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An exhibition game (also known as a friendly, scrimmage, demonstration, training match, pre-season game, warmup match, or preparation match, depending at least in part on the sport) is a sport whose prize money and impact on the player's or the team's rankings is either zero or otherwise greatly reduced. Exhibition games often serve as "warm-up matches", particularly in many team sports where these games help coaches and managers select and condition players, before the competitive matches of a league season or tournament. If the players usually play in different teams in other leagues, exhibition games offer an opportunity for the players to learn to work with each other. The games can be held between separate teams or between parts of the same team.
An exhibition game may also be used to settle a challenge, to provide professional entertainment, to promote the sport, to commemorate an anniversary for a famous player, or to raise money for charities. Several sports leagues hold to showcase their best players against each other, while other exhibitions games may pit participants from two different leagues or countries to unofficially determine who would be the best in the world. International competitions like the Olympic Games may also hold exhibition games as part of a demonstration sport.
Although most friendlies are simply one-off matches arranged between the clubs in which a certain amount is paid by the challenger club to the incumbent club, some teams do compete in short tournaments, such as the Emirates Cup, Teresa Herrera Trophy, International Champions Cup and the Amsterdam Tournament. Although these events may involve sponsorship deals, a trophy, and television broadcasts, there is little prestige attached to them. In addition, club teams may tour other continents as part of global branding campaigns.
International friendlies give team managers the opportunity to experiment with team selection and tactics before the tournament proper, and also allow them to assess the abilities of players they may potentially select for the tournament squad. Players can be booked in international friendlies, and can be suspended from future international matches based on red cards or accumulated yellows in a specified period. Caps and goals scored also count towards a player's career records. The results can play a part in affecting the country's FIFA ranking. In 2004, FIFA ruled that substitutions by a team be limited to six per match in international friendlies in response to criticism that such matches were becoming increasingly farcical with managers making as many as 11 substitutions per match. An international match loses its official status if this regulation is breached.
Matches in multinational football tournaments such as the King's Cup, the Kirin Cup, Intercontinental Cup and the China Cup are usually considered international friendlies by FIFA.
Although not fought for profit, amateur bouts (usually) and sparring sessions are not considered to be exhibition fights. On 25 August 2018, YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI had an exhibition match that ended in a draw. On 28 November 2020, Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr. had a fight that ended in a draw.
Under the 1995–2004 National Hockey League collective bargaining agreement, teams were limited to nine preseason games. From 1975 to 1991, NHL teams sometimes played exhibition games against teams from the Soviet Union in the Super Series, and in 1978, played against World Hockey Association teams also in preseason training. Like the NFL, the NHL sometimes schedules exhibition games for cities without their own NHL teams, often at a club's minor league affiliate (e.g. Carolina Hurricanes games at Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, North Carolina, home of their AHL affiliate the Charlotte Checkers; Los Angeles Kings games at Citizens Business Bank Arena in Ontario, California, home of their AHL affiliate the Ontario Reign; Montreal Canadiens games at Colisée Pepsi in Quebec City, which has no pro hockey but used to have an NHL team until 1995; Washington Capitals at 1st Mariner Arena in the Baltimore Hockey Classic; Buffalo Sabres at Pegula Ice Arena on the campus of owner Terrence Pegula's alma mater Penn State University; various Western Canada teams at Credit Union Centre in Saskatoon, a potential NHL expansion venue; and the St. Louis Blues in Kansas City, Missouri at T-Mobile Center, also a potential expansion venue that is currently considered part of the Blues' television market).
Before the Vegas Golden Knights entered the NHL in 2017, the Kings would traditionally play an annual game known as Frozen Fury in Las Vegas in a partnership with the MGM Grand Las Vegas. The game was then played at Delta Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, before it ended in 2024 due to the arrival of the expansion Utah Mammoth. Today, all teams must play six, seven, or eight preseason games. Each preseason game must have at least eight veterans dressed, except during the World Cup of Hockey. In the 1994–95 season and the 2012–13 season, no preseason games were played due to lockouts.
Since the 2000s, some preseason games have been played in Europe against European teams, as part of the NHL Challenge and NHL Premiere series. In addition to the standard preseason, there also exist prospect tournaments such as the Vancouver Canucks' YoungStars tournament and the Detroit Red Wings' training camp, in which NHL teams' younger prospects face off against each other under their parent club's banner.
In 1992, goaltender Manon Rhéaume played in a preseason game for the Tampa Bay Lightning, becoming the first woman to suit up for an all-male pro sports team in North America.
The Flying Fathers, a Canadians group of Catholic Church priests, regularly toured North America playing exhibition hockey games for charity. One of the organization's founders, Les Costello, was a onetime NHL player who was ordained as a priest after retiring from professional hockey. Another prominent exhibition hockey team is the Buffalo Sabres Alumni Hockey Team, which is composed almost entirely of retired NHL players, the majority of whom (as the name suggests) played at least a portion of their career for the Buffalo Sabres.
American college hockey teams occasionally play exhibition games against Canadian college teams as well as against USA or Canadian national teams. (In men's hockey, the senior national teams are selected from NHL and other pro players, and college teams would be overmatched against those teams even if they were allowed to play them. However, the national under-18 teams are made up of amateurs, allowing college squads to play them.)
