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Anointing in the extraordinary form is still permitted under the conditions mentioned in article 9 of the 2007 .
In the case of necessity when only a single anointing on the forehead is possible, it suffices for valid administration of the sacrament to use the shortened form:
When it becomes opportune, all the anointings are to be supplied together with their respective forms for the integrity of the sacrament. If the sacrament is conferred conditionally, for example, if a person is unconscious, ("if you are capable") is added to the beginning of the form, not ("if you are disposed"). In doubt if the soul has left the body through death, the priest adds, ("if you are alive").
Other Western historical forms.
Liturgical rites of the Catholic Church, both Western and Eastern, other than the Roman, have a variety of other forms for celebrating the sacrament. For example, according to Giovanni Diclich who cites De Rubeis, &c. cap. 28 p. 381, the Aquileian Rite, also called , had twelve anointings, namely, of the head, forehead, eyes, ears, nose, lips, throat, chest, heart, shoulders, hands, and feet. The form used to anoint is the first person plural indicative, except for the anointing on the head which could be either in the first person singular or plural.
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For example, the form is given as:
The other anointings all mention an anointing with oil and are all made "through Christ our Lord", and "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit", except the anointing of the heart which, as in the second option for anointing of the head, is "in the name of the Holy and Undivided Trinity". The Latin forms are as follows:
Eastern Orthodox Church.
The teaching of the Eastern Orthodox Church on the Holy Mystery (sacrament) of Unction is similar to that of the Roman Catholic Church. However, the reception of the Mystery is not limited to those who are enduring physical illness. The Mystery is given for healing (both physical and spiritual) and for the forgiveness of sin. For this reason, it is normally required that one go to confession before receiving Unction. Because it is a Sacred Mystery of the Church, only Orthodox Christians may receive it.
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Anointing is considered to be a public rather than a private sacrament, and so as many of the faithful who are able are encouraged to attend. It should be celebrated in the church when possible, but if this is impossible, it may be served in the home or hospital room of the afflicted.
Unction in the Greek Orthodox Church and Churches of Hellenic custom (Antiochian Eastern Orthodox, Melkite, etc.) is usually given with a minimum of ceremony.
Anointing may also be given during Forgiveness Vespers and Great Week, on Great and Holy Wednesday, to all who are prepared. Those who receive Unction on Holy Wednesday should go to Holy Communion on Great Thursday. The significance of receiving Unction on Holy Wednesday is shored up by the hymns in the Triodion for that day, which speak of the sinful woman who anointed the feet of Christ. Just as her sins were forgiven because of her penitence, so the faithful are exhorted to repent of their sins. In the same narrative, Jesus says, "in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial" (Id., v. 12), linking the unction with Christ's death and resurrection.
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In some dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church it is customary for the bishop to visit each parish or region of the diocese some time during Great Lent and give Anointing for the faithful, together with the local clergy.
Oriental Orthodox Church.
The Oriental Orthodox Church regards anointing of the sick as one of the seven sacraments.
Armenian Orthodox Church.
From the 4th to the 15th centuries, the Armenian Church administered the sacrament of the unction of the sick. This is recorded in the Church Canons and commentary works. However, beginning in the 15th century, the Armenian Church did not refuse, but abstained from conducting the sacrament in order to resist the influence of the Catholic Church, over time, being left out of liturgical life, deeming sufficient the laying on of hands and the administration of the Sacraments of Penance and Holy Communion.
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Hussite Church.
The Hussite Church regards anointing of the sick as one of the seven sacraments.
Anabaptist Churches.
Anabaptists observe the ordinance of anointing of the sick in obedience to , with it being counted among the seven ordinances by Conservative Mennonite Anabaptists. In a compendium of Anabaptist doctrine, theologian Daniel Kauffman stated:
The 2021 "Church Polity" of the Dunkard Brethren Church, a Conservative Anabaptist denomination in the Schwarzenau Brethren tradition, teaches:
Lutheran churches.
Anointing of the sick has been retained in Lutheran churches since the Reformation. Although it is not considered a sacrament like baptism, confession and the Eucharist, it is known as a ritual in the same respect as confirmation, holy orders, and matrimony.
Liturgy.
After the penitent has received absolution following confession, the presiding minister recites James 5:14-16. He goes on to recite the following:
[Name], you have confessed your sins and received Holy Absolution. In remembrance of the grace of God given by the Holy Spirit in the waters of Holy Baptism, I will anoint you with oil. Confident in our Lord and in love for you, we also pray for you that you will not lose faith. Knowing that in Godly patience the Church endures with you and supports you during this affliction. We firmly believe that this illness is for the glory of God and that the Lord will both hear our prayer and work according to His good and gracious will.
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He anoints the person on the forehead and says this blessing:
Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has given you the new birth of water and the Spirit and has forgiven you all your sins, strengthen you with His grace to life everlasting. Amen.
Anglican churches.
The 1552 and later editions of the Book of Common Prayer omitted the form of anointing given in the original (1549) version in its Order for the Visitation of the Sick, but most twentieth-century Anglican prayer books do have anointing of the sick. The Book of Common Prayer (1662) and the proposed revision of 1928 include the "visitation of the sick" and "communion of the sick" (which consist of various prayers, exhortations and psalms).
Some Anglicans accept that anointing of the sick has a sacramental character and is therefore a channel of God's grace, seeing it as an "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace" which is the definition of a sacrament. The Catechism of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America includes Unction of the Sick as among the "other sacramental rites" and it states that unction can be done with oil or simply with laying on of hands. The rite of anointing is included in the Episcopal Church's "Ministration to the Sick".
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Article 25 of the Thirty-Nine Articles, which are one of the historical formularies of the Church of England (and as such, the Anglican Communion), speaking of the sacraments, says: "Those five commonly called Sacraments, that is to say, Confirmation, Penance, Orders, Matrimony, and extreme Unction, are not to be counted for Sacraments of the Gospel, being such as have grown partly of the corrupt following of the Apostles, partly are states of life allowed in the Scriptures; but yet have not like nature of Sacraments with Baptism, and the Lord's Supper, for that they have not any visible sign or ceremony ordained of God."
In 1915 members of the Anglican Communion founded the Guild of St Raphael, an organisation dedicated to promoting, supporting and practising Christ's ministry of healing.
Other Protestant communities.
Protestants provide anointing in a wide variety of formats. Protestant communities generally vary widely on the sacramental character of anointing. Most Mainline Protestants recognize only two sacraments, the eucharist and baptism, deeming anointing only a humanly-instituted rite. Non-traditional Protestant communities generally use the term ordinance rather than "sacrament".
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Mainline beliefs.
Liturgical or Mainline Protestant communities (e.g. Presbyterian, Congregationalist/United Church of Christ, Methodist, etc.) all have official yet often optional liturgical rites for the anointing of the sick partly on the model of Western pre-Reformation rites. Anointing need not be associated with grave illness or imminent danger of death.
Charismatic and Pentecostal beliefs.
In Charismatic and Pentecostal communities, anointing of the sick is a frequent practice and has been an important ritual in these communities since the respective movements were founded in the 19th and 20th centuries. These communities use extemporaneous forms of administration at the discretion of the minister, who need not be a pastor. There is minimal ceremony attached to its administration. Usually, several people physically touch (laying on of hands) the recipient during the anointing. It may be part of a worship service with the full assembly of the congregation present, but may also be done in more private settings, such as homes or hospital rooms. Some Pentecostals believe that physical healing is within the anointing and so there is often great expectation or at least great hope that a miraculous cure or improvement will occur when someone is being prayed over for healing.
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Evangelical and fundamentalist beliefs.
In Evangelical and Fundamentalist communities, anointing of the sick is performed with varying degrees of frequency, although laying on of hands may be more common than anointing. The rite would be similar to that of Pentecostals in its simplicity, but would usually not have the same emotionalism attached to it. Unlike some Pentecostals, Evangelicals and Fundamentalists generally do not believe that physical healing is within the anointing. Therefore, God may or may not grant physical healing to the sick. The healing conferred by anointing is thus a spiritual event that may not result in physical recovery.
The Church of the Brethren practices Anointing with Oil as an ordinance along with Baptism, Communion, Laying on of Hands, and the Love Feast.
Evangelical Protestants who use anointing differ about whether the person doing the anointing must be an ordained member of the clergy, whether the oil must necessarily be olive oil and have been previously specially consecrated, and about other details. Several Evangelical groups reject the practice so as not to be identified with charismatic and Pentecostal groups, which practice it widely.
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Latter Day Saint movement.
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Latter-day Saints, who consider themselves restorationists, also practice ritual anointing of the sick, as well as other forms of anointing. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) consider anointing to be an ordinance.
Members of the LDS Church who hold the Melchizedek priesthood may use consecrated olive oil in performing the ordinance of blessing of the "sick or afflicted", though oil is not required if it is unavailable. The priesthood holder anoints the recipient's head with a drop of oil, then lays hands upon that head and declare their act of anointing. Then another priesthood holder joins in, if available, and pronounces a "sealing" of the anointing and other words of blessing, as he feels inspired. Melchizedek priesthood holders are also authorized to consecrate any pure olive oil and often carry a personal supply in case they have need to perform an anointing. Oil is not used in other blessings, such as for people seeking comfort or counsel.
In addition to the James 5:14-15 reference, the Doctrine and Covenants contains numerous references to the anointing and healing of the sick by those with authority to do so.
Community of Christ.
Administration to the sick is one of the eight sacraments of the Community of Christ, in which it has also been used for people seeking spiritual, emotional or mental healing.
External links.
Western
Eastern
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Abstract data type
In computer science, an abstract data type (ADT) is a mathematical model for data types, defined by its behavior (semantics) from the point of view of a "user" of the data, specifically in terms of possible values, possible operations on data of this type, and the behavior of these operations. This mathematical model contrasts with "data structures", which are concrete representations of data, and are the point of view of an implementer, not a user. For example, a stack has push/pop operations that follow a Last-In-First-Out rule, and can be concretely implemented using either a list or an array. Another example is a set which stores values, without any particular order, and no repeated values. Values themselves are not retrieved from sets; rather, one tests a value for membership to obtain a Boolean "in" or "not in".
ADTs are a theoretical concept, used in formal semantics and program verification and, less strictly, in the design and analysis of algorithms, data structures, and software systems. Most mainstream computer languages do not directly support formally specifying ADTs. However, various language features correspond to certain aspects of implementing ADTs, and are easily confused with ADTs proper; these include abstract types, opaque data types, protocols, and design by contract. For example, in modular programming, the module declares procedures that correspond to the ADT operations, often with comments that describe the constraints. This information hiding strategy allows the implementation of the module to be changed without disturbing the client programs, but the module only informally defines an ADT. The notion of abstract data types is related to the concept of data abstraction, important in object-oriented programming and design by contract methodologies for software engineering.
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History.
ADTs were first proposed by Barbara Liskov and Stephen N. Zilles in 1974, as part of the development of the CLU language. Algebraic specification was an important subject of research in CS around 1980 and almost a synonym for abstract data types at that time. It has a mathematical foundation in universal algebra.
Definition.
Formally, an ADT is analogous to an algebraic structure in mathematics, consisting of a domain, a collection of operations, and a set of constraints the operations must satisfy. The domain is often defined implicitly, for example the free object over the set of ADT operations. The interface of the ADT typically refers only to the domain and operations, and perhaps some of the constraints on the operations, such as pre-conditions and post-conditions; but not to other constraints, such as relations between the operations, which are considered behavior. There are two main styles of formal specifications for behavior, axiomatic semantics and operational semantics.
Despite not being part of the interface, the constraints are still important to the definition of the ADT; for example a stack and a queue have similar add element/remove element interfaces, but it is the constraints that distinguish last-in-first-out from first-in-first-out behavior. The constraints do not consist only of equations such as but also logical formulas.
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Operational semantics.
In the spirit of imperative programming, an abstract data structure is conceived as an entity that is "mutable"—meaning that there is a notion of time and the ADT may be in different states at different times. Operations then change the state of the ADT over time; therefore, the order in which operations are evaluated is important, and the same operation on the same entities may have different effects if executed at different times. This is analogous to the instructions of a computer or the commands and procedures of an imperative language. To underscore this view, it is customary to say that the operations are "executed" or "applied", rather than "evaluated", similar to the imperative style often used when describing abstract algorithms. The constraints are typically specified in prose.
Auxiliary operations.
Presentations of ADTs are often limited in scope to only key operations. More thorough presentations often specify auxiliary operations on ADTs, such as:
These names are illustrative and may vary between authors. In imperative-style ADT definitions, one often finds also:
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The operation is not normally relevant or meaningful, since ADTs are theoretical entities that do not "use memory". However, it may be necessary when one needs to analyze the storage used by an algorithm that uses the ADT. In that case, one needs additional axioms that specify how much memory each ADT instance uses, as a function of its state, and how much of it is returned to the pool by .
Restricted types.
The definition of an ADT often restricts the stored value(s) for its instances, to members of a specific set "X" called the "range" of those variables. For example, an abstract variable may be constrained to only store integers. As in programming languages, such restrictions may simplify the description and analysis of algorithms, and improve its readability.
Aliasing.
In the operational style, it is often unclear how multiple instances are handled and if modifying one instance may affect others. A common style of defining ADTs writes the operations as if only one instance exists during the execution of the algorithm, and all operations are applied to that instance. For example, a stack may have operations ("x") and (), that operate on "the" only existing stack. ADT definitions in this style can be easily rewritten to admit multiple coexisting instances of the ADT, by adding an explicit instance parameter (like "S" in the stack example below) to every operation that uses or modifies the implicit instance. Some ADTs cannot be meaningfully defined without allowing multiple instances, for example when a single operation takes two distinct instances of the ADT as parameters, such as a operation on sets or a operation on lists.
