Most fans that is. So another football league may bite the dust. In case you missed it, the Arena Football League is in trouble after 21 years. Probably their biggest claim to fame is former Iowa Barnstormer turned NFL success story Kurt Warner. (We love rags-to-riches stories, and what’s more raggy than a former grocery bagger winning the Super Bowl!) But if you follow football, you know this is just one more football league trying to compete with the NFL and having a hard time doing it.Don’t know why. It seems more than with any other sport, brand or industry though, we seem to accept no substitutes when it comes to the NFL does not like competition.
Auto industry? The Big 3 see Honda and Toyota making serious inroads. Starbucks? I can get a latte at McDonald’s. Can’t afford an iPhone? No problem. Just get an LG VU. Entertainment/Music industry? They may be as close a model to sports and the NFL because they too are dependent on recruiting top talent. But even the music industry has been hurt by allowing countless download sites access to their distribution network, maybe even more important than a stable of musicians, not to mention the new acts emerging outside the majors’ grasp.
Not the NFL.
They control everything. Unlike other pro sports, there’s no minor league. (NFL Europe is a different animal because that's them expanding the reach of the American game over there, not compete with it here.) Baseball has several minor leagues, (doubling as farm systems), as does hockey with the AHL and the NBA with the summer Development league. Yeah you can argue that college is actually the NFL’s minor league, but this also holds true for the other sports as well.
My experience with the NFL’s ‘competitors’ goes back to the Atlantic Coast Football League where as a kid, I’d watch the Bridgeport Jets play in an all-concrete bleacher slash so-called stadium, complete with lights in one corner of the field that would go out at random times. Since then, I’ve watched the USFL, XFL, and the Arena League’s special cousin, Af2.
(Little history: Before then, you had the AFL in the 60s who’s teams would later merge with the NFL in 1970. You also had the United Football league merging with the Continental Football League before itself folding. Prior to that, the first official minor league for the NFL called the American Association, ran for five years before WWII.)
40+ years ago, the league was struggling to get attention. Forget shoe deals. Players often worked a second job in the off-season just to make ends meet. Not now. Attribute it to the first-mover thing, but more likely, better lawyers. They already had the talent locked up, but the smartest move the league made was securing TV rights to broadcast games. Next would be getting stadiums and benficial tax deals from municipalities—and fans.
You want to look at why any competing league fails, it begins and ends with those things.
Insane income from TV rights and merchandising each year? Check! All pro leagues sell merch, but the NFL’s reach extends into film and TV shows with their own channel, an HBO training camp series, and a yearly draft that has become a major weekend event for ESPN and an insanely popular gaming series. Fans want to use an NFL logo or team pic on their site? Nice try there as well.
Two words: Better lawyers.
As for the product itself, they’ve basically increased the number of games in a season, (16 regular, 4 pre-season), and run three days a week, and in some cases, four, which equals more ticket sales and ad revenue.
The league also has the parity it wants. Who cares if your team lost this year—free agency means you can restock next year and have another shot at it. Look at the Phoenix Cardinals, the laughing stock of the league, like, forever. This year? Playoffs.
The Super Bowl will again command record rates for commercials this year, a record viewing audience nearing 100+ million viewers domestically and almost twice that globally. (Yeah futbol purists, it still falls well short of World Cup numbers.)
More importantly though, all the things the NFL has done has created this brand loyalty that’s second to none. Whenever you see an XFL try and make it, the first thing you do is compare it to the NFL and think how it's not going to be as good. Just like Zune isn’t an iPod or that LG isn’t an iPhone.
When you have that, NFL competitors? As Jerry Glanville once said “Not For Long.”
2 comments:
Ah, the XFL. I had such high hopes. But Vince McMahon did give us "He Hate Me" and fun camera angles so we have that.
I thought the Arena Football tried to position itself not as competition for the NFL but as a complement to it. The seasons only partly overlapped, didn't they? It's weird. Arena Football used to have a lot of owners who also owned NFL teams (Dallas and Denver still do). Those owners were most in favor of pulling the plug this season so yeah -- cut out the competition at a time when the NFL's profits have fallen somewhat. Or, I guess, putting it in the best light. everyone's just decided to focus on their core business.
Anyway -- "The league also has the parody it wants." -- made me snort laugh. That's what happens when you go for parity.
That’s what happens when you don’t run spell check. ;-p
I had to rephrase the point of the whole thing, maybe it's not that the NFL cares, but that NFL fans only seem to want the real thing and not some imitation league.
On second thought, Atlanta making the playoffs without Vick? Parody!
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