By ALAN SNEL
LVSportsBiz.com
If you think football is over with the Brady Bowl and another Patriots coronation Sunday, you couldn’t be further from the truth.
More football is coming your way. There’s something called the Alliance of American Football, with its eight-team league, kicking off its first Saturday action in four days when Orlando plays Atlanta and San Antonio plays San Diego. A day later on Sunday, Birmingham plays Memphis, while Arizona takes on Salt Lake. LVSportsBiz.com was on hand in late November when this new league came to Las Vegas to draft its teams’ quarterbacks.
The league’s co-founder, Charlie Ebersol, and his alliance partner, NFL Hall-of-Famer Bill Polian, created the 10-week, 40-game regular season, with CBS Sports Network broadcasting a game a weekend. The league could function as a Triple A football feeder system, somewhere between college football and the NFL. Many of the players will be former college football players who competed in big-time name programs.
Naturally, there’s a Las Vegas connection. The new football league will stage its championship game the weekend of April 26-28, 2019 at Sam Boyd Stadium. You want to learn more about this upstart league? Just click here.
Then, there’s another eight-team football league in the works that will be played on a 50-yard indoor field with lots of production equipment and will look like a video game with fans both at the controls and watching games streamed live on Twitch, the website channel home to esports competitions.
The Fan Controlled Football League gives you a strong clue about who will be calling the plays for the seven-on-seven competition of teams playing in an Arena League-like setting. Games will last only an hour. Fans will choose everything from the team’s logos to its coaches and players.
Fans will follow the action via live streaming coming to their mobile phones or laptops, and esports-loving teens and millennials are used to catching everything from the popular Fortnite video game to even Vegas Golden Knights players competing against each other on the Twitch online platform.
The league tried a demo of its fan-run model when it launched an expansion team called the Salt Lake Screaming Eagles in the Indoor Football League in 2017. The team partnered with both Amazon’s Twitch and Sports Illustrated, and turned over control of the team to our fans. It generated hundreds of thousands of streams and play-calls via a mobile app from fans across the world, the league web site said.
An entrepreneur by the name of Sohrob Farudi from Manhattan Beach, California is the founder and CEO of the Fan Controlled Football League.
And naturally, there’s a Las Vegas connection to this football endeavor as well.
There’s been talk that Zappos head man Tony Hsieh will be an investor in the Fan Controlled Football League. But there’s no confirmation on Hsieh is involved — yet. (It should be noted that Hsieh’s Zappos — the downtown Las Vegas-based online clothing and shoe retailer — is a sponsor of the Vegas Golden Knights and the Las Vegas Lights FC soccer team.
Las Vegan Seth Schorr, chairman of the Downtown Grand hotel-casino and a former executive with Wynn hotel-casino company, is listed as an adviser for the Fan-Controlled Football League, according to the league’s website. (NFL Hall-of-Famer Joe Montana is listed as an adviser, too.)
UFC’s owner, Endeavor (formerly WME-IMG), is listed as a production partner.
The league is scheduled to launch in summer 2019, according to the website.
In 2020, when the Raiders arrive in Las Vegas and christen their new subsidized domed stadium, another football league starts with a name some might remember in Las Vegas.
It’s the XFL 2.0 with eight teams based in Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, St. Louis, Seattle, Tampa and Washington D.C. The original XFL was launched in 2001 and lasted only one season, with Las Vegas being one of the four teams. The XFL reboot is scheduled for February 2020.
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