Spartans

An attorney named Harry Williamson put the club together in 1928, pulling players from semi-professional teams that had folded across Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia. The name nodded to the toughness of the local workforce and Portsmouth's steel industry; two years later, once residents voted to fund the construction of Universal Stadium, the Spartans joined the NFL. Fewer than 43,000 people lived in Portsmouth at the time, making it the second-smallest city in the league after Green Bay.

The Depression made the arrangement hard to sustain. The Spartans lost money in each of their four NFL seasons and occasionally paid players in shares rather than cash, with a 28–16–7 record and a run to the 1932 NFL Championship Game, the league's first-ever postseason playoff. Chicago Stadium hosted it indoors because of a blizzard, and the Bears won 9–0. Earlier that year the Spartans had beaten Green Bay 19–0 using just 17 players for the full 60 minutes, a game remembered as the Iron Man Game and drawing a crowd large enough that the Ohio National Guard was called in to manage it.

By 1934 the losses caught up with the club. George Richards, who owned Detroit radio station WJR, bought the franchise for around $8,000 and moved it north, renaming it the Detroit Lions — the identity under which it would later win four NFL titles, none of them credited to the Portsmouth years.

Green Bay and the Chicago Bears were the Spartans' main rivals in the league, sharpened by the 1931 episode when the Packers refused to travel to Portsmouth for a scheduled game over fears that bad weather would hurt the gate, a decision that pushed the NFL toward formal scheduling committees. Closer to home, Portsmouth measured itself against the semi-professional Ironton Tanks.