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The multiple instance style is sometimes combined with an aliasing axiom, namely that the result of () is distinct from any instance already in use by the algorithm. Implementations of ADTs may still reuse memory and allow implementations of () to yield a previously created instance; however, defining that such an instance even is "reused" is difficult in the ADT formalism.
More generally, this axiom may be strengthened to exclude also partial aliasing with other instances, so that composite ADTs (such as trees or records) and reference-style ADTs (such as pointers) may be assumed to be completely disjoint. For example, when extending the definition of an abstract variable to include abstract records, operations upon a field "F" of a record variable "R", clearly involve "F", which is distinct from, but also a part of, "R". A partial aliasing axiom would state that changing a field of one record variable does not affect any other records.
Complexity analysis.
Some authors also include the computational complexity ("cost") of each operation, both in terms of time (for computing operations) and space (for representing values), to aid in analysis of algorithms. For example, one may specify that each operation takes the same time and each value takes the same space regardless of the state of the ADT, or that there is a "size" of the ADT and the operations are linear, quadratic, etc. in the size of the ADT. Alexander Stepanov, designer of the C++ Standard Template Library, included complexity guarantees in the STL specification, arguing:
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Other authors disagree, arguing that a stack ADT is the same whether it is implemented with a linked list or an array, despite the difference in operation costs, and that an ADT specification should be independent of implementation.
Examples.
Abstract variable.
An abstract variable may be regarded as the simplest non-trivial ADT, with the semantics of an imperative variable. It admits two operations, and . Operational definitions are often written in terms of abstract variables. In the axiomatic semantics, letting formula_1 be the type of the abstract variable and formula_2 be the type of its contents, is a function formula_3 and is a function of type formula_4. The main constraint is that always returns the value "x" used in the most recent operation on the same variable "V", i.e. . We may also require that overwrites the value fully, .
In the operational semantics, ("V") is a procedure that returns the current value in the location "V", and ("V", "x") is a procedure with return type that stores the value "x" in the location "V". The constraints are described informally as that reads are consistent with writes. As in many programming languages, the operation ("V", "x") is often written "V" ← "x" (or some similar notation), and ("V") is implied whenever a variable "V" is used in a context where a value is required. Thus, for example, "V" ← "V" + 1 is commonly understood to be a shorthand for ("V",("V") + 1).
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In this definition, it is implicitly assumed that names are always distinct: storing a value into a variable "U" has no effect on the state of a distinct variable "V". To make this assumption explicit, one could add the constraint that:
This definition does not say anything about the result of evaluating ("V") when "V" is "un-initialized", that is, before performing any operation on "V". Fetching before storing can be disallowed, defined to have a certain result, or left unspecified. There are some algorithms whose efficiency depends on the assumption that such a is legal, and returns some arbitrary value in the variable's range.
Abstract stack.
An abstract stack is a last-in-first-out structure, It is generally defined by three key operations: , that inserts a data item onto the stack; , that removes a data item from it; and or , that accesses a data item on top of the stack without removal. A complete abstract stack definition includes also a Boolean-valued function ("S") and a () operation that returns an initial stack instance.
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In the axiomatic semantics, letting formula_5 be the type of stack states and formula_2 be the type of values contained in the stack, these could have the types formula_7, formula_8, formula_9, formula_10, and formula_11. In the axiomatic semantics, creating the initial stack is a "trivial" operation, and always returns the same distinguished state. Therefore, it is often designated by a special symbol like Λ or "()". The operation predicate can then be written simply as formula_12 or formula_13.
The constraints are then , , () = T (a newly created stack is empty), (("S", "x")) = F (pushing something into a stack makes it non-empty). These axioms do not define the effect of ("s") or ("s"), unless "s" is a stack state returned by a . Since leaves the stack non-empty, those two operations can be defined to be invalid when "s" = Λ. From these axioms (and the lack of side effects), it can be deduced that (Λ, "x") ≠ Λ. Also, ("s", "x") = ("t", "y") if and only if "x" = "y" and "s" = "t".
As in some other branches of mathematics, it is customary to assume also that the stack states are only those whose existence can be proved from the axioms in a finite number of steps. In this case, it means that every stack is a "finite" sequence of values, that becomes the empty stack (Λ) after a finite number of s. By themselves, the axioms above do not exclude the existence of infinite stacks (that can be ped forever, each time yielding a different state) or circular stacks (that return to the same state after a finite number of s). In particular, they do not exclude states "s" such that ("s") = "s" or ("s", "x") = "s" for some "x". However, since one cannot obtain such stack states from the initial stack state with the given operations, they are assumed "not to exist".
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In the operational definition of an abstract stack, ("S", "x") returns nothing and ("S") yields the value as the result but not the new state of the stack. There is then the constraint that, for any value "x" and any abstract variable "V", the sequence of operations { ("S", "x"); "V" ← ("S") } is equivalent to "V" ← "x". Since the assignment "V" ← "x", by definition, cannot change the state of "S", this condition implies that "V" ← ("S") restores "S" to the state it had before the ("S", "x"). From this condition and from the properties of abstract variables, it follows, for example, that the sequence:
where "x", "y", and "z" are any values, and "U", "V", "W" are pairwise distinct variables, is equivalent to:
Unlike the axiomatic semantics, the operational semantics can suffer from aliasing. Here it is implicitly assumed that operations on a stack instance do not modify the state of any other ADT instance, including other stacks; that is:
Boom hierarchy.
A more involved example is the Boom hierarchy of the binary tree, list, bag and set abstract data types. All these data types can be declared by three operations: "null", which constructs the empty container, "single", which constructs a container from a single element and "append", which combines two containers of the same type. The complete specification for the four data types can then be given by successively adding the following rules over these operations:
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Access to the data can be specified by pattern-matching over the three operations, e.g. a "member" function for these containers by:
Care must be taken to ensure that the function is invariant under the relevant rules for the data type. Within each of the equivalence classes implied by the chosen subset of equations, it has to yield the same result for all of its members.
Common ADTs.
Some common ADTs, which have proved useful in a great variety of applications, are
Each of these ADTs may be defined in many ways and variants, not necessarily equivalent. For example, an abstract stack may or may not have a operation that tells how many items have been pushed and not yet popped. This choice makes a difference not only for its clients but also for the implementation.
An extension of ADT for computer graphics was proposed in 1979: an abstract graphical data type (AGDT). It was introduced by Nadia Magnenat Thalmann, and Daniel Thalmann. AGDTs provide the advantages of ADTs with facilities to build graphical objects in a structured way.
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Implementation.
Abstract data types are theoretical entities, used (among other things) to simplify the description of abstract algorithms, to classify and evaluate data structures, and to formally describe the type systems of programming languages. However, an ADT may be implemented. This means each ADT instance or state is represented by some concrete data type or data structure, and for each abstract operation there is a corresponding procedure or function, and these implemented procedures satisfy the ADT's specifications and axioms up to some standard. In practice, the implementation is not perfect, and users must be aware of issues due to limitations of the representation and implemented procedures.
For example, integers may be specified as an ADT, defined by the distinguished values 0 and 1, the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division (with care for division by zero), comparison, etc., behaving according to the familiar mathematical axioms in abstract algebra such as associativity, commutativity, and so on. However, in a computer, integers are most commonly represented as fixed-width 32-bit or 64-bit binary numbers. Users must be aware of issues with this representation, such as arithmetic overflow, where the ADT specifies a valid result but the representation is unable to accommodate this value. Nonetheless, for many purposes, the user can ignore these infidelities and simply use the implementation as if it were the abstract data type.
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Usually, there are many ways to implement the same ADT, using several different concrete data structures. Thus, for example, an abstract stack can be implemented by a linked list or by an array. Different implementations of the ADT, having all the same properties and abilities, can be considered semantically equivalent and may be used somewhat interchangeably in code that uses the ADT. This provides a form of abstraction or encapsulation, and gives a great deal of flexibility when using ADT objects in different situations. For example, different implementations of the ADT may be more efficient in different situations; it is possible to use each in the situation where they are preferable, thus increasing overall efficiency. Code that uses an ADT implementation according to its interface will continue working even if the implementation of the ADT is changed.
In order to prevent clients from depending on the implementation, an ADT is often packaged as an opaque data type or handle of some sort, in one or more modules, whose interface contains only the signature (number and types of the parameters and results) of the operations. The implementation of the module—namely, the bodies of the procedures and the concrete data structure used—can then be hidden from most clients of the module. This makes it possible to change the implementation without affecting the clients. If the implementation is exposed, it is known instead as a "transparent data type."
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Modern object-oriented languages, such as C++ and Java, support a form of abstract data types. When a class is used as a type, it is an abstract type that refers to a hidden representation. In this model, an ADT is typically implemented as a class, and each instance of the ADT is usually an object of that class. The module's interface typically declares the constructors as ordinary procedures, and most of the other ADT operations as methods of that class. Many modern programming languages, such as C++ and Java, come with standard libraries that implement numerous ADTs in this style. However, such an approach does not easily encapsulate multiple representational variants found in an ADT. It also can undermine the extensibility of object-oriented programs. In a pure object-oriented program that uses interfaces as types, types refer to behaviours, not representations.
The specification of some programming languages is intentionally vague about the representation of certain built-in data types, defining only the operations that can be done on them. Therefore, those types can be viewed as "built-in ADTs". Examples are the arrays in many scripting languages, such as Awk, Lua, and Perl, which can be regarded as an implementation of the abstract list.
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In a formal specification language, ADTs may be defined axiomatically, and the language then allows manipulating values of these ADTs, thus providing a straightforward and immediate implementation. The OBJ family of programming languages for instance allows defining equations for specification and rewriting to run them. Such automatic implementations are usually not as efficient as dedicated implementations, however.
Example: implementation of the abstract stack.
As an example, here is an implementation of the abstract stack above in the C programming language.
Imperative-style interface.
An imperative-style interface might be:
typedef struct stack_Rep stack_Rep; // type: stack instance representation (opaque record)
typedef stack_Rep* stack_T; // type: handle to a stack instance (opaque pointer)
typedef void* stack_Item; // type: value stored in stack instance (arbitrary address)
stack_T stack_create(void); // creates a new empty stack instance
void stack_push(stack_T s, stack_Item x); // adds an item at the top of the stack
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stack_Item stack_pop(stack_T s); // removes the top item from the stack and returns it
bool stack_empty(stack_T s); // checks whether stack is empty
This interface could be used in the following manner:
stack_T s = stack_create(); // creates a new empty stack instance
int x = 17;
stack_push(s, &x); // adds the address of x at the top of the stack
void* y = stack_pop(s); // removes the address of x from the stack and returns it
if (stack_empty(s)) { } // does something if stack is empty
This interface can be implemented in many ways. The implementation may be arbitrarily inefficient, since the formal definition of the ADT, above, does not specify how much space the stack may use, nor how long each operation should take. It also does not specify whether the stack state "s" continues to exist after a call "x" ← ("s").
In practice the formal definition should specify that the space is proportional to the number of items pushed and not yet popped; and that every one of the operations above must finish in a constant amount of time, independently of that number. To comply with these additional specifications, the implementation could use a linked list, or an array (with dynamic resizing) together with two integers (an item count and the array size).
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Functional-style interface.
Functional-style ADT definitions are more appropriate for functional programming languages, and vice versa. However, one can provide a functional-style interface even in an imperative language like C. For example:
typedef struct stack_Rep stack_Rep; // type: stack state representation (opaque record)
typedef stack_Rep* stack_T; // type: handle to a stack state (opaque pointer)
typedef void* stack_Item; // type: value of a stack state (arbitrary address)
stack_T stack_empty(void); // returns the empty stack state
stack_T stack_push(stack_T s, stack_Item x); // adds an item at the top of the stack state and returns the resulting stack state
stack_T stack_pop(stack_T s); // removes the top item from the stack state and returns the resulting stack state
stack_Item stack_top(stack_T s); // returns the top item of the stack state
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American Football League
The American Football League (AFL) was a major professional American football league that operated for ten seasons from 1960 until 1970, when it merged with the older National Football League (NFL), and became the American Football Conference. The upstart AFL operated in direct competition with the more established NFL throughout its existence. It was more successful than earlier rivals to the NFL, including not only the organizations founded in 1926, 1936, and 1940, respectively, under the AFL name, but also the later All-America Football Conference, which existed between 1944 and 1950, but conducted operations only between 1946 and 1949.
This fourth version of the AFL was the most successful, created by a number of owners who had been refused NFL expansion franchises or had minor shares of NFL franchises. The AFL's original lineup consisted of an Eastern division of the Titans of New York, Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills, and the Houston Oilers, and a Western division of the Los Angeles Chargers, Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders, and Dallas Texans. The league first gained attention by signing 75% of the NFL's first-round draft choices in 1960, including Houston's successful signing of college star and Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon.
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While the first years of the AFL saw uneven competition and low attendance, the league was buttressed by a generous television contract with the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), followed by a contract with the competing National Broadcasting Company (NBC) for games starting with the 1965 season, that broadcast the more offense-oriented football league nationwide. Continuing to attract top talent from colleges and the NFL by the mid-1960s, as well as successful franchise shifts of the Chargers from L.A. south to San Diego and the Texans north to Kansas City (becoming the Kansas City Chiefs), the AFL established a dedicated following. The transformation of the struggling Titans into the New York Jets under new ownership, including the signing of University of Alabama star quarterback Joe Namath, further solidified the league's reputation among the major media.
As fierce competition made player salaries skyrocket in both leagues, especially after a series of "raids", the leagues agreed to a merger in 1966. Among the conditions were a common draft and a championship game played between the two league champions, first played in early 1967, which would eventually become known as the Super Bowl.