Several MLB teams used to play regular exhibition games during the year against nearby teams in the other major league, but regular-season interleague play has made such games unnecessary. The two Canadian MLB teams, the Toronto Blue Jays of the American League and the Montreal Expos of the National League, met annually to contest the Pearson Cup; this tradition ended when the Expos moved to Washington DC for the 2005 season. Similarly, the New York Yankees played in the Mayor's Trophy Game against various local rivals from 1946 to 1983.
It also used to be commonplace to have a team play an exhibition against Minor League affiliates during the regular season, but worries of injuries to players, along with travel issues, have made this very rare. Exhibitions between inter-city teams in different leagues, like Chicago's Crosstown Classic and New York's Subway Series which used to be played solely as exhibitions for bragging rights are now blended into interleague play. The annual MLB All-Star Game, played in July between players from AL teams and players from NL teams, had long been considered an exhibition match, though between 2003 and 2016 this status was questioned because the league whose team won the All-Star game had been awarded home field advantage for the upcoming World Series (prior to 2003 the leagues alternated which one of them had home field advantage; starting in 2017 the team with the better regular season record would be given home field advantage).
Another exhibition game, the Hall of Fame Game/Classic which was played in Cooperstown, New York on the weekend of inductions to the Baseball Hall of Fame, was also ended in 2008 due to interleague play and teams playing only substitutes.
However, from 1971 to 1975, NBA teams played preseason exhibitions against American Basketball Association teams with the ABA winning the series 80 to 75 games. In the early days of the NBA, league clubs sometimes challenged the legendary barnstorming Harlem Globetrotters, with mixed success. The Minneapolis Lakers beat the Globetrotters seven games to one. The NBA has played preseason games in Europe and Asia. Beginning in 2015, the league has scheduled NBA Africa Games with players of direct African descent against players from the rest of the league; the NBA has also played against teams in Australia's National Basketball League. In the 2006 and 2007 seasons, the NBA and the primary European club competition, the Euroleague, conducted a preseason tournament featuring two NBA teams and the finalists from that year's Euroleague. In the 1998–99 and 2011–12 seasons, teams were limited to only two preseason games due to lockouts.
The annual NBA All-Star Game is an exhibition game.
Women's National Basketball Association teams play up to three preseasons games per year. WNBA teams will play each other and will also play women's national basketball teams. Most years, the WNBA also stages an All-Star Game, but this game is canceled if pre-empted by major international competitions such as the Olympic Games.
The NFL has played exhibition games in Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia (including the American Bowl in 1999) and Mexico to spread the league's popularity (a game of this type was proposed for China but, due to financial and logistical problems, was eventually canceled). The league has tacitly forbidden the playing of non-league opponents, with the last interleague game having come in 1972 between the NFL's New York Jets and the Seaboard Football League's Long Island Chiefs and the last game against a team other than an NFL team (the all-NFL rookie College All-Stars) was held in 1976.
Exhibition games are quite unpopular with many fans, who resent having to pay regular-season prices for two home exhibition games as part of a season-ticket package. Numerous lawsuits have been brought by fans and classes of fans against the NFL or its member teams regarding this practice, but none have been successful in halting it. The Pro Bowl, traditionally played after the end of the NFL season (since 2010 played the week prior to the Super Bowl), is also considered an exhibition game.
The Arena Football League briefly had a two-game exhibition season in the early 2000s, a practice that ended in 2003 with a new television contract. Exhibition games outside of a structured season are relatively common among indoor American football leagues; because teams switch leagues frequently at that level of play, it is not uncommon to see some of the smaller leagues schedule exhibition games against teams that are from another league, about to join the league as a probational franchise, or a semi-pro outdoor team to fill holes in a schedule.
True exhibition games between opposing colleges at the highest level do not exist in college football; due to the importance of opinion polling in the top level of college football, even exhibition games would not truly be exhibitions because they could influence the opinions of those polled. Intramural games are possible because a team playing against itself leaves little ability for poll participants to make judgments, and at levels below the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), championships are decided by objective formulas and thus those teams can play non-league games without affecting their playoff hopes.
High school football teams frequently participate in controlled scrimmages with other teams during preseason practice, but full exhibition games are rare because of league rules and concerns about finances, travel and player injuries, along with enrollments not being registered until the early part of August in most school districts under the traditional September–June academic term. Some states hold preseason events known as "jamborees" in which several pairs of high school football squads take turns playing one half (usually 24 minutes of game time) to give players some experience before the first official game. Another high school football exhibition contest is the all-star game, which usually brings together top players from a region. These games are typically played by graduating seniors after the regular season or in the summer. Many of these games, which include the U.S. Army All-American Bowl and Under Armour All-America Game, are used as showcases for players to be seen by colleges and increase their college recruiting profile, or for athletes to confirm their choice and sign their National Letter of Intent outside of National Signing Day.
National teams sometimes play exhibition matches versus invitational teams like the Barbarian F.C. and Barbarian Rugby Club. Also, rugby union clubs sometimes play preseason matches.
Other historical examples of non-championship races include the Marlboro Challenge in Champ Car racing and the TOCA Touring Car Shootout in the British Touring Car Championship. Until the mid-1980s there were also a significant number of non-championship Formula One races.
The National Hot Rod Association Pro Stock teams will have a preseason drag meet held before the traditional start in Pomona. The Pro Stock Showdown is a preseason drag meet held for the Pro Stock teams held at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
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