Philadelphia's professional sports teams date at least to the 1860 founding of baseball's Athletics. The city is one of 13 U.S. cities to have all four major sports: the Philadelphia Eagles of the National base ball League, the Philadelphia Flyers of the National Hockey League, the Philadelphia Phillies in the National League of Major League Baseball, and the Philadelphia 76ers in the National Basketball Association.

 

The city's professional teams went without a championship from 1983, when the 76ers won the NBA Championship, until 2008, when the Phillies won the World Series. In 2004, ESPN ranked Philadelphia second on its list of The Fifteen Most Tortured Sports Cities.^] The failure was sometimes attributed in jest to the "Curse of Billy Penn". Also, in recent years, Philadelphia sports teams have befallen to what John Smallwood of The Philadelphia Daily News called the "Curse of the Inauguration,"an alleged curse on all Philadelphia sports teams for their inability to win a championship whenever they have played for one during a presidential inaugural year,dating back to the 76ers loss in the 1977 NBA Finals. This trend continued in 2009, President Barack Obama's inauguration year, when the Phillies lost to the New York Yankees in the World Series.

Major-sport professional sports teams that originated in Philadelphia but ultimately moved to other cities include the Golden State Warriors basketball team and the Oakland Athletics baseball team.

Philadelphia is home to professional, semi-professional and elite amateur teams in cricket, rugby league (Philadelphia Fight), rugby union and other sports. Major sporting events in the city include the Penn Relays, Stotesbury Cup, Philadelphia Marathon, Broad Street Run, Philadelphia International Championship bicycle race, and the Dad Vail Regatta.

Philadelphia is home to the Philadelphia Big 5, a group of five Division I college basketball programs: Big 5 are Saint Joseph's University, University of Pennsylvania, La Salle University, Temple University, and Villanova University. The sixth NCAA Division I school in Philadelphia is Drexel University. At least one of the teams is competitive nearly every year and at least one team has made the NCAA tournament for the past four decades.

In February 2008, Philadelphia beat several other cities in competition for the 16th Major League Soccer franchise. The Philadelphia Union entered the league in 2010 calling PPL Park their home (a soccer-specific stadium) in Chester, Pennsylvania.

Education in Philadelphia is provided by many private and public institutions. The School District of Philadelphia runs the city's public schools. The Philadelphia School District is the eighth largest school district in the United States with 163,064 students in 347 public and charter schools.

Philadelphia is one of the largest college towns in the United States and has the second-largest student concentration on the East Coast with over 120,000 college and university students enrolled within the city and nearly 300,000 in the metropolitan area. There are over 80 colleges, universities, trade, and specialty schools in the Philadelphia region. The city contains three major research universities: the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and Temple University. Other institutions of higher learning within the city's borders include Saint Joseph's University, La Salle University, Peirce College, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, The University of the Arts, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Curtis Institute of Music, Thomas Jefferson University, Moore College of Art and Design, The Art Institute of Philadelphia, Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College, Philadelphia University, Chestnut Hill College, Holy Family University, the Community College of Philadelphia and Messiah College Philadelphia Campus.

Philadelphia's famous Pennsylvania Main Line and western suburbs are home to other notable colleges and universities including Villanova University, Bryn Mawr College, Haverford College, and Swarthmore College.