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The AFL and NFL operated as separate leagues until 1970, with separate regular season and playoff schedules except for the championship game. NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle also became chief executive of the AFL from July 26, 1966, through the completion of the merger. During this time the AFL expanded, adding the Miami Dolphins and Cincinnati Bengals. After losses by the Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders in the first two AFL-NFL World Championship Games to the Green Bay Packers (1966–67), the New York Jets and Chiefs won Super Bowls III and IV (1968–69) respectively, cementing the league's claim to being an equal to the NFL.
In 1970, the AFL was absorbed into the NFL. The ten AFL franchises joined three existing NFL teams—the Baltimore Colts, the Cleveland Browns, and the Pittsburgh Steelers—to form the merged league's American Football Conference.
History.
During the 1950s, the National Football League had grown to rival Major League Baseball as one of the most popular professional sports leagues in the United States. One franchise that did not share in this newfound success of the league was the Chicago Cardinals – owned by the Bidwill family – who had become overshadowed by the more popular Chicago Bears. The Bidwills hoped to move their franchise, preferably to St. Louis, but could not come to terms with the league, which demanded money before it would approve the move. Needing cash, the Bidwills began entertaining offers from would-be investors, and one of the men who approached the Bidwills was Lamar Hunt, son and heir of millionaire oilman H. L. Hunt. Hunt offered to buy the Cardinals and move them to Dallas, where he had grown up. However, these negotiations came to nothing, since the Bidwills insisted on retaining a controlling interest in the franchise and were unwilling to move their team to a city where a previous NFL franchise had failed in . While Hunt negotiated with the Bidwills, similar offers were made by Bud Adams, Bob Howsam, and Max Winter.
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When Hunt, Adams, and Howsam were unable to secure a controlling interest in the Cardinals, they approached NFL commissioner Bert Bell and proposed the addition of expansion teams. Bell, wary of expanding the 12-team league and risking its newfound success, rejected the offer. On his return flight to Dallas, Hunt conceived the idea of an entirely new league and decided to contact the others who had shown interest in purchasing the Cardinals. In addition to Adams, Howsam, and Winter, Hunt reached out to Bill Boyer, Winter's business partner, to gauge their interest in starting a new league. Hunt's first meeting with Adams was held in March 1959. Hunt, who felt a regional rivalry would be critical for the success of the new league, convinced Adams to join and found his team in Houston. Hunt next secured an agreement from Howsam to bring a team to Denver.
After Winter and Boyer agreed to start a team in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, the new league had its first four teams. Hunt then approached Willard Rhodes, who hoped to bring pro football to Seattle. However, not wanting to undermine its own brand, the University of Washington was unwilling to let the fledgling league use Husky Stadium, and Rhodes' effort came to nothing (Seattle would later get a pro football team of its own in 1974 some time after the AFL-NFL merger during the construction of the Kingdome and began play in 1976). Hunt also sought franchises in Los Angeles, Buffalo and New York City. During the summer of 1959, he sought the blessings of the NFL for his nascent league, as he did not seek a potentially costly rivalry. Within weeks of the July 1959 announcement of the league's formation, Hunt received commitments from Barron Hilton and Harry Wismer to bring teams to Los Angeles and New York, respectively. His initial efforts for Buffalo, however, were rebuffed, when Hunt's first choice of owner, Pat McGroder, declined to take part; McGroder had hoped that the threat of the AFL would be enough to prompt the NFL to expand to Buffalo.
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On August 14, 1959, the first league meeting was held in Chicago, and charter memberships were given to Dallas, New York, Houston, Denver, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis-Saint Paul. On August 22, the league officially was named the American Football League at a meeting in Dallas. The NFL's initial reaction was not as openly hostile as it had been with the earlier All-America Football Conference (AAFC), as Bell had even given his public approval; but he died suddenly in October 1959, and individual NFL owners soon began a campaign to undermine the new league. AFL owners were approached with promises of new NFL franchises or ownership stakes in existing ones. Only the party from Minneapolis-Saint Paul accepted, and with the addition of Ole Haugsrud and Bernie Ridder the Minnesota group joined the NFL in 1961 as the Minnesota Vikings. The older league also announced on August 29 that it had conveniently reversed its position against expansion, and planned to bring new NFL teams to Houston and Dallas, to start play in 1961. (The NFL did not expand to Houston at that time; the promised Dallas team – the Dallas Cowboys – actually started play in 1960, and the Vikings began play in 1961.) Finally, the NFL quickly came to terms with the Bidwills and allowed them to relocate the struggling Cardinals to St. Louis, eliminating that city as a potential AFL market.
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Ralph Wilson, who owned a minority interest in the NFL's Detroit Lions at the time, initially announced he was placing a team in Miami, but like the Seattle situation, was also rebuffed by local ownership (like Seattle, Miami would later get a pro football team of its own as well); given five other choices, Wilson negotiated with McGroder and brought the team that became the Bills to Buffalo. Buffalo was officially awarded its franchise on October 28. During a league meeting on November 22, a 10-man ownership group from Boston (led by Billy Sullivan) was awarded the AFL's eighth team. On November 30, 1959, Joe Foss, a World War II Marine fighter ace and former governor of South Dakota, was named the AFL's first commissioner. Foss commissioned a friend of Harry Wismer's to develop the AFL's eagle-on-football logo. Hunt was elected President of the AFL on January 26, 1960.
The AFL draft.
The AFL's first draft took place the same day Boston was awarded its franchise, and lasted 33 rounds. The league held a second draft on December 2, which lasted for 20 rounds. Because the Oakland Raiders joined after the initial AFL drafts, they inherited Minnesota's selections. A special "allocation draft" was held in January 1960, to allow the Raiders to stock their team, as some of the other AFL teams had already signed some of Minneapolis' original draft choices.
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Crisis and success (1960–61).
In November 1959, Minneapolis-Saint Paul owner Max Winter announced his intent to leave the AFL to accept a franchise offer from the NFL. In 1961, his team began play in the NFL as the Minnesota Vikings. Los Angeles Chargers owner Barron Hilton demanded that a replacement for Minnesota be placed in California, to reduce his team's operating costs and to create a rivalry. After a brief search, Oakland was chosen and an ownership group led by F. Wayne Valley and local real estate developer Chet Soda was formed. After initially being called the Oakland Señors, the rechristened Oakland Raiders officially joined the AFL on January 30, 1960.
The AFL's first major success came when the Houston Oilers signed Billy Cannon, the All-American and 1959 Heisman Trophy winner from LSU. Cannon signed a $100,000 contract to play for the Oilers, despite having already signed a $50,000 contract with the NFL's Los Angeles Rams. The Oilers filed suit and claimed that Rams general manager Pete Rozelle had unduly manipulated Cannon. The court upheld the Houston contract, and with Cannon the Oilers appeared in the AFL's first three championship games (winning two).
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On June 9, 1960, the league signed a five-year television contract with ABC, which brought in revenues of approximately $2.125 million per year for the entire league. On June 17, the AFL filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL, which was dismissed in 1962 after a two-month trial. The AFL began regular-season play (a night game on Friday, September 9, 1960) with eight teams in the league – the Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills, Dallas Texans, Denver Broncos, Houston Oilers, Los Angeles Chargers, Titans of New York, and Oakland Raiders. Raiders' co-owner Wayne Valley dubbed the AFL ownership "The Foolish Club", a term Lamar Hunt subsequently used on team photographs he sent as Christmas gifts.
The Oilers became the first-ever league champions by defeating the Chargers, 24–16, in the AFL Championship on January 1, 1961. Attendance for the 1960 season was respectable for a new league, but not nearly that of the NFL. In 1960, the NFL averaged attendance of more than 40,000 fans per game and more popular NFL teams in 1960 regularly saw attendance figures in excess of 50,000 per game, while Canadian Football League (CFL) attendances averaged approximately 20,000 per game. By comparison, AFL attendance averaged about 16,500 per game and generally hovered between 10,000 and 20,000 per game. Professional football was still primarily a gate-driven business in 1960, so low attendance meant financial losses. The Raiders, with a league-worst average attendance of just 9,612, lost $500,000 in their first year and only survived after receiving a $400,000 loan from Bills owner Ralph Wilson. In an early sign of stability, however, the AFL did not lose any teams after its first year of operation. In fact, the only major change was the Chargers' move from Los Angeles to nearby San Diego (they would return to Los Angeles in 2017).
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On August 8, 1961, the AFL challenged the CFL to an exhibition game that would feature the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Buffalo Bills, which was attended by 24,376 spectators. Playing at Civic Stadium in Hamilton, Ontario, the Tiger-Cats defeated the Bills 38–21 playing a mix of AFL and CFL rules.
Movement and instability (1962–63).
While the Oilers found instant success in the AFL, other teams did not fare as well. The Oakland Raiders and Titans of New York struggled on and off the field during their first few seasons in the league. Oakland's eight-man ownership group was reduced to just three in 1961, after heavy financial losses in their first season. Attendance for home games was poor, partly due to the team playing in the San Francisco Bay Area—which already had an established NFL team (the San Francisco 49ers)—but the product on the field was also to blame. After winning six games in their debut season, the Raiders won a total of three times in the 1961 and 1962 seasons. Oakland took part in a 1961 supplemental draft meant to boost the weaker teams in the league, but it did little good. They participated in another such draft in 1962.
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The Titans fared a little better on the field but had their own financial troubles. Attendance was so low for home games that team owner Harry Wismer had fans move to seats closer to the field to give the illusion of a fuller stadium on television. Eventually Wismer could no longer afford to meet his payroll, and on November 8, 1962, the AFL took over operations of the team. The Titans were sold to a five-person ownership group headed by Sonny Werblin on March 28, 1963, and in April the new owners changed the team's name to the New York Jets.
The Raiders and Titans both finished last in their divisions in the 1962 season. The Texans and Oilers, winners of their divisions, faced each other for the 1962 AFL Championship on December 23. The Texans dethroned the two-time champion Oilers, 20–17, in a double-overtime contest that was, at the time, professional football's longest-ever game.
In 1963, the Texans became the second AFL team to relocate. Lamar Hunt felt that despite winning the league championship in 1962, the Texans could not sufficiently profit in the same market as the Dallas Cowboys, which entered the NFL as an expansion franchise in 1960. After meetings with New Orleans, Atlanta, and Miami, Hunt announced on May 22 that the Texans' new home would be Kansas City, Missouri. Kansas City mayor Harold Roe Bartle (nicknamed "Chief") was instrumental in his city's success in attracting the team. Partly to honor Bartle, the franchise officially became the Kansas City Chiefs on May 26.
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The San Diego Chargers, under head coach Sid Gillman, won a decisive 51–10 victory over the Boston Patriots for the 1963 AFL Championship. Confident that his team was capable of beating that season's NFL champion Chicago Bears (he had the Chargers' rings inscribed with the phrase "World Champions"), Gillman approached NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle and proposed a final championship game between the two teams. Rozelle declined the offer; however, the game would be instituted three seasons later.
Watershed years (1964–65).
A series of events throughout the next few years demonstrated the AFL's ability to achieve a greater level of equality with the NFL. On January 29, 1964, the AFL signed a lucrative $36 million television contract with NBC (beginning in the 1965 season), which gave the league money it needed to compete with the NFL for players. Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney was quoted as saying to NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle after receiving the news of the AFL's new TV deal that, "They don't have to call us 'Mister' anymore". A single-game attendance record was set on November 8, 1964, when 61,929 fans packed Shea Stadium to watch the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills.
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The bidding war for players between the AFL and NFL escalated in 1965. The Chiefs drafted University of Kansas star Gale Sayers in the first round of the 1965 AFL draft (held November 28, 1964), while the Chicago Bears did the same in the NFL draft. Sayers eventually signed with the Bears. A similar situation occurred when the New York Jets and the NFL's St. Louis Cardinals both drafted University of Alabama quarterback Joe Namath. In what was viewed as a key victory for the AFL, Namath signed a $427,000 contract with the Jets on January 2, 1965 (the deal included a new car). It was the highest amount of money ever paid to a collegiate football player, and is cited as the strongest contributing factor to the eventual merger between the two leagues.
After the 1963 season, the Newark Bears of the Atlantic Coast Football League expressed interest in joining the AFL; concerns over having to split the New York metro area with the still-uncertain Jets were a factor in the Bears' bid being rejected. In 1965, Milwaukee officials tried to lure an expansion team to play at Milwaukee County Stadium where the Green Bay Packers had played parts of their home schedule after an unsuccessful attempt to lure the Packers there full-time, but Packers head coach Vince Lombardi invoked the team's exclusive lease, and additionally, signed an extension to keep some home games in Milwaukee until 1976.
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In June 1965, the AFL awarded its first expansion team to Cox Broadcasting of Atlanta. The NFL quickly counteroffered insurance executive Rankin Smith a franchise, which he accepted; the Atlanta Falcons began play as an NFL franchise for the 1966 season. In March 1965, Joe Robbie had met with Commissioner Foss to inquire about an expansion franchise for Miami. On May 6, Robbie secured an agreement with Miami mayor Robert King High to bring a team to Miami. League expansion was approved at a meeting held on June 7, and on August 16 the AFL's ninth franchise was officially awarded to Robbie and entertainer Danny Thomas. The Miami Dolphins joined the league for a fee of $7.5 million and started play in the AFL's Eastern Division in 1966. The AFL also planned to add two more teams by 1967.
Escalation and merger (1966–67).
In 1966, the rivalry between the AFL and NFL reached an all-time peak. On April 7, Joe Foss resigned as AFL commissioner. His successor was Oakland Raiders head coach and general manager Al Davis, who had been instrumental in turning around the fortunes of that franchise. That following May, Wellington Mara, owner of the NFL's New York Giants, broke a "gentleman's agreement" against signing another league's players and lured kicker Pete Gogolak away from the AFL's Buffalo Bills. In response to the Gogolak signing and no longer content with trying to outbid the NFL for college talent, the AFL under Davis began to also recruit players already on NFL squads. Davis's strategy focused on quarterbacks in particular, and in two months he persuaded seven NFL quarterbacks to sign with the AFL. Although Davis's intention was to help the AFL win the bidding war, some AFL and NFL owners saw the escalation as detrimental to both leagues. Alarmed with the rate of spending in the league, Hilton Hotels forced Barron Hilton to relinquish his stake in the Chargers as a condition of maintaining his leadership role with the hotel chain.
