As the first season of the Alliance of American Football heads into its final three weeks, a few things are clear: the games are competitive and fun, the TV ratings are still decent and, outside of San Antonio, most of the teams really struggle to sell tickets.
Thanks to a league-record crowd of 30,345 in San Antonio for the Commanders’ 19-15 win over the Salt Lake Stallions on Saturday night, the AAF had its third-best weekend at the gate in week seven. The four games drew an announced 65,279 for an average of 16,3201The median – 12,587 – was just slightly below average, so don’t get too excited.. That’s (a) the highest since week two and (b) not nearly enough to pay the bills. (Especially when the crowd you see above, which appeared to be maybe half the announced total in Tempe, consisted of a lot of folks who got half-price tickets. I was one of them.)
Here are the team numbers after seven weeks of play:
| Team | G | Total | Average | Median | High | Low |
| San Antonio Commanders | 3 | 87,378 | 29,126 | 29,176 | 30,345 | 27,857 |
| Orlando Apollos | 3 | 58,943 | 19,648 | 20,191 | 20,394 | 18,358 |
| San Diego Fleet | 4 | 76,617 | 19,154 | 20,421 | 20,986 | 14,789 |
| Birmingham Iron | 4 | 54,207 | 13,552 | 15,175 | 17,319 | 6,539 |
| Memphis Express | 3 | 39,359 | 13,120 | 13,621 | 13,758 | 11,980 |
| Atlanta Legends | 4 | 43,581 | 10,895 | 10,773 | 11,416 | 10,619 |
| Arizona Hotshots | 4 | 39,727 | 9,932 | 9,556 | 11,751 | 8,865 |
| Salt Lake Stallions | 3 | 27,864 | 9,288 | 9,302 | 10,412 | 8,150 |
| AAF TOTAL | 28 | 427,676 | 15,274 | 13,466 | 30,345 | 6,539 |
Along with the big crowd in San Antonio, the Atlanta Legends announced their biggest gathering of the season (11,416, about 800 more than last week) and the possibility of seeing Johnny Manziel make his AAF debut apparently spurred an extra 137 people to come out to the Liberty Bowl to see the Memphis Express beat the Birmingham Iron in overtime. Memphis’ announced crowd of 13,758 was also their biggest ever. (Let’s be realistic here: “ever” covers just less than two months, and the idea that “droves of fans were pouring in,” as this fanboy breathlessly wrote, is ridiculous.)
I went to the Arizona Hotshots’ game against San Diego, and, for the second time, enjoyed an entertaining show by the home team while being part of a disappointing crowd. The announced 9,760 was about 400 more than Arizona’s last home game while also seeming to be about twice as big as the number of folks who were actually there. Only Salt Lake is keeping Arizona off the bottom of the league attendance table.
While the league has rebounded from its nadir in week four with three straight weekends of increasing announced attendance, the AAF is still way behind where they’d need to be to even lose scads of money. They’re surely losing way more than scads, given the startup costs of a league in the most expensive sport there is. (And chicanery like having the Orlando team train in Georgia to skirt workers’ compensation laws can only help so much.) While their new chairman has committed to a robust investment that he believes will cover their costs for five years or so, both his prediction and his patience remain to be tested. If they can’t do better than 15-16k per game, there’s going to be a lot of money going out the door in pursuit of the cause of player development2Or app development, one..
Attendance in March is off about 23 percent from the new-football-league smell of February, with inconsistent weather surely partially to blame3About that: who knew weather could be unpredictable in the first quarter of the year? Especially given how things are changing?, but outlandish expectations have probably played a part, too. The AAF may have thought football tickets sell themselves, but they don’t. Sales and marketing efforts have seemed to be lacking in this league the first time out, and it’s too late to do much about it for 20194Hence, the offer of $7 end zone tickets I received for one game and the half-price offer for the most recent one. It’s not the price point, guys – though their tickets have been overpriced..
Or maybe it’s as simple as something my companion at Sunday’s game said in the third quarter as he surveyed the random bodies rattling around in the 66,000-seat Sun Devil Stadium.
