Oh man, where have I been. Seems like this would be something that would make sense for the NFL and UFL to team up.
Same place everyone else was... not watching or caring about the UFL.
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- Thread starter BB73
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Same place everyone else was... not watching or caring about the UFL.
ORD_Buckeye
Wrong glass, Sir.
So, I've been listening to some Chick Webb and thinking about the numbers for my hypothetical minor league.
I recalculated my salary figures, and they're actually a good bit lower. 60 players at 40K/year (x 1.2 for payroll taxes) brings player compensation to $2,880,000 per team x 8 teams for an annual league total of just over $23MM.
Now you need to add salaries for coaches, trainers, league officials, part time refs, assistants to the traveling secretary and so on. Add in some kind of blanket health insurance/medical care for the players, leasing stadiums, a marketing budget, offices and training facilities, travel expenses and so on. I'm not going to waste the time researching how this might break down, but let's say that total league operating expenses would be equal to player salaries. So an annual operating budget of $46MM of which half is salaries. That leaves $23MM for overhead. Take $3MM off the top to run the league office, and each team would need to operate on an annual budget of $2.5MM. That seems low to me, but sticking with it for now........
Assuming that initial capitalization would be two years of operating expenses, that means that Cuban (and maybe a couple of well heeled investors) would need to cough up $100MM to get the league up and running.
With regards to breaking even on an annual basis, assume that they could average 15K at an average paid attendance of $15. They have four games a week over a 12 game schedule for 48 regular season games, plus three playoff games. That's 51 total games. Their selling 765,000 tickets at $15 for total league ticket revenue of $11,475,000, leaving a shortfall of roughly $35MM (or a little under $4MM per team). Could they close that gap with a combination of radio/television rights, concessions, sponsorships and merchandise? Could they expect to average more than 15K a game? Get more than $15 per ticket?
I recalculated my salary figures, and they're actually a good bit lower. 60 players at 40K/year (x 1.2 for payroll taxes) brings player compensation to $2,880,000 per team x 8 teams for an annual league total of just over $23MM.
Now you need to add salaries for coaches, trainers, league officials, part time refs, assistants to the traveling secretary and so on. Add in some kind of blanket health insurance/medical care for the players, leasing stadiums, a marketing budget, offices and training facilities, travel expenses and so on. I'm not going to waste the time researching how this might break down, but let's say that total league operating expenses would be equal to player salaries. So an annual operating budget of $46MM of which half is salaries. That leaves $23MM for overhead. Take $3MM off the top to run the league office, and each team would need to operate on an annual budget of $2.5MM. That seems low to me, but sticking with it for now........
Assuming that initial capitalization would be two years of operating expenses, that means that Cuban (and maybe a couple of well heeled investors) would need to cough up $100MM to get the league up and running.
With regards to breaking even on an annual basis, assume that they could average 15K at an average paid attendance of $15. They have four games a week over a 12 game schedule for 48 regular season games, plus three playoff games. That's 51 total games. Their selling 765,000 tickets at $15 for total league ticket revenue of $11,475,000, leaving a shortfall of roughly $35MM (or a little under $4MM per team). Could they close that gap with a combination of radio/television rights, concessions, sponsorships and merchandise? Could they expect to average more than 15K a game? Get more than $15 per ticket?
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Your numbers don't take into account one minor detail: Nobody wants to watch bad football. 15K per game attendance? No way that happens. People aren't going to watch a product where the teams are comprised of grown men and ex-college wash outs not good enough for the NFL alongside kids right out of high school nobody has ever heard of.
NBC and the WWE lost $70 million on the XFL in only one season with arguably the most prime TV contract for any start-up sports league in history. The USFL presented a far superior product and most remember it as mildly successful producing a boat load of future NFL talent, including multiple NFL Hall of Famers. In three years the USFL lost $163 million -- which adjusted from 1985 dollars would be more like a bajillion dollars in todays economy. The NFL itself was losing $30 million a season on NFL Europe and axed that in 2007.
Bad football is bad.
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Deety
Head Coach
I've often wondered why retired NFL players don't use their resources and connections to start their own minor league. They retire young enough to start a new business and stay in it for a long time, probably feel as though they could do it better than the NFL, have access to people with the business skills to make it work, and could get it moving pretty quickly. They could still partner with colleges to whatever extent to offer educational benefits and gain game venues, but set their own rules to make it more of a college/NFL hybrid program with the contractual relationship being between the new league and the schools rather than the players and the schools. I could see both good and very bad things coming from that sort of setup.
Whatever the ultimate ramifications of this case wind up being, it should at least be an interesting ride.
