This kind of shit sucks for everyone involved. It actually pisses me off. It was horrible to read when they were having issues paying out after the first week of the season. I hoped with more investors and tv coverage they would make it through the season. They only made it through 8 of the 10 game season and made players pay for their own travel back home. That's ********ed up. I don't know how many football leagues indoors and outdoors have come and gone. People forget that when they talk about all of the things done to make sure MLS is viable now and in the future.
Yeah, its definitely raw to the players involved. These are guys who were seriously scouted and yet not drafted for the NFL. A number of them probably have had trials/limited walk-on runs with those teams. They're good, they love the game, and this was their way of getting to play it beyond their college years. I imagine the pay was pretty paltry, i.e. early MLS days where you'd need a job selling cars part time to get by for the year or something. And they had to pay their own way home. Hopefully not booked on WOW airline... Early MLS had to do enough to make it financially (and perhaps still does need what it does to keep thriving) and that's without the money sucking machine that is the NFL around pulling the attention and draw. Sure we had European, Mexican League, and USMNT fans in the US, but there was a fan base to be built in cities for local teams. These football leagues are often working smallish markets that are already heavily saturated with NFL allegiances.
It's not surprising. The NFL has peaked and is probably looking at a slow but steady decline in the foreseeable future. Part of the problem is that a lot of people are becoming uncomfortable with a sport that demonstrably enhances the prospect of permanent brain damage for those who choose to play. Sort of the same thing happened with boxing, which is why boxing has become a niche, albeit a lucrative niche, sport. The guys who threw their money away on the AAF would have been better advised if they had invested in the new American pro rugby and pro lacrosse leagues, which have a long term upside that pro football does not have.
Here's how much trouble the AAF was in: you guys are talking about its birth and death, and I've never heard of it. What was it? An indoor football league?
Outdoor. Spring league... maybe going into the summer. I listened to a couple people talk about it on a podcast around when they played their first game and it sounded pretty well doomed to failure.
It seemed pretty sound through most of the first weekend. It did decent ratings on CBS and that led to expanding tv coverage on the NFL Network. Then players didn't get paid after that first weekend.
The way MLS is set up, we could vault past those other countries by having an entire league not making payroll since they pay for all but the DP-excess salaries