Chicago Bears Tickets

The Chicago Bears are one of only two franchises remaining from the NFL's 1920 founding, alongside the Arizona Cardinals, and their story runs parallel to the league's own. The club started in 1919 as the Decatur Staleys, a works team for the A. E. Staley starch company, turned professional as a charter member in 1920, and moved to Chicago in 1921. Founder George Halas renamed the team the Bears in 1922 as a nod to the Chicago Cubs, the baseball club whose Wrigley Field the football team shared, and he dressed the franchise in navy and orange drawn from his alma mater, the University of Illinois. Halas coached the Bears for 40 seasons spread across four decades, an NFL record, and after 50 years at Wrigley Field the team settled into Soldier Field in 1971.

The lineage of Bears greats spans every era of the sport. Red Grange and Bronko Nagurski were part of the Pro Football Hall of Fame's original induction class in 1963, Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers defined the late 1960s, Walter Payton piled up a franchise-record 16,726 rushing yards that stood as the NFL mark until 2002, and Brian Urlacher and Devin Hester headlined the modern era, with Hester setting the NFL record for career punt and kickoff return touchdowns. When the franchise unveiled its list of the 100 greatest Bears in 2019, the top five came out as Payton, Butkus, Nagurski, Sid Luckman, and Sayers.

Only the Green Bay Packers have won more NFL championships. The Bears' nine titles include eight from the pre-merger era, claimed in 1921, 1932, 1933, 1940, 1941, 1943, 1946, and 1963, and the 1940s dynasty built on Sid Luckman and Halas's T-formation offense won four of those titles while adopting the Monsters of the Midway nickname from the University of Chicago. The 73-0 demolition of Washington in the 1940 championship game still stands as the most lopsided score in NFL history. The modern peak arrived in the 1985 season, when Mike Ditka's team lost once all year, rode the then-revolutionary 46 defense, and beat the New England Patriots 46-10 in Super Bowl XX, a then-record margin of victory. Chicago returned to the Super Bowl in the 2006 season, falling to the Indianapolis Colts in Super Bowl XLI.

The individual honors run just as deep.

• NFL MVP: Walter Payton won in 1977 and again in the 1985 championship season, with Sid Luckman and Harlon Hill earning the honor in 1943 and 1955.
• Defensive Player of the Year: Dick Butkus took the award in 1969 and 1970.
• Super Bowl MVP: Richard Dent earned the honor in Super Bowl XX.
• Special Teams Player of the Year: Devin Hester won it three times, in 2006, 2007, and 2010.

At the franchise level, the Bears hold the NFL record for Pro Football Hall of Fame enshrinees, with more than 30 players having earned their place in Canton primarily as Bears, and the team's 14 retired uniform numbers are the most in the league, with Payton's 34, Butkus's 51, Sayers's 40, and Ditka's 89 among them.

Bears fandom is a culture unto itself. "Da Bears" entered the national vocabulary through Saturday Night Live's "Bill Swerski's Superfans" sketches, the 1985 team recorded "The Super Bowl Shuffle" before the playoffs and watched it reach number 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earn a Grammy nomination, and "Bear Down, Chicago Bears" has served as the fight song since the 1940s. Staley Da Bear, the mascot introduced in 2003, takes his name from the A. E. Staley company that started the franchise. It all comes together on game days at Soldier Field, the lakefront stadium on the Near South Side that has anchored the franchise since 1971, and the whole scene is a big part of why Bears tickets remain a Chicago ritual.