ATHLETICISM OR EXPLOITATION?
Legends football coming to Canada
The Legends Football League last month announced a new uniform deal that would include “sleeker designs” and “more engaging colours.”
The deal will also lead to the introduction of something you wouldn’t normally expect a football league to be without: pants.
You probably have not heard of the Legends Football League, but you might be familiar with its 2004 predecessor: the Lingerie Bowl, a pay-per-view special aired during halftime of the Super Bowl that was exactly as shameless as it sounds.
After a few of those, the enterprise turned into an actual league and four years ago the word “Lingerie” was replaced with “Legends” — although the outfits became only moderately more demure. The women essentially wear bikinis and the uniform’s signature design is a pair of shoulder pads that somehow provide protection while also exposing a lot of cleavage.
Now, it is coming to Canada. Super Channel, a premium pay channel based in Edmonton, this week announced a threeyear deal with Legends Football League, around which it will launch the Super Channel Sports programming block. The third year of that deal, 2019, coincides with the league’s planned date for an LFL Canada, with teams based in Vancouver, Calgary, Regina and Toronto.
It seems worth noting, at this point, that none of this is satire.
There is actually a league for a full-contact sport in which the female athletes are dressed in revealing outfits for the benefit of their male audience. If a game was played in heavy rain, it would be mud-wrestling with helmets. Are we really still doing this?
Mitchell Mortaza, the league’s founder and commissioner, says concerns about exploitation are overblown. People have accused him of such things for years, he says, “and nothing I’m going to say is going to sway them.”
“I think if people have that reaction, it’s because they haven’t seen the athletes,” he says. “They really just have to see the sport, see the athletes.”
So, I did. The LFL has a YouTube channel that includes game broadcasts alongside the obligatory LFL Hottest Athletes of 2016 collection. There’s no disputing the sport, a seven-onseven version of football on a 50-yard field, includes talented athletes. Mortaza says most of the current athletes played Division I sports in the NCAA, where in the past the league recruited “model-actress types.”
There are runs, throws, passes and hits. The spirals can be as tight as the uniforms.
“It was primarily sold on sex appeal back in the day and now we are pushing athleticism.”
He notes the new pants this season as evidence of the focus on performance over titillation. The pants have nothing in the way of pads to disrupt the curves.
Don McDonald, chief operating officer of Super Channel, says “It’s ideal for pay TV. It’s edgy, it’s unique, it’s skewed to the male demographic.”
The first season on Super Channel Sports begins in April.
As for the uniforms, he pivots to the players: “They are incredibly athletic” and they “have a passion to play.”
“They certainly are uniquely dressed,” McDonald allows.
It’s not clear why the league wants to have it both ways. Mortaza can claim the sport is no longer primarily about sex appeal, but the marketing suggests otherwise. Players are spritzed with water and posed with come-hither looks and those league-produced YouTube videos describe its athletes as being “a real-life Pocahontas” and having “rock-hard abs and a backside that could rival Kim K.” Again: not satire.
The dispiriting reality is, other than tennis and golf, there are few opportunities for women to play pro sports, and those that do exist are on the fringes. Pro hockey and soccer leagues are fledgling, but they attract a small fraction of the attention the same athletes get when they play for national teams in an Olympics or World Cup.
The LFL offers a chance for female athletes to play a competitive sport in front of a paying audience — the women are unpaid — as long as they are OK with wearing a chest protector that does not cover their chest. Sports remains the tail of the equality curve, where it’s still often thought the best way to get exposure is to expose more.
The LFL experimented with some trial games in Canada a few years ago, which convinced Mortaza the market for his product here exists. Mortaza insists the brand has changed.
“It has evolved quite a bit,” he says. “Absolutely, it is going to continue on that trajectory.”
It has a long way to go before it will stop being depressing.
It’s ideal for pay TV. It’s edgy, it’s unique, it’s skewed to the male demographic.