Arena Football 2, the AFL's erstwhile developmental league, which played 10 seasons from 2000 through 2009, and the CIRA AFL, which began play in 2016 but e. not directly affiliated with the AFL.