By Jim McCarthy Dec 17, 2008 0 comments

Arena Football, We Hardly Knew Ye

Today, the Arena Football League announced that it’s cancelling the 2009 season.

Sure, there are plenty of Arena Football jokes to go around, but the league is the second-longest operating football league in history (22 years) and had a lot of support from the NFL.

Now, owners (like Jon Bon Jovi, John Elway, and NFL owners Jerry Jones and Arthur Blank) say they’re going to reconfigure the thing and bring it back in ’10, but I’d say that’s far from a certainty.

In theory, the AFL should have a strong niche:  affordable, family-friendly, football, and of course, they’ve had some success.  Heck, they were on NBC for a few years there and showed signs of life for a while.

Here’s my view of what didn’t work out for them:

* The product was weird.  Football is a game where you’re not supposed to score all the time.  By default, Arena Football teams scored a touchdown on almost every drive.  That’s kinda backwards, and it gave the game a frenetic, unserious feel.

*Football is tribal, and the building of tribal loyalties around the teams didn’t quite work.  Easier said than done, obviously.

*They didn’t reach the moms.  Moms make decisions about things like family outings, and they’re not as a rule friendly toward football.  They should have hit the Mom crowd much harder with their marketing, assuring them that this is the wholesome, fun alternative to paying $150 to NFL-ons play, knowing that so many of them are dubious characters off the field.  They mixed the message and made it sometimes about ‘hard core football’ fans and sometimes about family, but never about mom.  Not very Live 2.0, fellas.

Arena football is probably not even on your radar screen, and rightly so, but it’s an excellent illustration of how important it is to have niche focus and a product that addresses that niche.

Best wishes for a return to the astroturf next year!

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Reddit
  • Twitter
  • Yahoo! Buzz

Comments are closed.