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The same month Davis was named commissioner, several NFL owners, headed by Dallas Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm, secretly approached Lamar Hunt and other AFL owners and started negotiations with the AFL to merge. A series of secret meetings commenced in Dallas to discuss the concerns of both leagues over rapidly increasing player salaries, as well as the practice of player poaching. Hunt and Schramm completed the basic groundwork for a merger of the two leagues by the end of May, and on June 8, 1966, the merger was officially announced. Under the terms of the agreement, the two leagues would hold a common player draft. The agreement also called for a title game to be played between the champions of the respective leagues. The two leagues would be fully merged by 1970, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle would remain as commissioner of the merged league, which would be named the NFL. Additional expansion teams would eventually be awarded by 1970 or soon thereafter to bring it to a 28-team league. (The additional expansion would not happen until 1976.) The AFL also agreed to pay indemnities of $18 million to the NFL over 20 years. In protest, Davis resigned as AFL commissioner on July 25 rather than remain until the completion of the merger, and Milt Woodard was named president of the AFL, with the "commissioner" title vacated because of Rozelle's expanded role.
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On January 15, 1967, the first-ever championship game between the two separate professional football leagues, the "AFL-NFL World Championship Game" (retroactively referred to as Super Bowl I), was played in Los Angeles. After a close first half, the NFL champion Green Bay Packers overwhelmed the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs, 35–10. The loss reinforced for many the notion that the AFL was an inferior league. Packers head coach Vince Lombardi stated after the game, "I do not think they are as good as the top teams in the National Football League."
The second AFL-NFL Championship (Super Bowl II) yielded a similar result. The Oakland Raiders—who had easily beaten the Houston Oilers to win their first AFL championship—were overmatched by the Packers, 33–14. The more experienced Packers capitalized on a number of Raiders miscues and never trailed. Green Bay defensive tackle Henry Jordan offered a compliment to Oakland and the AFL, when he said, "... the AFL is becoming much more sophisticated on offense. I think the league has always had good personnel, but the blocks were subtler and better conceived in this game."
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The AFL added its tenth and final team on May 24, 1967, when it awarded the league's second expansion franchise to an ownership group from Cincinnati, Ohio, headed by NFL legend Paul Brown. Although Brown had intended to join the NFL, he agreed to join the AFL when he learned that his team would be included in the NFL once the merger was completed. The league's last expansion team, the Cincinnati Bengals began play in the 1968 season, finishing last in the Western Division.
Legitimacy and the end of an era (1968–1970).
While many AFL players and observers believed their league was the equal of the NFL, their first two Super Bowl performances did nothing to prove it. However, on November 17, 1968, when NBC cut away from a game between the Jets and Raiders to air the children's movie "Heidi", the ensuing uproar helped disprove the notion that fans still considered the AFL an inferior product. The perception of AFL inferiority forever changed on January 12, 1969, when the AFL Champion New York Jets shocked the heavily favored NFL Champion Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. The Colts, who entered the contest favored by as many as 18 points, had completed the 1968 NFL season with a 13–1 record, and won the NFL title with a convincing 34–0 win over the Cleveland Browns. Led by their stalwart defense—which allowed a record-low 144 points—the 1968 Colts were considered one of the best-ever NFL teams.
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By contrast, the Jets had allowed 280 points, the highest total for any division winner in the two leagues. They had also only narrowly beaten the favored Oakland Raiders 27–23 in the AFL championship game. Jets quarterback Joe Namath recalled that in the days leading up to the game, he grew increasingly angry when told New York had no chance to beat Baltimore. Three days before the game, a frustrated Namath responded to a heckler at the Touchdown Club in Miami by declaring, "We're going to win Sunday, I guarantee it!"
Namath and the Jets made good on his guarantee as they held the Colts scoreless until late in the fourth quarter. The Jets won, 16–7, in what is considered one of the greatest upsets in American sports history. With the win, the AFL finally achieved parity with the NFL and legitimized the merger of the two leagues. That notion was reinforced one year later in Super Bowl IV, when the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs upset the NFL champion Minnesota Vikings, 23–7, in the last championship game to be played between the two leagues. The Vikings, favored by 12½ points, were held to just 67 rushing yards.
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The last game in AFL history was the AFL All-Star Game, held in Houston's Astrodome on January 17, 1970. The Western All-Stars, led by Chargers quarterback John Hadl, defeated the Eastern All-Stars, 26–3. Buffalo rookie running back O. J. Simpson carried the ball for the last play in AFL history. Hadl was named the game's Most Valuable Player. The AFL ceased to exist as an unincorporated organization on February 1, 1970, when the NFL granted 10 new franchises and issued a new constitution.
Prior to the start of the 1970 NFL season, the merged league was organized into two conferences of three divisions each. All ten AFL teams made up the bulk of the new American Football Conference. To avoid having an inequitable number of teams in each conference, the leagues voted to move three NFL teams to the AFC. Motivated by the prospect of an intrastate rivalry with the Bengals as well as by personal animosity toward Paul Brown, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell quickly offered to include his team in the AFC. He helped persuade the Pittsburgh Steelers (the Browns' archrivals) and Baltimore Colts (who shared the Baltimore-Washington market with the Washington Redskins) to follow suit, and each team received US$3 million to make the switch. The remaining 13 NFL teams became part of the National Football Conference.
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Pro Football Hall of Fame receiver Charlie Joiner, who started his career with the Houston Oilers (1969), was the last AFL player active in professional football, retiring after the 1986 season, when he played for the San Diego Chargers.
Legacy.
Overview.
The American Football League stands as the only professional traditional outdoor football league to successfully compete against the NFL. When the two leagues merged in 1970, all ten AFL franchises and their statistics became part of the new NFL. Every other professional league that had competed against the NFL before the AFL–NFL merger had folded completely: the three previous leagues named "American Football League" and the All-America Football Conference (AAFC). From an earlier AFL (1936–1937), only the Cleveland Rams (now the Los Angeles Rams) joined the NFL and are currently operating, as are the Cleveland Browns and the San Francisco 49ers from the AAFC. A third AAFC team, the Baltimore Colts (not related to the 1953–1983 Baltimore Colts or to the current Indianapolis Colts franchise), played only one year in the NFL, disbanding at the end of the 1950 season. The league resulting from the merger was a 26-team juggernaut (since expanded to 32) with television rights covering all of the Big Three television networks (and since the 1990s, the newer Fox network) and teams in close proximity to almost all of the top 40 metropolitan areas, a fact that has precluded any other competing league from gaining traction since the merger; failed attempts to mimic the AFL's success included the World Football League (1974–75), United States Football League (1983–85), the United Football League (2009–2012) and the AAF (2019), and two iterations of the XFL (2001 and 2020), in addition to the NFL-backed and created World League of American Football (1991–92).
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The AFL was also the most successful of numerous upstart leagues of the 1960s and 1970s that attempted to challenge a major professional league's dominance. All nine teams that were in the AFL at the time the merger was agreed upon were accepted into the league intact (as was the tenth team added between the time of the merger's agreement and finalization), and none of the AFL's teams have ever folded. For comparison, the World Hockey Association (1972–79) managed to have four of its six remaining teams merged into the National Hockey League, which actually caused the older league to contract a franchise, but WHA teams were forced to disperse the majority of their rosters and restart as expansion teams. The merged WHA teams were also not financially sound (in large part from the hefty expansion fees the NHL imposed on them), and three of the four were forced to relocate within 20 years. Like the WHA, the American Basketball Association (1967–76) also managed to have only four of its teams merged into the National Basketball Association, and the rest of the league was forced to fold following a troubled final season of existence. Both the WHA and ABA lost several teams to financial insolvency over the course of their existences. The Continental League, a proposed third league for Major League Baseball that was to begin play in 1961, never played a single game, largely because MLB responded to the proposal by expanding to four of that league's proposed cities. Historically, the only other professional sports league in the United States to exhibit a comparable level of franchise stability from its inception was the American League of Major League Baseball, which made its debut in the early 20th century and later prompted the National League to allow for competition with the American League to eventually result in the modern-day MLB that we know of to this day.
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Rule changes.
The NFL adopted some of the innovations introduced by the AFL immediately and a few others in the years following the merger. One was including the names on player jerseys. The older league also adopted the practice of using the stadium scoreboard clocks to keep track of the official game time, instead of just having a stopwatch used by the referee. The AFL played a 14-game schedule for its entire existence, starting in 1960. The NFL, which had played a 12-game schedule since 1947, changed to a 14-game schedule in 1961, a year after the American Football League instituted it. The AFL also introduced the two-point conversion to professional football 34 years before the NFL instituted it in 1994 (college football had adopted the two-point conversion in the late 1950s). All of these innovations pioneered by the AFL, including its more exciting style of play and colorful uniforms, have essentially made today's professional football more like the AFL than like the old-line NFL. The AFL's challenge to the NFL also laid the groundwork for the Super Bowl, which has become the standard for championship contests in the United States of America.
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Television.
The NFL also adapted how the AFL used the growing power of televised football games, which were bolstered with the help of major network contracts (first with ABC, later with NBC after the latter network lost NFL rights to CBS). With that first contract with ABC, the AFL adopted the first-ever cooperative television plan for professional football, in which the proceeds were divided equally among member clubs. It featured many outstanding games, such as the classic 1962 double-overtime American Football League championship game between the Dallas Texans and the defending champion Houston Oilers. At the time it was the longest professional football championship game ever played. The AFL also appealed to fans by offering a flashier style of play (just like the ABA in basketball), compared to the more conservative game of the NFL. Long passes ("bombs") were commonplace in AFL offenses, led by such talented quarterbacks as John Hadl, Daryle Lamonica and Len Dawson.
Despite having a national television contract, the AFL often found itself trying to gain a foothold, only to come up against roadblocks. For example, CBS, which broadcast NFL games, ignored and did not report scores from the innovative AFL. While it has been alleged this snub was on orders from the NFL, it is more likely the arrangement was mutual due to the equally bitter rivalry between CBS and NBC. After the merger agreement was announced, CBS agreed to report AFL scores.
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Expanding and reintroducing the sport to more cities.
The AFL took advantage of the burgeoning popularity of football by locating teams in major cities that lacked NFL franchises. Hunt's vision not only brought a new professional football league to California and New York, but introduced the sport to Colorado, restored it to Texas and later to fast-growing Florida, as well as bringing it to Greater Boston for the first time in 12 years. Buffalo, having lost its original NFL franchise in 1929 and turned down by the NFL at least twice (1940 and 1950) for a replacement, returned to the NFL with the merger. The return of football to Kansas City was the first time that city had seen professional football since the NFL's Kansas City Blues of the 1920s; the arrival of the Chiefs, and the contemporary arrival of the St. Louis Football Cardinals, brought professional football back to Missouri for the first time since the temporary St. Louis Gunners of 1934. St. Louis would later regain an NFL franchise in 1995 with the relocation of the LA Rams to the city. The Rams moved back in 2016.
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In the case of the Dallas Cowboys, the NFL had long sought to return to the Dallas area after the Dallas Texans folded in 1952, but was originally met with strong opposition by Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, who had enjoyed a monopoly as the only NFL team to represent the American South. Marshall later changed his position after future-Cowboys owner Clint Murchison bought the rights to Washington's fight song "Hail to the Redskins" and threatened to prevent Marshall from playing it at games. By then, the NFL wanted to quickly award the new Dallas franchise to Murchison so the team could immediately begin play and compete with the AFL's Texans. As a result, the Cowboys played its inaugural season in 1960 without the benefit of the NFL draft. The Texans eventually ceded Dallas to the Cowboys and became the Kansas City Chiefs.
As part of the merger agreement, additional expansion teams would be awarded by 1970 or soon thereafter to bring the league to 28 franchises; this requirement was fulfilled when the Seattle Seahawks and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers began play in 1976. In addition, had it not been for the existence of the Oilers from 1960 to 1996, the Houston Texans also would likely not exist today; the 2002 expansion team restored professional football in Houston after the original charter AFL member Oilers relocated to become the Tennessee Titans.
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Kevin Sherrington of "The Dallas Morning News" has argued that the presence of AFL and the subsequent merger radically altered the fortunes of the Pittsburgh Steelers, saving the team "from stinking". Before the merger, the Steelers had long been one of the NFL's worst teams. Constantly lacking the money to build a quality team, the Steelers had only posted eight winning seasons, and just one playoff appearance, since their first year of existence in 1933 until the end of the 1969 season. They also finished with a 1–13 record in 1969, tied with the Chicago Bears for the worst record in the NFL. The $3 million indemnity that the Steelers received for joining the AFC with the rest of the former AFL teams after the merger helped them rebuild into a contender, drafting eventual Pro Football Hall of Famers like Terry Bradshaw and Joe Greene, and ultimately winning four Super Bowls in the 1970s. Since the 1970 merger, the Steelers have the NFL's highest winning percentage, the most total victories, the most trips to either conference championship game, are tied for the second most trips to the Super Bowl (tied with the Dallas Cowboys and Denver Broncos, trailing only the New England Patriots), and have won six Super Bowl championships, tied with the Patriots for the most in NFL history.
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Effects on players.
Perhaps the greatest social legacy of the AFL was the domino effect of its policy of being more liberal than the entrenched NFL in offering opportunity for black players. While the NFL was still emerging from thirty years of segregation influenced by Washington Redskins' owner George Preston Marshall, the AFL actively recruited from small and predominantly black colleges. The AFL's color-blindness led not only to the explosion of black talent on the field, but to the eventual entry of blacks into scouting, coordinating, and ultimately head coaching positions, long after the league merged itself out of existence.