“Maybe people can get tired of football,” he said.
Maybe. And maybe the NFL truly is the only game in town. Even in towns that don’t have NFL teams.
I have read that the AAF has good tv ratings. I don’t have any knowledge as to what makes a “good number” for tv, but that might be what the league is aiming for.
They’ve been decent, though dropping.
The thing is: if they intend to one day get enough television revenue to get close to profitability, they’re going to need to demonstrate bona fide interest in the form of ticket sales.
I mean, do the math: if they sold each of the 400,000 or so announced tickets, even at an average of $30 each, that’s only $12 million. Their player wage nut is around $32 million. And that’s before they pay coach one, buy plane ticket one, pay stadium rent or buy one pair of shoulder pads.
Supposedly they are not getting money for TV yet, so their business model relies quite a bit on gate revenue. They have some sponsors, but how much revenue they generate from that is unclear. If there is betting going on through their app (which, again, I have not seen, but I don’t know if that’s because sports wagering is not yet fully legal in my state) and they get a cut of that, fine, that’s something. (Though wagering on their first week was supposedly just meh. Maybe it’s gotten better once things have shaken out a bit more.)
They can tout 400k people watching on NFL Network if they want. That’s good for NFL Network. Maybe there’s a revenue sharing circumstance, or maybe the AAF is paying the freight for the production (not cheap) and keeping the ad revenue (which seems to mostly be limited to their leaguewide sponsors). Either way, they’re probably not closing the gap via television.
And if people simply don’t care enough to go to their local team’s games, that doesn’t bode well, no matter how many people are watching on TV. (And it will never be a substantial number, I don’t think.) Unless Tom Dundon is just going to be content to lose money for eons, they have to make revenue get closer to expenditures.
And maybe that’s where licensing the gambling technology comes in. That has a chance to be really lucrative, once they have proof of concept. If they can license that and take a cut of every bet on the next three pointer, the next strikeout or the next power play goal, that can add up. They’ve said they’re a technology company that runs a football league, not a football company that has a gambling app.
However it works, the supposed “massive market for spring football” has simply not materialized. And this has been the best-organized, least train-wrecky alternative league to come along in many a moon. It’s hard to see how the football itself ever stands on its own. Just like it’s hard to see how the fanboys will ever give up on the idea that there’s this “massive market for spring football.” Despite all the evidence piling up.
Looks like you had it right all along. The new major investor now is saying that unless the NFLPA agrees to let their players into the AAF, they will have to fold.
I guess the AAF wants the NFL to “loan” players to them to reduce their rooster cost. It would also up the talent in the league. But I’ll bet it don’t happen.
Well, the fans here in San Antonio are holding up our end of the bargain. There is genuine support here for the Commanders. It would be a shame to see the Alliance fold, at least from a San Antonio perspective. The Commanders have brought the football fan base here together, something that UTSA is struggling to do because of the preponderance of UT, A&M, Baylor, Texas Tech, TCU, and other Texas school alumni in the area.
They certainly did, Joe. My sense is that if they could have received that level of support in all eight cities, it would be a different story. (It would be REALLY hard to get nearly 30k a game for this product in eight total cities, no matter which cities they were.)
What I don’t get is why some San Antonians (is that the demonym?) are saying, “See, this proves we could support an NFL team!”
I don’t think anyone doubts that a metro of 2.5 million people in a football-crazy state would support an NFL team. (Pittsburgh, Las Vegas, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Jacksonville and – of course – Green Bay are all smaller metros.)
But what are they campaigning for? Do they think the NFL is going to expand again when they have added six teams in the last 40 years and two in the last 25? Do they think someone’s going to move to San Antonio? Who’s in play here that you’re trying to attract?
I was hoping the league would succeed, and apart from Manziel there’s been no positive coverage after Week 1. I think it is clear there’s a market for minor league or spring football. It’s not “massive,” and it’s probably not in Arizona or Salt Lake. The TV ratings are good enough, and any other sport without such a high starting salary structure would love to have these (announced) attendances.
