This character is a Other Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script.
The glyph is not a composition. Its East Asian Width is wide. In bidirectional text it acts as Other Neutral. When changing direction it is not mirrored. U+1F3C8 offers a line break opportunity at its position, except in some numeric contexts.
The CLDR project calls this character “american football” for use in screen reading software. It assigns these additional labels, e.g. for search in emoji pickers: american, ball, football.
This character is designated as an emoji. It will be rendered as colorful emoji on conforming platforms. To reduce it to a monochrome character, you can combine it with Variation Selector-15: 🏈︎ See the Emojipedia for more details on this character’s emoji properties.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
In Canada and the United States, a football (also called a pigskin) is a ball, roughly in the form of a prolate spheroid, used in the context of playing gridiron football. Footballs are often made of cowhide leather, as such a material is required in professional and collegiate football. Footballs used in recreation, and in organized youth leagues, may be made of rubber, plastic or composite leather (high school football rule books still allow inexpensive all-rubber footballs, though they are less common than leather).