In this paper, a novel framework is proposed to jointly optimize user association and resource allocation in the uplink cognitive femtocell network (CFN). In the considered CFN, femtocell base stations (FBSs) are deployed to serve a set of femtocell user equipments (FUEs) by reusing subchannels used in a macrocell base station (MBS). The problem of joint user association, subchannel assignment, and power allocation is formulated as an optimization problem, in which the goal is to maximize the overall uplink throughput while guaranteeing FBSs overloading avoidance, data rate requirements of the served FUEs, and MBS protection. To solve this problem, a distributed framework based on the matching game is proposed to model and analyze the interactions between the FUEs and FBSs. Using this framework, distributed algorithms are developed to enable the CFN to make decisions about user association, subchannel allocation, and transmit power. The algorithms are then shown to converge to a stable matching and exhibit a low computational complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed approach yields a performance improvement in terms of the overall network throughput and outage probability, with a small number of iterations to converge.