Grey Cup

Grey Cup

Grey Cup in 2022
Awarded for	Winning the Canadian Football League championship
Country	Canada
History
First award	1909; 115 years ago (1909)
Editions	110
First winner	Toronto Varsity Blues
Most wins	Toronto Argonauts (18 titles)
Most recent	Montreal Alouettes (8th title)
Website	cfl.ca

The Grey Cup (French: Coupe Grey) is both the championship game of the Canadian Football League (CFL) and the trophy awarded to the victorious team playing in the namesake championship of professional Canadian football. The game is contested between the winners of the CFL's East and West Divisional playoffs and is one of Canadian television's largest annual sporting events. Since 2022, the game was held on the third Sunday of November. The Toronto Argonauts have the most Grey Cup wins (18) since its introduction in 1909, while the Edmonton Elks (formerly the Edmonton Eskimos) have the most Grey Cup wins (11) since the merger in 1958. The latest, the 110th Grey Cup, took place in Hamilton, Ontario, on November 19, 2023, when the Montreal Alouettes defeated the Winnipeg Blue Bombers 28–24.

The Grey Cup is Canada's largest annual sports and television event, regularly drawing a Canadian viewing audience of about 4 million.^[1][2] Two awards are given for play in the game: the Most Valuable Player and the Dick Suderman Trophy as most valuable Canadian player.^[3] In 2019, Andrew Harris was the first player to win both the Grey Cup's Most Valuable Canadian and Most Valuable Player the same year, playing for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

The trophy was commissioned in 1909 by The Earl Grey, then Canada's governor general, who originally hoped to donate it for the country's senior amateur hockey championship. After the Allan Cup was donated for that purpose, Grey instead made his trophy available to the winner of the Canadian Dominion Football Championship, the national championship of Canadian football. The trophy has a silver chalice attached to a large base on which the names of all winning teams, players and executives are engraved. The Grey Cup has been broken on several occasions, stolen twice, and held for ransom. It survived a 1947 fire that destroyed numerous artifacts housed in the same building.

The Grey Cup was first won by the Toronto Varsity Blues of the University of Toronto. Play was suspended from 1916 to 1918 due to the First World War and in 1919 due to a rules dispute. The game has typically been contested in an east-versus-west format since the 1920s. The game was always played on a Saturday until 1968, but since 1969 (except for 1970) has always been on a Sunday. Held in late November (in some years in early December, most recently in 2021), and mostly in outdoor stadiums, the Grey Cup has been played in inclement weather at times, including the 1950 "Mud Bowl", in which a player reportedly came close to drowning in a puddle, then the 1962 "Fog Bowl", when the final minutes of the game had to be postponed to the following day due to a heavy fog, and the 1977 "Ice Bowl", contested on the frozen-over artificial turf at Montreal's Olympic Stadium. Most recently, in the 2017 game snow fell, at times heavily, throughout the game.

The then-Edmonton Eskimos formed the Grey Cup's longest dynasty, winning five consecutive championships from 1978 to 1982. Competition for the trophy has been exclusively between Canadian teams, except for a three-year period from 1993 to 1995, when an expansion of the CFL south into the United States resulted in the Baltimore Stallions winning the 1995 championship and taking the Grey Cup south of the border for the only time in its history.