Bears

Soldier Field sits on the Chicago lakefront with room for 62,500 after the 2002–2003 rebuild, and the Bears have called it home since 1971, having spent the previous half-century at Wrigley Field. During that renovation they played a single game away at Memorial Stadium in Illinois before returning to the lakefront ground.

The franchise traces back to 1920, when A.E. Staley formed the club as the Decatur Staleys. George Halas moved the team to Chicago the following year, and in 1922 renamed it the Bears, reasoning that footballers were bigger men than the baseball players next door at Wrigley — a nod to the Cubs sharing that stadium. Navy blue and burnt orange came from Halas's own days at the University of Illinois.

Nine championships sit in the club's history, eight of them from the pre-Super Bowl era. The 1940 title game against Washington ended 73–0, still the most one-sided result the league has produced. The other title came in 1985, when Mike Ditka's team went 15–1 and beat New England 46–10 in Super Bowl XX, built around a defence that included Mike Singletary and Richard Dent, who took the game's MVP award. That team, and the championship sides before it, earned the Bears their nickname, Monsters of the Midway, borrowed from the old University of Chicago Maroons and stuck to Halas's men once their dominance became hard to ignore. No franchise has sent more players into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, among them Walter Payton and Dick Butkus.

Against Green Bay the Bears have played the league's oldest and most contested series, running since 1921, with Detroit a fixture on the calendar since 1930. A rookie quarterback in Caleb Williams and head coach Ben Johnson brought the club back to the playoffs in the 2024–2025 season after fifteen years without one.