Hurricanes owner tosses lifeline to struggling AAF
When the Alliance of American Football debuted a little over a week ago to decent television ratings, it was widely viewed as a strong start for an upstart league with modest goals.
The strong start lasted a matter of days.
On Tuesday morning, the AAF announced that Tom Dundon, the entrepreneur who also happens to own the NHL’S Carolina Hurricanes, had “committed” US$250 million to the football league. That’s certainly a commitment.
Multiple reports suggested the AAF was close to insolvency, and the Dundon intervention was variously reported as his having either saved the league or essentially bought it. By the end of the day, it was evident that Dundon had bought the AAF.
It’s not unexpected that the AAF would have had some issues in its first season, as has always been the case for spring football in the United States, but usually the first brush with death doesn’t come quite so soon.
The AAF includes eight teams, all league-owned, six of which have played home games so far through two weeks.
Attendance has been strongest in San Antonio, former home of the CFL’S Texans, where a reported 28,000 turned out at the Alamodome. No other team cracked 21,000, and some of the announced attendance figures in other markets didn’t reflect the number of fans who were actually in the stands. A reporter with the Atlanta Journal-constitution estimated a crowd of about 9,000 in the stands for Atlanta’s game at San Diego (announced attendance was a little over 20,000). Similarly, Memphis reporters put the actual attendance at that team’s home opener at about half the announced total of 11,000 at Liberty Bowl Stadium.
The TV ratings were due for a steep decline in Week 2. The league’s opening game was televised on CBS, but the AAF won’t be shown again on that broadcast network until the championship game in late April. Instead, the AAF will be found on little-watched cable outlets like CBS Sports Network and the NFL Network, where audiences will be a tiny fraction of what they were on the main CBS network.
Dundon’s largesse could be just the thing that’s needed to backstop the AAF into something more than the one-and-done of so many spring leagues, but whatever happens, there are lessons here for the Canadian Football League, which has watched the emergence of the AAF with some trepidation. While it’s new enough to have not caused any sort of talent exodus of American players from the CFL, it remains a threat to the Canadian game, and all the more so if the sudden arrival of a giant money pile gives it stable funding. Every AAF player gets a first-year salary of US$70,000, which means the entire eight-team league, with 52-player rosters, would have a payroll just above $29 million.
Dundon’s commitment would appear to provide years of financial support, although he may have escape clauses in his deal. Rich guys usually include those. But the early challenges of the AAF, aside from what it means to a potential competitor, should show something else to the CFL: that it isn’t easy to create a market for pro football where one doesn’t already exist.
Commissioner Randy Ambrosie has spent a lot of time this off-season pushing his expansion of the CFL into foreign markets, with forays into Mexico and across Europe, all of which are intended to result in media deals in those countries and, in theory, CFL fans across the globe. It’s a nice idea. But actually creating those fans in new markets is another thing.
You can’t just show up and drop your football at midfield and expect enthusiastic support. When the new football league in town gets a tepid response in places like Tennessee and Alabama, one has to wonder how smoothly an unfamiliar league will export to places like Germany, Mexico and Scandinavia.