The messy, quick death of the AAF, Silicon Valley's complement to the NFL | Sport

It end with a bang and to whimper. The bang was the head injured last Saturday by Johnny Manziel, which forced the quarterback out of the game and to the sideline, where he sat on a folding chair. The whimper was the mealy-mouthed via an email to employees it is not only a two-fold break-up, but it is becoming increasingly important to have a huge popularity, the NFL is the only professional game that matters.

Its pretenders always start with tragicomedy and farce, unhinged by the reality that the planet is still alive and well. A hundred million Super Bowl viewers in the winter does not mean there is a gap in the market in the spring.

The AAF folded faster than the World Football League, which was not exactly global, since it was stretched from Philadelphia to Honolulu, whose best team was operating when it came to driving, and saw a player abruptly exit the field when it was served. with a restraining order during a game. It sank sooner than the United States Football League, which was made over the face of the real-estate tycoon who became the 45th President of the United States. And it was introduced to the United Football League, which was mired in financial and legal woes, and the XFL, the shambles tawdry shamed by the wrestling impresario, Vince McMahon.

The AAF's demise – barring the emergence of a deep-pocketed savior – is bizarrely timed, coming out of two weeks after Tom Dundon, owner of the Carolina Hurricanes NHL franchise, took charge after announcing he would invest $ 250m. Warning signs included moving the final from Las Vegas to an arena at the Dallas Cowboys' training ground that holds only 12,000. The last hours were predictably messy, with Steve Spurrier, telling the Orlando Sentinel, "we're definitely getting ready for this year" were definitely not.

Perhaps Spurrier could have divined that his first-place Orlando Apollos had some problems at mission control when they were staying in Jacksonville, a two-hour drive north of Orlando, and training at a high school another 30 miles away , just across the line, because it was easier to find out in Georgia than in Florida.

Still, the quality of play was reasonable. There was a celebrity fan: "ALLOWING THE PLAYERS TO ACTUALLY FIGHT WOULD BE KEY TO LEAGUE'S SUCCESS", Eminem tweeted.

Though teams in Salt Lake City and Phoenix struggled to attract more than 10,000 fans to games, the league was averaging 15,000 and San Antonio had an announced crowd of 30,345 in week seven. Ratings were strong and better than Major League Soccer, while they were tightly controlled: all the players were on contracts offering a total of $ 250,000 over three years.

But the eight teams had 52-man rosters and only five regular-season home games. Add the costs of having a job, and it is obvious that the economics are daunting for any major league.

The co-founders, Bill Polian, a veteran NFL executive, and Charlie Ebersol, a 36-year-old TV producer, knew that. They saw the AAF as a complement to the NFL rather than competitor: a spring league that started the week after the Super Bowl and had a deal to broadcast some games on the NFL Network. They hoped the relationship would deepen over the years and that the AAF would emerge as a gateway to the NFL.

However, Dundon told USA Today that NFC may be used, but it may not be used in the future, but it may not be effective in the future. he did not see a future.

Yet the play itself was only half the story. Conceptually, the AAF was part little brother to the NFL, part Silicon Valley start-up. And like a lot of new tech companies, it was becoming more profitable than ever before, but it would be a market that would lead to a dominant market share when the time was right for its product to become ubiquitous.

From its San Francisco office, the AAF developed hardware and software to track, visualize and analyze games in real time, and have a mobile app. That has obvious appeal for fantasy gaming. And since a 2018 US Supreme Court ruling essentially legalized Vegas-style sports wagering across the country, making the AAF's instant technology lucrative lucrative, especially if licensed to others.

It's a bit surprising that the AAF had a partnership with the casino operator MGM Resorts International and that investors included Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based technology venture capital firm. The likes of the Iron Birmingham, Atlanta Legends and Memphis Express might have scored their last touchdowns, but the AAF's digital platform could live on.

McMahon, meanwhile, is planning an XFL reboot for 2020 and seven of the eight teams will be in cities that have NFL franchises. The apparent collapse of the AAF removes a rival, but it seems like a good omen.