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They are running out of space in the cemetery of the failed football leagues. There are already headstones for the World Football League, the United States Football League, the original XFL, the United Football League, the Fall Experimental Football League, the Continental Football League, the all-American Football League, the Stars Football League a host of arena football leagues. They are now joined by the Alliance of American Football, whose majority owner made the strange decision to bury the league still alive in the middle of its first season.
AAF seemed promising. Unlike many starter football leagues, which have the business model of "Hey, let's start a football league," the AAF seemed to have a lot of things to understand. There was a televised deal, with games being broadcast on TNT, CBS Sports Network, the NFL network and even on CBS Live. He had an innovative application; there were innovative rules. He got surprisingly decent odds thanks to the jump that was reasonably stable all season. Perhaps the most important point is that the AAF fully understood its place. Unlike many other leagues, the AAF has understood that it would never beat the NFL against the competition and position itself as a NFL development league. . And for some reason, he had Steve Spurrier.
But the league, which began playing in February, suspended its football operations Tuesday, canceling the last two weeks of the regular season and the playoffs. players practiced when the news broke and returned home without cash to pay for their return flight. Spurrier has proclaimed his 7-1 Orlando Orlando Apollos league champions, and I can not find any good reason for not agreeing with him.
The abrupt end is the culmination of a long quarrel between the founders, Charlie Ebersol and Bill Polian, and the majority owner Tom Dundon, a man who draws his name disturbingly from the noise Law and order. Ebersol and Polian ran out of money in Dundon just 10 days after the start of the game. The cash injection helped the AAF get paid, and Dundon seemed to be the savior of the game. league. But now he turned out to be the killer of the league. Dundon made the seemingly one-sided decision to close the league on Tuesday, surprising his leaders, players and coaches. It's really strange to see a league owner explain why he closes his store then The founders of the league publicly scream that the owner is wrong.
Hypothetically, the league is not dead, it pauses as it finds a more financially sound business model for the years to come. But it's hard to imagine that the league is gaining enough confidence from investors, business partners or supporters to make a second season possible after proving it could not get through the first year.
The AAF has changed the well-known history of the failed football league. Most leagues have retreated after much less progress, with far worse strategies for long – term success and much less money. Most leagues fold because they can not find a man with money in the bank. The FAA seems to fall back because it has found one.
For the most part, minor league sports are not profitable. They generally have a hard time attracting local and national supporters enough to cover the many sports-related expenses, such as player and coach salaries, housing, travel, equipment, stadium operating costs. and the insurance of the players. The main reason why some minor leagues are able to survive in the long run is that the major leagues agree to subsidize their losses in the name of player development. In European football, lower ranked teams can be promoted to the top leagues or at least earn money by selling their good players to bigger clubs. In America, where there is no upward mobility, the options are finding a benefactor or dying.
Minor league baseball teams may exist as player and coach salaries are fully paid for by MLB teams. Many minor league teams belong directly to NHL teams, and in the other teams, many player contracts are paid for by NHL teams. The NBA G League is a twenty-first century success story, from eight teams from its founding in 2001 to 27 during the current season. But this has less to do with a blissful passion for basketball in the minor leagues and more with almost every team in the NBA buying its own G-League team. Here is a video that I shot in 2017 during a game of Long Island Nets, affiliated with Brooklyn's G League:
You can see this video and think that Ligue G is doomed, but I see it as a sign that the league has a bright future. The Nets chose not to sell tickets for this game, played in the same arena as the one reserved for the professional team later in the evening. The NBA franchise was willing to absorb all the losses associated with this game so that its leaders and talented appraisers could follow the affiliate without having to move. The MLB and NHL teams have long been willing to spend millions of dollars developing minor league players; This video is proof that the NBA was born.
If the question you ask yourself is: "Was the RAA profitable?" The answer is no. No, not even close, and I suspect that in five years, in two decades, the answer would have always been negative. The question is more interesting, however: to what extent was the AAF able to convince the NFL to join and compensate for the inevitable losses of a minor league football operation?
The only problem with creating a league with the express purpose of becoming the NFL's main minor league is that it does not necessarily want to have a minor league. At one point, the NFL funded its own development league, NFL Europe. The league's tricky goal was to try to train players and spark interest in American football abroad, and with a few exceptions it was not particularly successful. Since the elimination of the European league in 2007, the NFL has not really expressed interest in having a property under development. The AAF was banging on the NFL window, offering to scrape their car, though the NFL would probably be satisfied with a car wash if it wanted the raclette.
Ebersol and Polian have announced the signing of a cooperation agreement with the NFL in two or three years. Their plan was to create a league able to keep up until this lifebuoy arrives. It was not a bad plan.