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I remember going to watch the Shelby Blues back in the day. But, then again I also go to minor league hockey and baseball games. They are more affordable and in many cases more enjoyable. Somehow baseball and Hockey have made it work.
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Interesting concept Deety. I haven't really heard anyone discuss the Socioeconomic and educational ramifications of what could occur to this point. There are kids who legitimately see sports as a path to offsetting the cost of college, who might not otherwise have a path to college.
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Just my .02, if the Arena league failed, the NFL D-League has about zero chance of actually succeeding.
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cincibuck
You kids stay off my lawn!
Yeah but.... IF as I think, the pay for play plan breaks the college sports back for all but a handful, maybe 50, programs, then the NBA and NFL might re-think their current stance on minor league programs. Right now the NFL- if it wants to keep expanding- needs to find more markets. That could mean teams in Europe, Canada and Latin America - or it can mean US teams that can fill in the open TV dates.
The NFL has a hands off policy on Friday and Saturday football. 16 weeks plus playoffs - Labor Day to February. If there are only 50 college teams - or better still, none- that could end. Bingo-bango - new market - four games on Saturday to sell. That might also be the time to sell minor league football. Or minor league football could fill the off-season market - a ten week late winter - early summer season with a July draft to follow the championship.
Bad football may be bad football, but to someone like me bad football beats the hell out of baseball and NBA basketball. The only sports TV I watch from the day after the Super Bowl until the last week of August are the NCAA tourney games. I'm a potential market and I'm guessing that there are others like me out there. It certainly won't match NFL season market numbers, but it doesn't need to.
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ORD_Buckeye
Wrong glass, Sir.
The XFL was a bad joke with ridiculous ambitions. A true minor league wouldn't be composed of college rejects and NFL wash outs. It would be composed of players who today are some of the biggest starts in college football right out of high school. You think Vince Young is going to Texas if Radio has a minor league avenue in which to prepare for the NFL, and that goes for a lot of young talent. You think that Buckeye with the 3rd grade reading level (and I'm going to go out on a limb and assume he was a major recruit coming out of HS) is coming to Columbus if he can major in football for 40K a year and focus 100% on preparing for the NFL.
The problem with the USFL is that they didn't see themselves as a minor league. They saw themselves as a big city, major league bidding head-to-head against the NFL for top talent coming out of college. Comparing that to a true minor league operation, preparing talented kids out of high school for a shot at the NFL in 3-4 years down the road is the ultimate apples-to-oranges comparison.
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zincfinger
Gert Frobe-approved
Don't those minor leagues generally make it work by being owned and largely funded by the major leagues they exist to serve?
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ORD_Buckeye
Wrong glass, Sir.
They're affiliated with a major league team, but I don't think they are, as a matter of course, owned by that team.
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zincfinger
Gert Frobe-approved
You're probably right. My point wasn't so much about formal ownership as about economic self-sufficiency. My guess is that for any football minor league (other than CFB) to work, it would have to be subsidized by the NFL.
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The Arena League couldn't keep the Destroyers in football crazy Columbus past five seasons with attendance figures falling from 17,000 to 12,000 (and 7,000 of those attendees were dressed as empty seats -- corporate sponsors had a hard time giving away free tickets, and this was while the team was AFL championship caliber). The leagues high-water mark honestly was the positive rep from Kurt Warner winning the Super Bowl in a different football league, which provided a big bump in attendance and viewers up until about 2005. By 2010 they'd scrubbed an entire season and folded two franchises. Today AFL teams average 8,000 fans and there is literally no competitive football alternative. NFL Europe is gone. The UFL is gone. Div 1A college expansion where ESPN is now showing feature games on Thurs & Friday I think has over saturated the market to the point a lot of people really don't need any more football in the spring and summer. Alongside that, NASCAR has kind of become a thing and Major League Baseball is as popular as it has ever been.
Yes, there are people like you (and me) that might support a local D-League spring football team with an occasional walk-up ticket purchase, but corporate partnerships with Joe's Sunoco and the local Qwik-E-Mart doesn't pay the bills.
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I watched Radio because he was a superstar for the Texas Longhorns. If he skips college to play for the Albuquerque Chihuahuas neither you or I know who he is, because an NFL caliber coach for a true minor league team will have weeded his ass off the roster after two seasons once it's clear VY isn't much for book learning.
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ORD_Buckeye
Wrong glass, Sir.
The thing is you or I don't have to watch him so long as the people of Albuquerque buy in.
I also think a badass NFL coach would have been the best thing for Radio back then. It might have instilled some discipline in him as well as the notion that he had better learn how to read an NFL level playbook.
If he had failed out in the minors, it then would have saved an NFL team millions of dollars that would otherwise be wasted on an imbecile.
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