The AFL's free agents came from several sources. Some were players who could not find success playing in the NFL, while another source was the then newly-formed Canadian Football League. In the late 1950s, many players released by the NFL, or un-drafted and unsigned out of college by the NFL, went north to try their luck with the CFL (which formed in 1958), and later returned to the states to play in the AFL.
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In the league's first years, players such as Oilers' George Blanda, Chargers/Bills' Jack Kemp, Texans' Len Dawson, the Titans' Don Maynard, Raiders/Patriots/Jets' Babe Parilli, Pats' Bob Dee proved to be AFL standouts. Other players such as the Broncos' Frank Tripucka, the Pats' Gino Cappelletti, the Bills' Cookie Gilchrist and the Chargers' Tobin Rote, Sam DeLuca and Dave Kocourek also made their mark to give the fledgling league badly needed credibility. Rounding out this mix of potential talent were the true "free agents", the walk-ons and the "wanna-be's", who tried out in droves for the chance to play professional American football.
After the AFL–NFL merger agreement in 1966, and after the AFL's Jets defeated an extremely strong Baltimore Colts team, a popular misconception fostered by the NFL and spread by media reports was that the AFL defeated the NFL because of the common draft instituted in 1967. This apparently was meant to assert that the AFL could not achieve parity as long as it had to compete with the NFL in the draft. But the 1968 Jets had less than a handful of "common draftees". Their stars were honed in the AFL, many of them since the Titans days.
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Players who chose the AFL to develop their talent included Lance Alworth and Ron Mix of the Chargers, who had also been drafted by the NFL's San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Colts respectively. Both eventually were elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame after earning recognition during their careers as being among the best at their positions. Among specific teams, the 1964 Buffalo Bills stood out by holding their opponents to a pro football record 913 yards rushing on 300 attempts, while also recording fifty quarterback sacks in a 14-game schedule.
In 2009, a five-part series, "Full Color Football: The History of the American Football League", on the "Showtime Network", refuted many of the long-held misconceptions about the AFL. In it, Abner Haynes tells of how his father forbade him to accept being drafted by the NFL's Pittsburgh Steelers, after head coach Buddy Parker and quarterback Bobby Layne had visited the Haynes home drunk; the NFL Cowboys' Tex Schramm is quoted as saying that if his team had ever agreed to play the AFL's Dallas Texans, they would very likely have lost; George Blanda makes a case for more AFL players being inducted to the Pro Football Hall of Fame by pointing out that Hall of Famer Willie Brown was cut by the Houston Oilers because he couldn't cover Oilers flanker Charlie Hennigan in practice. Later, when Brown was with the Broncos, Hennigan needed nine catches in one game against the Broncos to break Lionel Taylor's professional football record of 100 catches in one season. Hennigan caught the nine passes and broke the record, even though he was covered by Brown.
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Influence on professional football coaching.
The AFL also spawned coaches whose style and techniques have profoundly affected the play of professional football to this day. In addition to AFL greats like Hank Stram, Lou Saban, Sid Gillman and Al Davis were eventual hall of fame coaches such as Bill Walsh, a protégé of Davis with the AFL Oakland Raiders for one season; and Chuck Noll, who worked for Gillman and the AFL LA/San Diego Chargers from 1960 through 1965. Others include Buddy Ryan (AFL's New York Jets), Chuck Knox (Jets), Walt Michaels (Jets), and John Madden (AFL's Oakland Raiders). Additionally, many prominent coaches began their pro football careers as players in the AFL, including Sam Wyche (Cincinnati Bengals), Marty Schottenheimer (Buffalo Bills), Wayne Fontes (Jets), and two-time Super Bowl winner Tom Flores (Oakland Raiders). Flores also has a Super Bowl ring as a player (1969 Kansas City Chiefs).
AFL 50th anniversary celebration.
As the influence of the AFL continues through the present, the 50th anniversary of its launch was celebrated during 2009. The season-long celebration began in August with the 2009 Pro Football Hall of Fame Game in Canton, Ohio, between two AFC teams (as opposed to the AFC-vs-NFC format the game first adopted in 1971). The opponents were two of the original AFL franchises, the Buffalo Bills and Tennessee Titans (the former Houston Oilers). Bills' owner Ralph C. Wilson Jr. (a 2009 Hall of Fame inductee) and Titans' owner Bud Adams were the only surviving members of the Foolish Club at the time (both are now deceased; Wilson's estate sold the team in 2014), the eight original owners of AFL franchises. (As of the season, the Titans and Chiefs are still owned by descendants of the original eight owners.)
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The Hall of Fame Game was the first of several "Legacy Weekends", during which each of the "original eight" AFL teams sported uniforms from their AFL era. Each of the 8 teams took part in at least two such "legacy" games. On-field officials also wore red-and-white-striped AFL uniforms during these games.
In the fall of 2009, the Showtime pay-cable network premiered "Full Color Football: The History of the American Football League", a 5-part documentary series produced by NFL Films that features vintage game film and interviews as well as more recent interviews with those associated with the AFL.
The NFL sanctioned a variety of "Legacy" gear to celebrate the AFL anniversary, such as "throwback" jerseys, T-shirts, signs, pennants and banners, including items with the logos and colors of the Dallas Texans, Houston Oilers, and New York Titans, the three of the Original Eight AFL teams which have changed names or venues. A December 5, 2009, story by Ken Belson in "The New York Times" quotes league officials as stating that AFL "Legacy" gear made up twenty to thirty percent of the league's annual $3 billion merchandise income. Fan favorites were the Denver Broncos' vertically striped socks, which could not be re-stocked quickly enough.
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Teams.
Today, two of the NFL's eight divisions are composed entirely of former AFL teams, the AFC West (Broncos, Chargers, Chiefs, and Raiders) and the AFC East (Bills, Dolphins, Jets, and Patriots). Additionally, the Bengals now play in the AFC North and the Tennessee Titans (formerly the Oilers) play in the AFC South.
Former stadiums: Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Fenway Park, Nickerson Field, Alumni Stadium, Nippert Stadium, the Cotton Bowl, Balboa Stadium and Kezar Stadium are still standing, but currently do not host a team, and the Houston Astrodome was partially demolished.
Playoffs.
From 1960 to 1968, the AFL determined its champion via a single-elimination playoff game between the winners of its two divisions. The home teams alternated each year by division, so in 1968 the Jets hosted the Raiders, even though Oakland had a better record (this was changed in 1969). In 1963, the Buffalo Bills and Boston Patriots finished tied with identical records of 7–6–1 in the AFL East Division.
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The home teams alternated each year by division, so in 1968 the Jets hosted the Raiders, even though Oakland had a better record (this was changed in 1969). In 1963, the Buffalo Bills and Boston Patriots finished tied with identical records of 7–6–1 in the AFL East Division. There was no tie-breaker protocol in place, so a one-game playoff was held in War Memorial Stadium in December. The visiting Patriots defeated the host Bills 26–8. The Patriots traveled to San Diego as the Chargers completed a three-game season sweep over the weary Patriots with a 51–10 victory. A similar situation occurred in the 1968 season, when the Oakland Raiders and the Kansas City Chiefs finished the regular season tied with identical records of 12–2 in the AFL West Division. The Raiders beat the Chiefs 41–6 in a division playoff to qualify for the AFL Championship Game. In 1969, the final year of the independent AFL, for the first time professional football featured a playoff team that had not won its division or conference during the regular season.
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In 1969, the final year of the independent AFL, for the first time professional football featured a playoff team that had not won its division or conference during the regular season. A four-team playoff was held, with the second-place teams in each division playing the winner of the other division. The Chiefs upset the Raiders in Oakland 17–7 in the league's championship, the final AFL game played (except for the league's All-Star game). The Kansas City Chiefs were the first Super Bowl champion to win two road playoff games and the first team to win the Super Bowl despite not having won its division or conference during the regular season.
All-Star games.
The AFL did not play an All-Star game after its first season in 1960, but did stage All-Star games for the 1961 through 1969 seasons. All-Star teams from the Eastern and Western divisions played each other after every season except 1965. That season, the league champion Buffalo Bills played all-stars from the other teams.
After the 1964 season, the AFL All-Star game had been scheduled for early 1965 in New Orleans' Tulane Stadium. After numerous black players were refused service by a number of area hotels and businesses, black and white players alike called for a boycott. Led by Bills players such as Cookie Gilchrist, the players successfully lobbied to have the game moved to Houston's Jeppesen Stadium.
All-Time AFL Team.
As chosen by 1969 AFL Hall of Fame Selection committee members:
Records.
The following is a sample of some records set during the existence of the league. The NFL considers AFL statistics and records equivalent to its own.
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AS Roma
Associazione Sportiva Roma ("Rome Sport Association"; Italian pronunciation: ) is a professional football club based in Rome, Italy. Founded by a merger in 1927, Roma has participated in the top tier of Italian football for all of its existence, except for the 1951–52 season. Roma has won Serie A three times, in 1941–42, 1982–83 and 2000–01, as well as nine ' titles and two ' titles. In European competitions, Roma won the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup in 1960–61 and the UEFA Conference League in 2021–22, while they finished runners-up in the 1983–84 European Cup, the 1990–91 UEFA Cup and the 2022–23 UEFA Europa League.
Sixteen players have won the FIFA World Cup while playing at Roma: Attilio Ferraris and Enrique Guaita (1934); Guido Masetti and Eraldo Monzeglio (1934 and 1938); Aldo Donati and Pietro Serantoni (1938); Bruno Conti (1982); Rudi Völler and Thomas Berthold (1990); Aldair (1994); Vincent Candela (1998); Cafu (2002); Daniele De Rossi, Simone Perrotta and Francesco Totti (2006); Paulo Dybala (2022).
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Since 1953, Roma has played home matches at the Stadio Olimpico, a venue the club shares with city rivals Lazio. With a capacity of over 72,000, the stadium is the second-largest of its kind in Italy, with only the San Siro able to seat more. The club plans to move to a new stadium, though it is yet to start construction. Having a strong local rivalry, Roma and Lazio contest the Derby della Capitale.
The club's home colours are carmine red and golden yellow, which gives Roma its nickname "I Giallorossi" ("The Yellow and Reds"). These colours have often been combined with white shorts. The club badge features a she-wolf, an allusion to the founding myth of Rome.
History.
Foundation.
AS Roma was founded in the spring of 1927 when Italo Foschi initiated the merger of three older Italian Football Championship clubs from the city of Rome: Roman FC, SS Alba-Audace and Fortitudo-Pro Roma SGS. Foschi was an important Roman representative of the ruling National Fascist Party.
The purpose of the merger was to give the Italian capital a strong club to rival that of the more dominant Northern Italian clubs of the time. The only major Roman club to resist the merger was Lazio because of the intervention of the army General Vaccaro, a member of the club and executive of Italian Football Federation (FIGC).
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All three founding clubs were relegated, but the fascist-aligned FIGC bet over the capacity of the new team to give a stronger representation to the capital of Italy, and they were awarded a wild card for the , the Serie A forerunner. The club played its earliest seasons at the Motovelodromo Appio stadium, before settling in the working-class streets of Testaccio, where it built an all-wooden ground Campo Testaccio; this was opened in November 1929. An early season in which Roma made a large mark was the 1930–31 championship, where the club finished as runners-up behind . Captain Attilio Ferraris, along with Guido Masetti, Fulvio Bernardini and Rodolfo Volk, were highly important players during this period.
First title victory and decline.
After a slump in league form and the departure of high key players, Roma eventually rebuilt their squad, adding goalscorers such as the Argentine Enrique Guaita. Under the management of Luigi Barbesino, the Roman club came close to their first title in 1935–36, finishing just one point behind champions Bologna.
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Roma returned to form after being inconsistent for much of the late 1930s. Roma recorded an unexpected title triumph in the 1941–42 season by winning their first title. The 18 goals scored by local player Amedeo Amadei were essential to the Alfréd Schaffer-coached Roma side winning the title. At the time, Italy was involved in World War II and Roma were playing at the Stadio Nazionale PNF.
In the years just after the war, Roma were unable to recapture their league stature from the early 1940s. Roma finished in the lower half of Serie A for five seasons in a row, before eventually succumbing to their only ever relegation to Serie B at the end of the 1950–51 season, around a decade after their championship victory. Under future Italy national team manager Giuseppe Viani, promotion straight back up was achieved.
After returning to the Serie A, Roma managed to stabilise themselves as a top-half club again with players such as Egisto Pandolfini, Dino da Costa and Dane Helge Bronée. Their best finish of this period was under the management of Englishman Jesse Carver, when in 1954–55, they finished as runners-up after Udinese, who originally finished second, were relegated for corruption. Although Roma were unable to break into the top four during the following decade, they did achieve some measure of cup success. Their first honour outside of Italy was recorded in 1960–61 when Roma won the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup by defeating Birmingham City 4–2 in the finals. A few years later, Roma won their first Coppa Italia trophy in 1963–64 after defeating Torino 1–0.
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Their lowest point came during the 1964–65 season, when manager Juan Carlos Lorenzo announced the club could not pay its players and was unlikely to be able to afford to travel to Vicenza to fulfil its next fixture. Supporters kept the club going with a fundraiser at the Sistine Theatre and bankruptcy was avoided with the election of a new club president Franco Evangelisti.
Their second Coppa Italia trophy was won in 1968–69, when it competed in a small, league-like system. Giacomo Losi set a Roma appearance record in 1969 with 450 appearances in all competitions, a record that would last 38 years.
Time of mixed fortunes from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Roma were able to add another cup to their collection in 1972, with a 3–1 victory over Blackpool in the Anglo-Italian Cup. During much of the 1970s, Roma's appearance in the top half of Serie A was sporadic. The best place the club were able to achieve during the decade was third in 1974–75. Notable players who turned out for the club during this period included midfielders Giancarlo De Sisti and Francesco Rocca.