There should, in theory, be a way to make this work. The salary structure of the AAF appears relatively similar to that of the CFL based on very quick research. But if your business structure was putting out a quality product, hoping the market was “massive” while simultaneously hoping the NFL would subsidize some of your player costs going forward, that’s an extremely risky business model. You’d probably have to limit roster sizes, limit salaries, pick Triple-A towns and market the hell out of the team locally to make it work, and even then you’re looking at losing a lot of money in the startup phase.
That being said if they had 40-man rosters with an average annual salary of $40k/year (which appears to be in line with AA-AAA baseball, not including signing bonuses), as opposed to 52 and $83k, you’re looking at an annual salary structure of about $13m instead of $32m (before insurance), which seems more manageable. Get local marketing teams together and you’ve got a chance of sustainability.
I’m a big believer in the idea that the simplest explanation is USUALLY the right one.
From everything I’m reading, Dundon just had zero idea how expensive it would be to do this and eventually got sick of throwing money away. (He had slashed team budgets to the bone and they obviously were losing money with every game – or would have been, had they actually been invoiced by the University of Central Florida for stadium rental, or paid players’ hotel bills.)
It feels like the “We need NFL practice squad players and we need them NOW” bit was cover. It makes no sense, first off, because no one can name an NFL practice squad player, and — HELLO — it’s April and those guys haven’t done anything but OTAs (maybe) since last December. You were going to take, what, 100 of those guys and drop ship them into your teams and release 100 guys who had been there from the beginning? You thought you had bad football, drops and penalties, the first few weeks?
Until Ebersol and/or Dundon speak up, it’s all speculation, but it seems like the simplest explanation was a guy who saw money being burned and rather than throw another estimated $20M after it to complete the last month – and, presumably, pay the outstanding debts, of which there are many – just threw in the towel.
I have always said the reason none of this is really possible is that it’s simply too expensive to do football. Player wages are only part of it. When it comes out – as I suspect it will – exactly how much was lost in the AAF’s short existence, it ought to be a wake up call for the people who insist spring/alternative football “can work if it’s done right.”
It can’t work. It can’t be done right. It’s too expensive to do right. And you can’t generate enough revenue to offset that.
Thanks, John.
I was slightly surprised they went with 53-man rosters. Were players 41-53 REALLY going to be of that much use to you? (Coaches love to have as many players as they can, I get that.)
I don’t think anyone in AA baseball is making $40k a year. $1,700 a month is the starting AA salary and it’s $2,150 in AAA. But that’s a quibble that doesn’t invalidate your point, which is you have to contain costs.
But even then, remember this: the (original) XFL paid players virtually nothing, relatively (about $4,500 a week for most non-quarterbacks), only had 38 players on a team and didn’t offer them health insurance, marketed like there was no tomorrow, had an equity partner that was a major television network AND STILL LOST TENS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS.
If you do this as cheaply as you can, you can’t generate enough interest to pay even the meager bills. And, as we’ve seen in most places, people aren’t going to just run right out and buy tickets because footbawwwwwwwwwwwww. And if you try and go big, you can’t. That kind of money isn’t out there without a major commitment from television that is highly unlikely.
I went to two Hotshots games and was considering going either this weekend or waiting to see if they somehow got a home playoff game and going to that. It was fun. The weather here this time of year is ideal for outdoor football, the games were quick and (in a big plus for me) sparsely attended, which I selfishly enjoy.
But I’m under no delusion that this league was justthisclose to making it, because they weren’t. And I can’t for the life of me understand why people are saying, “Well, of course the XFL is going to be great because Vince McMahon is sinking a bunch of money into it” when he sank a bunch of money into it before and it didn’t work and he’s still going to lose a ton of money.
Obit time. Hoping to read your follow up to this soon. Did you happen to pick up a program for the Fleet game? I need a scan! As far as I can tell the Hotshots were the only AAF team to make something as old-fangled as a printed game program this season.
Croz
I actually do have an opening game program of the Hotshots, but didn’t get one from the Fleet game, even though I went. I picked up a car magnet at the most recent game that now adorns the lid to my gas tank.