Arena Football League (AFL)

The AFL is hands down the most successful minor league system for professional football in the history of the United States. Around since 1987 arena football was a creative idea executed smartly although modestly over an extended period.

The AFL was the brain child of not big investors but of Jim Foster. Jim played college football at the University of Iowa. Following graduation he played for and eventually helped run different minor league football teams. An example of this is the Newton Nite Hawks (extra credit if you have any idea were Newton is) who Jim helped organize an international tour of Europe (video of this tour can be found on youtube and is kind of fun to see).

Jim understood the difficulties of minor league football. A minor league team would be luck to draw 6,000 fans. For that size large stadiums like those used by colleges and the NFL are out of the question. Minor league teams ended up mostly playing in high school football stadiums. The problem with that is high school football stadiums have a negative stigma, your are limited to the kind of promotions you can do, you can’t serve beer or alcohol which is were minor league baseball and hockey makes its money, and high school stadiums are often poorly maintained.

There is also a lot of expense connected to keeping a full roster (36 guys or more) on a football team lucky to draw 6,000 fans.

Jim saw the success indoor soccer was having during the 80s and had a revolutionary idea. He took the game of football and smushed it down to fit in a hockey rink. That way games could be played in indoor arenas around the country. 6,000 fans at a 60,000 seat NFL stadium look pitiful but 6,000 fans at a hockey arena looks like a happin time!  Since games were done in arenas you could sell beer and do crazy promotions and venues were used for big name concerts and other sporting events so there was no stigma.

Instead of playing 11 per side football the league played 8 per side and had an “iron man rule” where 6 players had to play both offense and defense. This reduced the roster size down to only 20 players per team making pay-roll a lot easier to get.

Jim Foster did a good job in the early days securing sponsorships and television deals and eventually big name investors.

In the early days many of the players were former DII college players and the league had a reputation of being a place players go when their careers weren’t going to go anywhere else. Slowly over time the caliber of players grew and there are along list of NFL players that used the AFL as a stepping stone.

So the league did a good job managing both personal expectation and fan expectation and a good job managing their pay-roll.

The main problem Arena Football has had is being accepted as “real” football. In the early days the game was very gimmicky this was okay because the league was trying to get noticed. When the league landed a national TV contract with NBC the game needed to become more mainstream and more like outdoor football. The ball size was too small, the iron-man rule became out-dated, the defense was too restricted, there was no running game, the nets at the end of the end zones seemed silly, the lack of out-of-bounds, the regular flying of players into the crowd, the amount of video game like crazy plays, All of these things kept the game from being accepted by the mainstream football fan and all of these issues could have been addressed easily.

Because of this Arena Football eventually filed for bankruptcy. The league is still around today. They currently have a pretty nice TV deal with CBS Sports and teams in several major markets. The AFL is still the best option for American football players to play professionally without going to Canada.