10
votes
The Alliance of American Football has failed spectacularly, of course
Link information
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- Title
- The AAF Failed Because All Minor League Football Does
- Published
- Apr 4 2019
- Word count
- 2251 words
the fact that the renewed viability of alternative football leagues now entirely rests in the hands of fucking vince mcmahon and his investors pains me greatly, because while mcmahon is a smart businessman, he's also about the least credible person who could possibly be doing this owing to his status as a character within his own enterprises and his previous history with alternative football. there are so many people who still hold his fucking disastrous, two-decade old first incarnation of the XFL over him and the possibility that it was rigged (even though there's no evidence of that) even today. barring a miracle, i have no idea how he intends to be any more successful than the AAF was.
The article mentions that there's also the FFL (Fredom Football League). That certainly looks interesting and they're claiming March 2020 will be their first season. So we'll see. They've certainly got an interesting ownership policy where teams are owned by a group of players, coaches, fans, investors, etc. rather than a single rich dude.
considering that i literally haven't heard of it, and i'm reasonably well versed in all of the wild alternative football leagues out there, i suspect they're not going to do so well unless they're intending to do some media blitz later this year. they do at least seem to have at least taken a page from what the AAF is doing and aren't targeting markets which are the physical location of already existing NFL teams (except oakland, but oakland is obviously losing the raiders), so i guess that's a good start.
I wonder if maybe they've focused their marketing at areas with teams. Neither the AAF or FFL have (or will have) teams anywhere near where I live, so maybe they do promote themselves, just not around me.
presumably. that would be one of the things you'd be smart to do as a start-up league, but local attendance does only get you so far. national TV deals and TV viewership tend to be bigger moneymakers and bigger factors in the survival of a league than how many people show up (the AAF's attendance for example on average was like, 15,000 a week which is kinda paltry compared to the NFL, but TV viewership was in the mid-hundreds of thousands which is pretty good and got a few of their games flexed onto networks nearly everybody has like TNT instead of second-tier cable package channels like CBSSNa and NFL Network).
This article is a pretty good rundown of why the AAF failed, including some reasonable speculation.
This is literally the first I'm hearing of the AAF, which is a shame because I think I would've really enjoyed it. Looking at the teams it's kind of notable that they picked locations (particularly in the east conference) without their own teams in the NFL (with Atlanta being a noticeable exception). Doesn't look like there was a remotely local team for me in the northeast, but we're saturated with NFL choices here, so that's understandable.