The problem, of course, was an immediate lack of money. The league failed to deliver his first set of paychecks, blaming a computer problem. (I bet it's the same bug that prevented me from classifying various homework absolutely Throughout my career in high school and college.) The league also failed to buy insurance for all its players – a kind of huge deal for a contact sport – forcing the Orlando franchise to hold practices in Georgia due to lack of Florida workers compensation laws. for professional athletes. So, 10 days after the founding of the league, Dundon bought out. It has invested $ 70 million and committed to invest an additional $ 180 million in the coming years. He seemed to want to give the league the money it needed to survive in the short term until the NFL entered. However, Dundon quickly changed his tone to no longer be enthusiastic about his brilliant new league before proclaiming his imminent destiny. Last week, Dundon announced that if the league failed to get NFL players to play, it would be forced to close the league.
The idea that the FAA needed the help of the NFL was quite right, but everything in Dundon's statement was strange. For starters, it was an ultimatum, preemptively accusing the NFLPA's refusal to share the players for the AAF's disappearance. In the squeegee scenario, Dundon now shouted "IF YOU DO NOT GIVE SOAP TO ME, I WILL MAKE YOUR CAR REBUILD" to a driver who has never asked for his car to be scraped first. Second, while the FAA would ultimately need the help of the NFL, Dundon seemed strangely focused on one form of specific help: literally sharing players with the NFL. This would not necessarily be a requirement for a development league. But more importantly, Dundon has made the issue of NFL players seem urgent, when that was clearly not the case. Clearly, the AAF could have ended their season without the 88th player in the Cincinnati Bengals lineup, and without finishing his first season, it seems unlikely that she will be able to convince the NFL or NFLPA that she worth to be a partner.
Nobody knows for sure why Dundon immediately began to prepare to kill the league in which he just invested $ 70 million. The best explanation offered so far comes from a report from Sports IllustratedAlbert Breer, who postulates that Dundon actually bought the league not for, you know, the leaguebut for proprietary technology the league had been working, as its application and game technology. From the beginning, Ebersol introduced the league as "a tech company with a football league"; Dundon apparently took that to the letter. C & # 39; may be illegal, and who knows if technology is worth $ 70 millionand it seems likely that he does not have the rights anyway. But why would Dundon have given up so quickly? It does not make much sense but explains why Dundon was so eager to reduce the losses of the league …million per week, according to United States today-As soon as possible.
The FAA was caught between two distinct and imperfect plans. Ebersol and Polian may have had the best shot of all minor leagues because they were pragmatic enough to realize that they would eventually need help from the NFL. That said, "the best shot of any minor football league of all time" was still not a very good plan. They knew they needed to run a league and survive a few years to get the NFL started, but they do not have the money to do it. So they decided to start a league and survive a few weeks to bait another buyer. The phrase "Let's do it and be legends, man" comes to mind. (Or maybe "Let's do it and become Atlanta Legends, man.") They probably should not have started the league until they had enough financial support to last at least one season. Instead, they had to rush a sale just to secure their weekly expenses, and they ended up selling to someone with extremely different plans for the company.
As for Dundon, his public explanation for the closing of the league begs us to believe that he spent $ 70 million for an extremely unprofitable league in February and realized in April that his league was absolutely not profitable. The seven weeks elapsed between the league's purchase and its closure seem both too long – how did he buy the league in February and took it until April to realize how much of it was? 39, he lost money every week? – and too short – how did he buy the league in February and expect everything to be settled by April? It is disheartening that he apparently had no interest in keeping the league alive long enough to keep the promise of becoming a true development league. I buy without conviction that it is he who bought the league mainly for his technology, which makes him look like a bad person (for defending a league with hundreds of dollars). Employees for his personal endeavor) and for a worse businessman (for spending $ 70 million on a football league so he can close it within two months).
The AAF had different projects from the other leagues but had the same goal. It will not be the last of its kind. Next year will see the planned launch of a second XFL (again owned by Vince McMahon of the WWE) as well as a league called the Freedom Football League, founded by former NFL players , Ricky Williams and Terrell Owens. I suspect the new XFL will fail for the same reason as the first: McMahon has no interest in joining the NFL because he seems to sincerely believe that he can build a football league tied with the NFL. But on many occasions, this has proven to be an unrealistic goal for all potential NFL competitors. The FFL does not seem to be interested in a partnership with the NFL either. The main idea of the league is to rebel against the acquisition of a large sum of money by the NFL. Both seem to think that the NFL is a rival rather than a lifeline.
The world does not need another football league. Personally, I like watching football, but the last dozen attempts to create leagues have failed. It seems quite convincing that there is not enough interest in a second-tier football organization to provide the money needed for the many expenses of football. The only thing that will lead to the success of another football league is the NFL which has decided that its own football product could be improved by the presence of another football league. AAF seemed to realize this, but was shot down by myopia and the small size of its owners.
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