What is the first PRO football game that was EVER made

It is difficult to track back the first PRO football game that was EVER made - only because of the lack of recordkeeping. Football is believed to have it's origins as early as 1863, though there is no firm documentation of that.
We do know that in 1869, Rutgers and Princeton played a college soccer football game on November 6. The game used a modification of the London Football Association rules. Over the next seven years, modern football began to develop from rugby as the sport gained popularity with major eastern schools which today, we call the "Ivy League" institutions.



Walter Camp, later known as the "Father of American football" wrote the first rules at the Massasoit convention in 1876. Camp's rules were adopted by the colleges and semi-pro teams and are still the foundation for the NFL's rules today, though the rules have been modified greatly since Camp's original drafts.

As for professional games, the earliest documented professional football player was William "Pudge" Heffelfinger, an All-American guard from Yale, who received a "Game performance bonus to W. Heffelfinger for playing (cash) $500" for a November 12, 1892 game against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club, according to the page of an 1892 ledger sheet from the Allegheny Athletic Association, now in possession of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

At that time, holding an amateur status was important, though it is widely suspected that loopholes were created and exploited to allow for "double expense" compensation, a practice that was quite common at that time.

A week after Heffelfinger received his compensation, Allegheny paid Ben Donnelly $250 for a game against Washington & Jefferson College. Washington & Jefferson won, 9-0 despite having two ringers, Donnelly and Heffelfinger, on the team.

Players like Jim Thorpe, Curly Lambeau, and George Halas, among others, were instrumental in getting professional football accepted to the next level, when the American Professional Football Association was created in 1920. Hundreds of "town teams" and "semi pro" teams sprung up throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states between 1892 and 1920, but an organization needed to be created in order to clear up rules and recruiting discrepancies that occurred between competing teams and competing leagues.

The APFA was renamed the "National Football League" in 1922.

Harold "Red" Grange was the first high profile college player (University of Illinois) to join the pro-ranks in 1925, having signed a lucrative contract with the Chicago Bears. Ernie Nevers (Stanford) followed suit by signing with the Duluth Eskimos in 1926.

NFL football did not receive its mainstream acceptance until the post-World War II era and the live televising of games in the 1950s (the first televised college game was Waynesburg vs Fordham in 1939; the first televised professional game was the Philadelphia Eagles vs Brooklyn Dodgers, also in 1939). Prior to that, college football was king, and one of the reasons a player's "amateur" status was crucial.