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The dawning of a newly successful era in Roma's footballing history was brought in with another Coppa Italia victory; they defeated Torino on penalties to win the 1979–80 edition. Roma would reach heights in the league which they had not touched since the 1940s by narrowly and controversially finishing as runners-up to in 1980–81. Former Milan player Nils Liedholm was the manager at the time, with players such as Bruno Conti, Agostino Di Bartolomei, Roberto Pruzzo and Falcão.
The second "scudetto" did not elude Roma for much longer. In 1982–83, the Roman club won the title for the first time in 41 years, amidst celebrations in the capital. The following season, Roma finished as runners-up in Italy and collected a Coppa Italia title; they also finished as runners-up in the European Cup final of 1984. The European Cup final with Liverpool ended in a 1–1 draw with a goal from Pruzzo, but Roma eventually lost in the penalty shoot-out. Roma's successful run in the 1980s would finish with a runners-up spot in 1985–86 and a Coppa Italia victory, beating out Sampdoria 3–2.
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After, a comparative decline began in the league, one of the few league highs from the following period being a third-place finish in 1987–88. At the start of the 1990s, the club was involved in an all-Italian UEFA Cup final, where they lost 2–1 to in 1991. The same season, the club won its seventh Coppa Italia and ended runners-up to Sampdoria in the Supercoppa Italiana. Aside from finishing runners-up to Torino in a Coppa Italia final, the rest of the decade was largely sub-par in the history of Roma, particularly in the league, where the highest they could manage was fourth in 1997–98. The early 1990s also saw the emergence of homegrown striker Francesco Totti, who would go on to be an important member of the team and the club's iconic captain.
Third "scudetto" in the Sensi era.
Roma won their third Serie A title in 2000–01. The "Scudetto" was won on the last day of the season after defeating Parma 3–1, edging Juventus by two points. The club's captain, Francesco Totti, was a large reason for the title victory and he would become one of the main heroes in the club's history, going on to break several club records. Other important players during this period included: Aldair, Cafu, Gabriel Batistuta and Vincenzo Montella.
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In the 2001–02 Serie A, Roma ended as runners-up to Juventus by one point. This would be the start of Roma finishing as runners-up several times in both Serie A and Coppa Italia during the 2000s – they lost out 4–2 to Milan in the Coppa Italia final of 2003 and lost to Milan again by finishing second in Serie A for the 2003–04 season. The club also re-capitalized several time in 2003–04 season. In November 2003, €37.5 million was injected by "Roma 2000" to cover the half-year loss and loss carried from previous year. and again on 30 June for €44.57 million. Through stock market, a further €19.850 million of new shares issued, and at the year end, the share capital was €19.878 million, which was unchanged . The following season also saw the departure of Walter Samuel for €25 million and Emerson for €28 million, which decreased the strength of the squad. The "Giallorossi" finished in eighth place, one of the worst of recent seasons.
On 9 July 2006, Roma's Francesco Totti, Daniele De Rossi and Simone Perrotta were part of the Italy national team which defeated France in the 2006 FIFA World Cup Final. In the "Calciopoli" scandal of 2006, Roma were not one of the teams involved. After punishments were issued, Roma was re-classified as runners-up for 2005–06, the same season they finished second in the Coppa Italia losing to Internazionale. In the two following seasons, 2006–07 and 2007–08, Roma finished as Serie A runners-up, meaning that in the 2000s, Roma finished in the top two positions more than any other decade in their history. Meanwhile, in the UEFA Champions League during both of these seasons, they reached the quarter-finals before going out to Manchester United. In the 2008–09 Champions League, Roma reached the knockout stage ahead of Chelsea in their group, thus finishing for the first time in their history as winners of the group stage. However, they lost to Arsenal in the knockout stage on penalty kicks.
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After a disappointing start to the 2009–10 season, Claudio Ranieri replaced Luciano Spalletti as head coach. At the time of the switch, Roma lay bottom of the Serie A table after losses to Juventus and Genoa. Despite this setback, Roma went on unbeaten streak of 24 matches in the league – with the last of the 24 being a 2–1 win over rivals Lazio, whereby they came from 1–0 down at half-time to defeat their city rivals after Ranieri substituted both Totti and De Rossi at the interval. The "Giallorossi" were on top of the table at one point, before a loss to Sampdoria later in the season. Roma would finish runners-up to Internazionale yet again in both Serie A and the Coppa Italia. During the 2000s, Roma had finally recaptured the "Scudetto", two Coppa Italia trophies, and their first two Supercoppa Italiana titles. Other notable contributions to the club's history have included a return to the Champions League quarter-finals (in the 2006–07 and 2007–08 editions) since 1984, six runners up positions in the league, four Coppa Italia finals and three Supercoppa finals – marking Roma's greatest ever decade.
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American ownership and Pallotta era.
In the summer of 2010, the Sensi family agreed to relinquish their control of Roma as part of a debt-settlement agreement, ending their reign that had begun in 1993. Until a new owner was appointed, Rosella Sensi continued her directorial role of the club. Following a series of poor results that saw Roma engage in a winless streak of five consecutive matches, Claudio Ranieri resigned as head coach in February 2011, and former striker Vincenzo Montella was appointed as caretaker manager until the end of the season. It was also during this season that Roma icon Francesco Totti scored his 200th Serie A goal against Fiorentina in March 2011, becoming only the sixth player to achieve such a feat.
On 16 April 2011, the takeover contract was closed with an American investment group led by Thomas R. DiBenedetto, with James Pallotta, Michael Ruane and Richard D'Amore as partners. DiBenedetto became the 22nd president of the club, serving from 27 September 2011 to 27 August 2012 and was succeeded by Pallotta. The new intermediate holding company, NEEP Roma Holding, was 60% owned by American's "AS Roma SPV, LLC" and the rest (40%) was retained by the creditor of Sensi, UniCredit. In turn, NEEP owned all shares held previously by Sensi (about 67%) with the rest free float in the stock market. UniCredit later disinvested NEEP Roma Holding to sell to "AS Roma SPV, LLC" and Pallotta.
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The new ownership hired Walter Sabatini as director of football and former Spanish international and Barcelona B coach Luis Enrique as manager. Signings included attacking midfielder Erik Lamela from River Plate and forward Bojan from Barcelona, as well as Dani Osvaldo and Miralem Pjanić. On the pitch, the team were eliminated from 2011–12 UEFA Europa League play-off round by Slovan Bratislava. In 2012, Pallotta became the new president. The 2012–13 pre-season started with the hiring of former manager Zdeněk Zeman. He was sacked on 2 February 2013, while the team ended up in sixth place in Serie A, and lost 1–0 to rivals Lazio in the Coppa Italia final. It was the first time that Lazio and Roma clashed in the Coppa Italia final. As a result, Roma missed out on European competition for the second-straight season.
On 12 June 2013, Rudi Garcia was appointed the new manager of Roma. He won his first ten matches (an all-time Serie A record) including a 2–0 derby win against Lazio, a 3–0 victory away to Internazionale and a 2–0 home win over title rivals Napoli. During this run, Roma scored 24 times while conceding just once, away to Parma. The club earned 85 points and finished second to Juventus, who won the league with a record-breaking 102 points. In 2014–15, Roma finished second behind Juventus for the second consecutive season after a poor run of form in 2015. At the end of season, the club was sanctioned for loss making and breaking UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations, being punished with a fine of up to €6 million and a limited squad for UEFA competitions.
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Ahead of the 2015–16 season, Roma acquired Bosnia international, Edin Džeko, from Manchester City on a €4 million loan with an €11 million option to buy clause, which was activated. On 13 January 2016, Garcia was sacked after a run of one win in seven Serie A matches. Luciano Spalletti was subsequently appointed manager of Roma for his second spell. On 21 February, Totti publicly criticised Spalletti due to his own lack of playing-time since returning from injury. Consequently, Totti was subsequently dropped by Spalletti for Roma's 5–0 win over Palermo, with the decision causing an uproar among the fans and in the media. After their initial disagreements, Spalletti began to use Totti as an immediate impact substitute, and he contributed with four goals and one assist after coming off the bench in five consecutive Serie A matches. Spalletti was able to lead Roma from a mid-table spot to a third-place finish in Serie A, clinching the UEFA Champions League play-off spot.
During the summer of 2016, Roma lost midfielder Miralem Pjanić to rivals Juventus to improve its financial position. On 27 April 2017, Roma appointed sporting director Monchi, formerly of Sevilla FC. On 28 May that year, on the last day of the 2016–17 season, Totti made his 786th and final appearance for Roma before retiring in a 3–2 home win against Genoa, coming on as a substitute for Mohamed Salah in the 54th minute and received a standing ovation from the fans. The win saw Roma finish second in Serie A behind Juventus. Daniele De Rossi succeeded Totti as club captain and signed a new two-year contract.
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On 13 June 2017, former Roma player Eusebio Di Francesco was appointed as the club's new manager, replacing Spalletti, who had left for Internazionale. Roma again lost a key player during the summer transfer window, with Mohamed Salah joining Liverpool F.C. for a fee of €39 million (£34m). Several new players joined the club, including a club-record deal of up to €40 million for Sampdoria striker Patrik Schick. In the 2017–18 UEFA Champions League Roma were drawn against FC Barcelona in the quarter-finals, being defeated 4–1 away in the first leg but winning 3–0 in the second to advance on away goals to the semi-finals for the first time since 1984. Roma then lost to Liverpool, the team that had defeated them in the 1984 European Cup Final 7–6 on aggregate. Roma ended the 2017–18 season in 3rd place on 77 points, qualifying for the following season's Champions League.
In the summer of 2018, Roma were busy in the transfer market, in large parts thanks to the €83 million they received from reaching the Champions League semi-finals, as well as selling goalkeeper Alisson for a world record €72 million including bonuses to Liverpool. Roma spent €150 million to sign the likes of Shick, Nzonzi, Pastore, Kluivert, Defrel and more, while selling their two starting midfielders from the previous season, Nainggolan and Strootman. The 2018–19 season saw the club eliminated against Porto 4–3 on aggregate in the Champions League round of 16; Di Francesco was sacked and replaced by Claudio Ranieri who served as caretaker manager. The following day, sporting director Monchi stepped down due to disagreements with Pallotta; the club president disputed his account In Monchi's two years at the club, he spent £208 million on 21 signings, while when he left, 12 of his signings remained at the club. Under Ranieri, Roma failed to qualify for the Champions League, finishing 6th.
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Friedkin era and European success.
In December 2019, AS Roma SPV LLC was in final negotiations to sell the team for $872 million, to American businessman Dan Friedkin, however negotiations stalled during the COVID-19 pandemic. On 6 August 2020, Friedkin signed the preliminary contract to agree to pay $591 million to Pallotta, the main shareholder of Roma.
Paulo Fonseca, who was hired as manager in 2019, left two years later and was replaced by fellow Portuguese José Mourinho. On 25 May 2022, he led Roma to win the inaugural edition of UEFA Europa Conference League, defeating Feyenoord in the final. In September 2024 it was reported that club owners are interested in purchesing the Premier League club of Everton. Club owners claim, it will not effect Roma.
Club identity.
Roma's colours of carmine red with a golden yellow trim represents the traditional colours of Rome, the official seal of the Comune di Roma features the same colours. The gold and the purple-red represent Roman imperial dignity. White shorts and black socks are usually worn with the red shirt. However, in particularly high key matches, the shorts and socks are the same colour as the home shirt.
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The kit itself was originally worn by "Roman Football Club"; one of the three clubs who merged to form the current incarnation in 1927. Because of the colours they wear, Roma are often nicknamed "i giallorossi" meaning the yellow-reds. Roma's away kit is traditionally white, with a third kit changing colour from time to time.
A popular nickname for the club is "i lupi" ("the wolves") – the animal has always featured on the club's badge in different forms throughout their history. The emblem of the team is currently the one which was used when the club was first founded. It portrays the female wolf with the two infant brothers Romulus and Remus, illustrating the myth of the founding of Rome, superimposed on a bipartite golden yellow over a maroon red shield. In the myth from which the club takes their nickname and logo, the twins (sons of Mars and Rhea Silvia) are thrown into the river Tiber by their uncle Amulius. A she-wolf then saved the twins and looked after them. Eventually, the two twins took revenge on Amulius before falling out themselves – Romulus killed Remus and was thus made king of a new city named in his honour, Rome.
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Facilities.
Stadiums.
The club's first stadium was the Motovelodromo Appio, previously used by Alba-Audace. Roma only played the 1927–28 season there until they moved to Campo Testaccio. Campo Testaccio was used through 1929 to 1940 until the team then moved to the Stadio Nazionale del PNF, where they spent 13 years. In the 1953–54 season, Roma moved to the Stadio Olimpico, which it shares with Lazio. The stadium has undergone several changes over the years, with the most significant taking place in the 1989–90 season, when the stadium was mostly demolished and reconstructed for the 1990 FIFA World Cup held in Italy. During reconstruction, Roma played its home matches at Stadio Flaminio.
On 30 December 2012, then-club president James Pallotta announced Stadio della Roma, a planned new stadium in the Tor di Valle area of Rome with a capacity of 52,500. Five years later, the Region of Lazio and the mayor of Rome rejected the stadium's construction proposal, before being approved soon following approval of readjustments to the stadium's design. However, in August 2017, the stadium suffered another delay, but that December, the project was again given the go-ahead and was expected to be built by 2020. This plan was completely cancelled by February 2021.
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In 2022, the club pivoted to a new site in Pietralata for the New AS Roma Stadium: construction is expected to start between 2025 and 2026 and is expected to conclude by 2028.
Trigoria.
