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The National Soccer League is a professional soccer league consisting of teams that play in the Professional Soccer Conference and the American Soccer Conference. The two league's were seperate, competing enterprises until 1971, when the two conferences's merged to form the National Soccer League as an official organisation that had only existed before as an informal umbrella term for the two conferences.

The league is one of the four major professional sports leagues of North America and has 40 teams, 36 from the United States and 4 from Canada. Each team plays a balances schedule of 38 games a year against the teams within their own conference, playing every team twice, once home and once away. The regular season begins in late August and ends exactly 38 weeks later in early to mid May. Four teams from each conference then advance through to the playoffs which culminate in early June with the two champions from each conference competing in the Gilbert Cup to discover the World Soccer Champion, a game that has been played since 1897.

The league is the only professional soccer league in the world, and is the most popular in the United States, with an average attendence of about 63,000 per game with games regularly pulling in huge TV audiences, whilst the Gilbert Cup is watched by an average American audience of about 111 million and a worldwide audience of close to 1 billion.