Reports are circulating this morning that the Arena Football League is shutting down for good. The league had previously canceled its 2009 season, ostensibly to reach a revamped collective bargaining agreement with its players and to develop a new b
usiness plan. The AFL, which seemed to be on such firm footing when it arrived in Kansas City in 2005, is yet another industry that has fallen prey to the wheezing economy. As a result, it looks like the Brigade is done after three seasons, 16 wins and 32 losses.
We’ve seen our share of minor-league sports come and go in Kansas City. Just this decade has seen the demise of the Comets (indoor soccer), Outlaws (hockey) and Knights (basketball). Am I missing anybody? The Brigade, and the AFL, seemed different. This was a unique product, a pinball version of football, that was fun to watch and enough like the real thing to satiate the appetite of many gridiron fans in the lull between the Super Bowl and the NFL draft. It had been around for awhile, too, unlike the WFL, USFL and XFL, having started up in 1987. The AFL enjoyed 22 seasons as a luxury on a consumer landscape that gobbled up such goodies.
When things start to go bad, though, guilty pleasures like indoor football suddenly don’t seem so important. That turned out to be true not only of the fans that supported the AFL, but also for the corporations that helped to subsidize it. When big ticket companies like ADT and Discover Card begin tightening their belts, it’s lights out for middling sports entities.
Still, the business model — the one the league’s owners were so keen to reinvent — seemed so sound. There was a saleable core product, distinct enough in its nature and distribution that there wasn’t any direct competition. Player salaries were subject to a hard salary cap, though the cap was not tied to league revenues, a la the NBA, which turned out to be a problem. Attendance was solid in most cities. The league had a national television agreement with NBC when the Brigade came into the league and also broadcast games on the vast Fox Sports network of regional stations.
ESPN took over as the league’s television partner in 2007, a season in which the AFL posted its highest-ever levels of attendance. Over the years, the league had moved towards celebrity ownerships, with the likes of John Elway, Mike Ditka, Ron Jaworski, Jon Bon Jovi and Neil Smith among those with stakes in teams. With the celebs came the egos. First, Bon Jovi and others complained of NBC’s lack of promotion of the league. Then Elway was part of a push to revamp the on-field product. The league’s identity as the last bastion of the two-way player was eroded and, with it, some of what made the league special was lost.
The consequences of that paled in comparison to the economy-based problems, but they didn’t help. What was the league trying to become? For two decades, it had grown slowly and methodically. Then, with the leading ghosts of NFL past now setting the course, and the incestuous nature of the partnership with ESPN complicating matters, for the first time the AFL seemed as if it was trying to be NFL Lite. Was that a mistake? I think so, but, again, that is probably small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.
So the Brigade is history and the Sprint Center has at least eight more open dates on the annual sports calendar. Fans of the economic advantages of attending minor-league events in Kansas City still have the T-Bones. Our defending Northern League champions continue to thrive at the gate, thanks to the enthusiasm by Wyandotte County residents for their adopted team and the success of the area of the city in which the T-Bones toil. Perhaps the new Missouri Mavericks can enjoy similar good tidings if the good people of Independence become puckheads en masse.
Nevertheless, I’m going to miss the Arena League. I covered the league for The Star during its first season in town and really enjoyed the experience. I watched several games each week, developed one of my typically-complicated rating systems and wrote a feature about one of my childhood heroes — John Elway.*
The Brigade developed a solid and enthusiastic fan base and also employed a lot of good people, such as head coach Kevin Porter. Porter will be fine, he’s already helping out at MidAmerica Nazarene, and if he wants to stay working in football, he’ll find a way. But what about the marketing people? Media relations? The administrative staff? What of the players, who put their bodies on the line in a dangerous vocation for a pittance compared to the salaries of NFL players?
There are a lot of people that have lost work during the demise of the AFL. I don’t feel any worse for them than I do for the victims of any struggling industry, including the one in which I work. Nevertheless, I feel bad for those people and it’s of them I am thinking this morning.