A sports centre located in at kilometre 3600 in south-east of Rome was purchased on 22 July 1977 by then club president Gaetano Anzalone. It was opened on 23 July 1979 as Anzalone's final act as president. The complex had its first expansion in 1984 when the club was handled by Dino Viola and another in 1998 under the chairmanship of Franco Sensi. The centre's official name is the Fulvio Bernardini di Trigoria, named after club icon Fulvio Bernardini.
On 4 September 2019, the Trigoria training ground began to serve also as a private school named 'Liceo Scientifico Sportivo A.S. Roma' exclusively educating only the team's youth players in a renovated building on the training ground premises. 80 students are currently enrolled in the school which features its own cafeteria and gym.
The centre is also known for hosting the Argentina national team during the 1990 FIFA World Cup, held in Italy.
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Supporters.
Roma is the fifth-most supported football club in Italy – behind Juventus, Internazionale, A.C. Milan and Napoli – with approximately 7% of Italian football fans supporting the club, according to the Doxa Institute-L'Espresso's research of April 2006. Historically, the largest section of Roma supporters in the city of Rome have come from the inner-city, especially Testaccio.
The traditional ultras group of the club was "Commando Ultrà Curva Sud" commonly abbreviated as "CUCS". This group was founded by the merger of many smaller groups and was considered one of the most historic in the history of European football. However, by the mid-1990s, "CUCS" had been usurped by rival factions and ultimately broke up. Since that time, the "Curva Sud" of the Stadio Olimpico has been controlled by more right-wing groups, including "A.S. Roma Ultras", "Boys" and "Giovinezza", among others. However, the oldest group, "Fedayn", is apolitical, and politics is not the main identity of Roma, just a part of their overall identity. Besides ultras groups, it is believed Roma fans support the left as opposed to Lazio supporters, which are notoriously proud of their right-wing affiliation.
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In November 2015, Roma's ultras and their Lazio counterparts boycotted Roma's 1–0 victory in the "Derby della Capitale" in protest at new safety measures imposed at the Stadio Olimpico. The measures – imposed by Rome's prefect, Franco Gabrielli – had involved plastic glass dividing walls being installed in both the Curva Sud and Curva Nord, splitting the sections behind each goal in two. Both sets of ultras continued their protests for the rest of the season, including during Roma's 4–1 victory in the return fixture. Lazio's ultras returned to the Curva Nord for Roma's 1–4 victory in December 2016, but the Roma ultras continue to boycott matches.
The most known club anthem is "Roma (non-si discute, si ama)", also known as "Roma Roma", by singer Antonello Venditti. The title roughly means, "Roma is not to be questioned, it is to be loved," and it is sung before each match. The song "Grazie Roma", by the same singer, is played at the end of victorious home matches. Recently, the main riff of The White Stripes' song "Seven Nation Army" has also become widely popular at matches.
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Rivalries.
In Italian football, Roma is a club with many rivalries; first and foremost is their rivalry with Lazio, the club with whom they share the Stadio Olimpico. The derby between the two is called the "Derby della Capitale", it is amongst the most heated and emotional footballing rivalries in the world. The fixture has seen some occasional instances of violence in the past, including the death of Lazio fan Vincenzo Paparelli in 1979–80 as a result of an emergency flare fired from the Curva Sud, and the abandonment of a match in March 2004 following unfounded rumours of a fatality which led to violence outside the stadium.
Against Napoli, Roma also compete in the "Derby del Sole", meaning the "Derby of the Sun". Nowadays, fans also consider other Juventus (a rivalry born especially in the 1980s), Milan, Atalanta (since 1984, when friendly relations between the two clubs' ultras deteriorated), and Internazionale (increased in recent years) among their rivals, as they are often competitors for the top four spots in the league table and qualification for the UEFA Champions League.
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Hooliganism.
Rivalries with other teams have escalated into serious violence. A group of ultras who label themselves the Fedayn — 'the devotees' — after a group of long-forgotten Iranian guerrilla fighters are regarded to be responsible for the organised hooliganism. In 2014 Daniele De Santis, a Roma ultra, was convicted of shooting Ciro Esposito and two others during clashes with Napoli fans who were in Rome for their club's Coppa Italia final against Fiorentina. Esposito died of his wounds. De Santis was sentenced to 26 years in prison, later reduced to 16 years on appeal. Roma ultras have displayed banners celebrating De Santis.
There have been multiple instances of Roma ultras attacking supporters of foreign clubs when playing in Rome. These attacks have regularly featured the Roma ultras using knives, poles, flares, bottles and stones on unarmed foreign supporters, resulting in multiple hospitalisations. Home games against Liverpool in 1984 and 2001, Middlesbrough in 2006, Manchester United in 2007, Arsenal in 2009, Tottenham Hotspur in 2012, and Chelsea in 2017 have all resulted in multiple stabbings and other injuries to foreign supporters. In 2018 Roma ultras travelling to an away game at Liverpool attacked home supporters, resulting in a home supporter being critically injured.
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Players.
Retired numbers.
Since 2017, Roma has not issued the squad number 10 to commemorate Francesco Totti, who was retired from football since 2017. It was going to be issued to Paulo Dybala in 2022, but Dybala chose the number 21 instead of number 10.
(1993–2017)
Chairmen history.
Roma have had numerous chairmen ( or ) over the course of their history, some of which have been the owners and co-owners of the club, some of them were nominated by the owners. Franco Sensi was the chairman until his death in 2008, with his daughter, Roma CEO Rosella Sensi taking his place as chairman. Here is a complete list of Roma chairmen from 1927 until the present day.
Managerial history.
Roma have had many managers and trainers running the team during their history, here is a chronological list of them from 1927 onwards.
Hall of Fame.
On 7 October 2012, the AS Roma Hall of Fame was announced.
The Hall of Fame players were voted via the club's official website and a special Hall of Fame panel. In 2013 four players were voted in. In 2014, the third year of AS Roma Hall of Fame four more players were voted in.
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Added in 2012:
Added in 2013:
Added in 2014:
Added in 2015:
Added in 2016:
Added in 2017:
Added in 2018:
Club records and statistics.
Francesco Totti currently holds Roma's official appearance record, having made 786 appearances in all competitions, over the course of 25 seasons from 1993 until 2017. He also holds the record for Serie A appearances with 619, as he passed Giacomo Losi on 1 March 2008 during a home match against Parma.
Including all competitions, Totti is the all-time leading goalscorer for Roma with 307 goals since joining the club, 250 of which were scored in Serie A (another Roma record). Roberto Pruzzo, who was the all-time topscorer since 1988, comes in second in all competitions with 138. In 1930–31, Rodolfo Volk scored 29 goals in Serie A over the course of a single season. Not only was Volk the league's top scorer that year, he also set a Roma record for most goals scored in a season, which would later be matched by Edin Džeko in 2016–17.
Its major founders Fortitudo and Alba having been relegated at the end of 1926–27 campaign, new-founded Roma had to take part to Southern First Division championship (Serie B) for its inaugural season. Nevertheless, the FIGC decided on a special enlargement of first level division re-admitting AS Roma and SSC Napoli. The first ever official matches participated in by Roma was in the National Division, the predecessor of Serie A, of 1927–28, against Livorno, a 2–0 Roma win. The biggest ever victory recorded by Roma was 9–0 against Cremonese during the 1929–30 Serie A season. The heaviest defeat Roma have ever suffered is 1–7, which has occurred five times; against Juventus in 1931–32, Torino in 1947–48, Manchester United in 2006–07, Bayern Munich in 2014–15 and Fiorentina in 2018–19.
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As a company.
Since 1999, during Franco Sensi's period in charge, Associazione Sportiva Roma has been a listed on Borsa Italiana. From 2004 to 2011, Roma's shares are distributed between; 67.1% to Compagnia Italpetroli SpA (the Sensi family "holding"; Banca di Roma later acquired 49% stake on Italpetroli due to debt restructuring) and 32.9% to other public shareholders.
Along with Lazio and Juventus, Roma is one of only three quotated Italian clubs. According to The Football Money League published by consultants Deloitte, in the 2010–11 season, Roma was the 15th highest-earning football club in the world with an estimated revenue of €143.5 million.
In April 2008, after months of speculation, George Soros was confirmed by Rosella Sensi, CEO of Serie A club A.S. Roma, to be bidding for a takeover. The takeover bid was successively rejected by the Sensi family, who instead preferred to maintain the club's ownership. On 17 August 2008 club chairman and owner Franco Sensi died after a long illness; his place at the chairmanship of the club was successively taken by his daughter Rosella.
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Since the takeover in 2011, NEEP Roma Holding S.p.A. has owned all shares Sensi previously hold. NEEP, itself a joint venture, was held by DiBenedetto AS Roma LLC (later renamed to AS Roma SPV, LLC) and Unicredit in 60–40 ratio from 2011 to 2013, which the former had four real person shareholders in equal ratio, led by future Roma president Thomas R. DiBenedetto (2011–12). The takeover also activated a mandatory bid of shares from the general public, however not all minority shareholders were willing to sell their shares. The mandatory bid meant NEEP held 78.038% of shares of AS Roma (increased from 67.1% of the Sensi). On 1 August 2013, the president of Roma as well as one of the four American shareholders of AS Roma SPV, LLC, James Pallotta, bought an additional 9% shares of NEEP Roma Holding from Unicredit (through Raptor Holdco LLC), as the bank was not willing to fully participate in the capital increase of NEEP from €120,000 to €160,008,905 (excluding share premium). On 4 April 2014 Starwood Capital Group also became the fifth shareholder of AS Roma SPV, as well as forming a strategic partnership with AS Roma SpA to develop real estate around the new stadium. The private investment firm was represented by Zsolt Kohalmi in AS Roma SPV, who was appointed on 4 April as a partner and head of European acquisitions of the firm. On 11 August 2014, UniCredit sold the remain shares on NEEP (of 31%) for €33 million which meant AS Roma SPV LLC (91%) and Raptor Holdco LLC (9%) were the sole intermediate holding company of AS Roma SpA.
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Since re-capitalization in 2003–04, Roma had a short-lived financial self-sustainability, until the takeover in 2011. The club had set up a special amortisation fund using Articolo 18-bis Legge 91/1981 mainly for the abnormal signings prior 2002–03 season, (such as Davide Bombardini for €11 million account value in June 2002, when the flopped player exchange boosted 2001–02 season result) and the tax payment of 2002–03 was rescheduled. In 2004–05, Roma made a net profit of €10,091,689 and followed by €804,285 in 2005–06. In 2006–07 season the accounting method changed to IFRS, which meant that the 2005–06 result was reclassified as net loss of €4,051,905 and 2006–07 season was net income of €10,135,539 (€14.011 million as a group). Moreover, the special fund (€80,189,123) was removed from the asset and co-currently for the equity as scheduled, meant Roma group had a negative equity of €8.795 million on 30 June 2007. Nevertheless, the club had sold the brand to a subsidiary which boost the profit in a separate financial statement, which "La Repubblica" described as "doping". In 2007–08, Roma made a net income of €18,699,219. (€19 million as a group) However, 2008–09 saw the decrease of gate and TV income, co-currently with finishing sixth in Serie A, which saw Roma make a net loss of €1,894,330. (€1.56 million as a group) The gate and TV income further slipped in 2009–10 with a net loss of €21,917,292 (already boosted by the sale of Alberto Aquilani;
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which saw Roma make a net loss of €1,894,330. (€1.56 million as a group) The gate and TV income further slipped in 2009–10 with a net loss of €21,917,292 (already boosted by the sale of Alberto Aquilani; €22 million as a group) despite sporting success (finishing in second place in 2009–10). Moreover, despite a positive equity as a separate company (€105,142,589), the AS Roma Group had a negative equity on the consolidated balance sheet, and fell from +€8.8 million to −€13.2 million. In the 2010–11 season, Roma was administered by UniCredit as the Sensi family failed to repay the bank and the club was put on the market, and were expected to have a quiet transfer window. Concurrently with no selling profit on the players, Roma's net loss rose to €30,589,137 (€30.778 million as a group) and the new owner already planned a re-capitalization after the mandatory bid on the shares. On the positive side, TV income was increased from €75,150,744 to €78,041,642, and gate income increased from €23,821,218 to €31,017,179. This was because Roma entered 2010–11 Champions League, which counter-weighed the effect of the new collective agreement of Serie A.
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On the positive side, TV income was increased from €75,150,744 to €78,041,642, and gate income increased from €23,821,218 to €31,017,179. This was because Roma entered 2010–11 Champions League, which counter-weighed the effect of the new collective agreement of Serie A. In 2011–12, the renewal of squad and participation in 2011–12 UEFA Europa League had worsened the financial result, which the €50 million capital increase (in advance) was counter-weighted totally by the net loss. In the 2012–13 season, the participation in domestic league only, was not only not harmful to the revenue but increase in gate income as well as decrease in wage bill, however Roma still did not yet break even (€40.130 million net loss in consolidated accounts). NEEP Roma also re-capitalized AS Roma in advance for another €26,550,000 during 2012–13. A proposed capital increase by €100 million for Roma was announced on 25 June 2014; however, until 22 May 2014, NEEP already injected €108 million into the club, which depends on public subscription; more than €8 million would convert to medium-long-term loan from shareholder instead of becoming share capital. more than €8 million would convert to medium-long-term loan from shareholder instead of becoming share capital. Another capital increase was carried in 2018.
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A joint venture of Roma, which was owned by Roma (37.5%), S.S. Lazio (37.5%) and Parma F.C.(25%), Società Diritti Sportivi S.r.l., was in the process of liquidation since 2005. The company was a joint-venture of four football clubs, including Fiorentina. After the bankruptcy of Fiorentina however, both Roma and Lazio had increased their shares ratio from 25% to 37.5%. Another subsidiary, "Soccer S.A.S. di Brand Management S.r.l.", was a special-purpose entity (SPV) that Roma sold their brand to the subsidiary in 2007. In February 2015, another SPV, "ASR Media and Sponsorship S.r.l", was set up to secure a five-year bank loan of €175 million from Goldman Sachs, for three-month Euribor (min. 0.75%) + 6.25% spread (i.e. min. 7% interests rate p.a.).
In 2015, Inter and Roma were the only two Italian clubs that were sanctioned by UEFA for breaking UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations, which they signed settlement agreements with UEFA. It was followed by Milan in 2018.
Roma had compliance with the requirements and overall objective of the settlement agreement in 2018, which the club exited from settlement regime.
Superleague Formula.
AS Roma had a team in the Superleague Formula race car series where teams were sponsored by football clubs. Roma's driver was ex-IndyCar Series driver Franck Perera. The team had posted three podiums and was operated by Alan Docking Racing.
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Abu Nidal Organization
The Abu Nidal Organization (ANO; ), officially Fatah – Revolutionary Council ( ), was a Palestinian militant group founded by Abu Nidal in 1974. It broke away from Fatah, a faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization, following the emergence of a rift between Abu Nidal and Yasser Arafat. The ANO was designated as a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, the European Union and Japan. However, a number of Arab countries supported the group's activities; it was backed by Iraq from 1974 to 1983, by Syria from 1983 to 1987, and by Libya from 1987 to 1997. It briefly cooperated with Egypt from 1997 to 1998, but ultimately returned to Iraq in December 1998, where it continued to have the state's backing until Abu Nidal's death in August 2002.
In practice, the ANO was leftist and secularist, as well as anti-Zionist and anti-Western. In theory, it was not particularly associated with any specific ideology—or at least no such foundation was declared. It was mostly linked with the pursuit of Abu Nidal's personal agendas. The ANO was established to carry on an armed struggle in pursuit of pan-Arabism and the destruction of Israel. Like other Palestinian militant groups, the ANO carried out worldwide hijackings, assassinations, kidnappings of diplomats, and attacks on synagogues. It was responsible for 90 terrorist attacks between 1974 and 1992. In 2002, Abu Nidal died under disputed circumstances in Baghdad, with Palestinian sources claiming that he was assassinated on the orders of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
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Formation and background.
The Abu Nidal Organization was established by Sabri Khalil al-Bannah (Abu Nidal), known by his "nom de guerre" Abu Nidal, a Palestinian Arab nationalist and a former Ba'ath party member. Abu Nidal long argued that PLO membership should be open to all Arabs, not just Palestinians. He also argued that Palestine must be established as an Arab state, stretching from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. Abu Nidal established his faction within the PLO, just prior to Black September in Jordan, and following internal disagreements within the PLO. During Fatah's Third Congress in Damascus in 1971, he emerged as the leader of a leftist alliance against Yasser Arafat. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, many members of the mainstream Fatah movement argued that a political solution with Israel should be an option. Consequently, Abu Nidal split from Fatah in 1974 and formed his "rejectionist" front to carry on a Pan-Arabist armed struggle.
Abu Nidal's first independent operation took place on September 5, 1973, when five gunmen using the name "Al-Iqab" ("The Punishment") seized the Saudi embassy in Paris, taking 11 hostages and threatening to blow up the building if Abu Dawud was not released from jail in Jordan, where he had been arrested in February 1973 for an attempt on King Hussein's life. Following the incident, Mahmoud Abbas of the PLO took flight to Iraq to meet Abu Nidal. In the meeting Abbas became so angry, that he stormed out of the meeting, followed by the other PLO delegates, and from that point on, the PLO regarded Abu Nidal as a mercenary.
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Two months later, just after the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, during discussions about convening a peace conference in Geneva, the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) hijacked a KLM airliner, using the name of the Arab Nationalist Youth Organization. The operation was intended to send a signal to Fatah not to send representatives to any peace conference. In response, Arafat officially expelled Abu Nidal from Fatah in March 1974, and the rift between the two groups, and the two men, was complete. In June the same year, ANO formed the Rejectionist Front, a political coalition that opposed the Ten Point Program adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in its 12th Palestinian National Congress session.
Abu Nidal then moved to Ba'athist Iraq where he set up the ANO, which soon began a string of terrorist attacks aimed at Israel and Western countries. Setting himself up as a freelance contractor, Abu Nidal is believed by the United States Department of State to have ordered attacks in 20 countries, killing or injuring over 900 people. The ANO group's most notorious attacks were on the El Al ticket counters at Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985, when Arab gunmen high on amphetamines opened fire on passengers in simultaneous shootings, killing 18 and wounding 120. Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal's biographer, wrote of the attacks that their "random cruelty marked them as typical Abu Nidal operations."
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Attacks.
The ANO carried out attacks in 20 countries worldwide, killing or injuring about 1,650 people. Targets include the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, moderate Palestinians, the PLO, and various Arab and European countries. The group has not attacked Western targets since the late 1980s.
Major attacks included the Rome and Vienna Airport Attacks in December 1985, the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul and the Pan Am Flight 73 hijacking in Karachi in September 1986, and the "City of Poros" day-excursion ship attack in Greece in July 1988.
The ANO has been especially noted for its uncompromising stance on negotiation with Israel, treating anything less than all-out military struggle against Israel as treachery. This led the group to perform numerous attacks against the PLO, which had made clear it accepted a negotiated solution to the conflict. Fatah-RC is believed to have assassinated PLO deputy chief Abu Iyad and PLO security chief Abul Hul in Tunis in January 1991. It assassinated a Jordanian diplomat in Lebanon in January 1994 and has been linked to the killing of the PLO representative there. Noted PLO moderate Issam Sartawi was killed by the Fatah-RC in 1983. In October 1974, the group also made a failed assassination attempt on the present Palestinian president and PLO chairman, Mahmoud Abbas. These attacks, and numerous others, led to the PLO issuing a death sentence "in absentia" against Abu Nidal. In the early 1990s, it made an attempt to gain control of a refugee camp in Lebanon, but this was thwarted by PLO organizations.
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Internal executions and torture.
The ANO's official newspaper "Filastin al-Thawra" regularly carried stories announcing the execution of traitors within the movement. Each new recruit of the ANO was given several days to write down his life story and sign a paper agreeing to his execution if anything was found to be untrue. Every so often, the recruit would be asked to rewrite the whole story. Any discrepancies were taken as evidence that he was a spy and he would be made to write it out again, often after days of being beaten and nights spent forced to sleep standing up.
British journalist Alec Collett was killed by the ANO in Aita al-Foukhar (village in Lebanon) in 1986. He was hanged on a rope and was shot in retaliation to US air raids on Libya.
By 1987, Abu Nidal used extreme torture tactics on members of the ANO who were suspected of betrayal and disloyalty. The tactics included hanging prisoners naked, whipping them until unconsciousness, using salt or chili powder to revive them, forcing them into a car tire for whipping and salt application, melting plastic on their skin, frying their genitals, and confining them in tiny cells bound hand and foot. If cells were full, prisoners could be buried alive with a steel pipe for breathing. Execution was carried out by firing a bullet down the pipe.
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From 1987 to 1988, hundreds of members of Abu Nidal's organization were killed due to internal paranoia and terror tactics. The elderly wife of a veteran member was also killed on false charges. The killings were mostly carried out by four individuals: Mustafa Ibrahim Sanduqa, Isam Maraqa, Sulaiman Samrin, and Mustafa Awad. Decisions to kill were mostly made by Abu Nidal after he had consumed a whole bottle of whiskey at night. According to ANO dissidents, the attacks made by the group were unconnected to the Palestinian cause and led to their defection. In addition, they claimed the guerrilla was the "living example of paranoia".
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Antibody
An antibody (Ab) or immunoglobulin (Ig) is a large, Y-shaped protein belonging to the immunoglobulin superfamily which is used by the immune system to identify and neutralize antigens such as bacteria and viruses, including those that cause disease. Antibodies can recognize virtually any size antigen, able to perceive diverse chemical compositions. Each antibody recognizes one or more specific antigens. Antigen literally means "antibody generator", as it is the presence of an antigen that drives the formation of an antigen-specific antibody. Each tip of the "Y" of an antibody contains a paratope that specifically binds to one particular epitope on an antigen, allowing the two molecules to bind together with precision. Using this mechanism, antibodies can effectively "tag" a microbe or an infected cell for attack by other parts of the immune system, or can neutralize it directly (for example, by blocking a part of a virus that is essential for its invasion).
More narrowly, an "antibody" ("Ab") can refer to the free (secreted) form of these proteins, as opposed to the membrane-bound form found in a B cell receptor. The term "immunoglobulin" can then refer to both forms. Since they are, broadly speaking, the same protein, the terms are often treated as synonymous.
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To allow the immune system to recognize millions of different antigens, the antigen-binding sites at both tips of the antibody come in an equally wide variety. The rest of the antibody structure is much less variable; in humans, antibodies occur in five "classes", sometimes called "isotypes": IgA, IgD, IgE, IgG, and IgM. Human IgG and IgA antibodies are also divided into discrete subclasses (IgG1, IgG2, IgG3, IgG4; IgA1 and IgA2). The class refers to the functions triggered by the antibody (also known as effector functions), in addition to some other structural features. Antibodies from different classes also differ in where they are released in the body and at what stage of an immune response. Between species, while classes and subclasses of antibodies may be shared (at least in name), their functions and distribution throughout the body may be different. For example, mouse IgG1 is closer to human IgG2 than human IgG1 in terms of its function.
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In the course of an immune response, B cells can progressively differentiate into antibody-secreting cells or into memory B cells. Antibody-secreting cells comprise plasmablasts and plasma cells, which differ mainly in the degree to which they secrete antibody, their lifespan, metabolic adaptations, and surface markers. Plasmablasts are rapidly proliferating, short-lived cells produced in the early phases of the immune response (classically described as arising extrafollicularly rather than from a germinal center) which have the potential to differentiate further into plasma cells. Occasionally plasmablasts are mis-described as short-lived plasma cells; formally this is incorrect. Plasma cells, in contrast, do not divide (they are terminally differentiated), and rely on survival niches comprising specific cell types and cytokines to persist. Plasma cells will secrete huge quantities of antibody regardless of whether or not their cognate antigen is present, ensuring that antibody levels to the antigen in question do not fall to 0, provided the plasma cell stays alive. The rate of antibody secretion, however, can be regulated, for example, by the presence of adjuvant molecules that stimulate the immune response such as TLR ligands. Long-lived plasma cells can live for potentially the entire lifetime of the organism. Classically, the survival niches that house long-lived plasma cells reside in the bone marrow, though it cannot be assumed that any given plasma cell in the bone marrow will be long-lived. However, other work indicates that survival niches can readily be established within the mucosal tissues- though the classes of antibodies involved show a different hierarchy from those in the bone marrow. B cells can also differentiate into memory B cells which can persist for decades similarly to long-lived plasma cells. These cells can be rapidly recalled in a secondary immune response, undergoing class switching, affinity maturation, and differentiating into antibody-secreting cells.
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Antibodies are central to the immune protection elicited by most vaccines and infections (although other components of the immune system certainly participate and for some diseases are considerably more important than antibodies in generating an immune response, e.g. in the case of herpes zoster). Durable protection from infections caused by a given microbe – that is, the ability of the microbe to enter the body and begin to replicate (not necessarily to cause disease) – depends on sustained production of large quantities of antibodies, meaning that effective vaccines ideally elicit persistent high levels of antibody, which relies on long-lived plasma cells. At the same time, many microbes of medical importance have the ability to mutate to escape antibodies elicited by prior infections, and long-lived plasma cells cannot undergo affinity maturation or class switching. This is compensated for through memory B cells: novel variants of a microbe that still retain structural features of previously encountered antigens can elicit memory B cell responses that adapt to those changes. It has been suggested that long-lived plasma cells secrete B cell receptors with higher affinity than those on the surfaces of memory B cells, but findings are not entirely consistent on this point.
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Structure.
Antibodies are heavy (~150 kDa) proteins of about 10 nm in size,
arranged in three globular regions that roughly form a Y shape.
In humans and most other mammals, an antibody unit consists of four polypeptide chains; two identical "heavy chains" and two identical "light chains" connected by disulfide bonds.
Each chain is a series of domains: somewhat similar sequences of about 110 amino acids each.
These domains are usually represented in simplified schematics as rectangles.
Light chains consist of one variable domain VL and one constant domain CL, while heavy chains contain one variable domain VH and three to four constant domains CH1, CH2, ...
Structurally an antibody is also partitioned into two antigen-binding fragments (Fab), containing one VL, VH, CL, and CH1 domain each, as well as the crystallisable fragment (Fc), forming the trunk of the Y shape.
In between them is a hinge region of the heavy chains, whose flexibility allows antibodies to bind to pairs of epitopes at various distances, to form complexes (dimers, trimers, etc.), and to bind effector molecules more easily.
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In an electrophoresis test of blood proteins, antibodies mostly migrate to the last, gamma globulin fraction.
Conversely, most gamma-globulins are antibodies, which is why the two terms were historically used as synonyms, as were the symbols Ig and γ.
This variant terminology fell out of use due to the correspondence being inexact and due to confusion with γ (gamma) heavy chains which characterize the IgG class of antibodies.
Antigen-binding site.
The variable domains can also be referred to as the FV region. It is the subregion of Fab that binds to an antigen.
More specifically, each variable domain contains three "hypervariable regions" – the amino acids seen there vary the most from antibody to antibody.
When the protein folds, these regions give rise to three loops of β-strands, localized near one another on the surface of the antibody.
These loops are referred to as the complementarity-determining regions (CDRs), since their shape complements that of an antigen.
Three CDRs from each of the heavy and light chains together form an antibody-binding site whose shape can be anything from a pocket to which a smaller antigen binds, to a larger surface, to a protrusion that sticks out into a groove in an antigen.
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