cough
Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver all have populations that could support teams.
Of course, putting in a closer to NFL quality product with NFL rules rather than CFL would basically mean the end of the CFL.
Media Life Magazine - Coming, a second pro football league
Mentions a few cities in the running
Quote:
“Is it crazy to try to compete with the NFL? I don’t think so,” writes Cuban on his blog, Blogmaverick.com. “There is obviously demand for top-level professional football, [and] the NFL wants and needs competition.”
The UFL is targeting cities without NFL teams initially, such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas, as well as Mexico City. The NFL has scheduled games in Mexico before to great success, and branching out in this way would create a new and potentially loyal audience for football in general.
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Competing with the NFL - Blog Maverick
His blog entry has some amazing comments, but more impressively he hasn't responed. This looks like an early leak, and not a formal attempt at publicity - yet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/sp...l?ref=business
Quote:
Where others might be daunted by the N.F.L.’s success and power, though, Hambrecht came to believe its monopoly status gave him an opening. “I really started thinking hard about this after the Los Angeles Rams left to go to St. Louis and the Houston Oilers went to Nashville,” he told me over drinks recently. “Why do you leave two of the top 10 TV markets in the country for these two smaller markets?”
The answer, of course, is that the N.F.L. doesn’t really have to worry about where its teams are located, since most games are televised and the bulk of the league’s revenues come from its network contracts. What’s more, with the right stadium deal and enough corporate sponsorship, team owners can make as much (or more) money in smaller cities as they can in larger ones. That’s why the N.F.L. does just fine despite not fielding a team in 21 of the country’s top 50 markets — including such enormous metropolitan areas as San Antonio, Las Vegas, Orlando and (of course) Los Angeles. Nor does the N.F.L., which now has 32 teams, have much incentive to expand. On the contrary: expansion dilutes the TV money. (Greg Aiello, the N.F.L.’s spokesman, told me that “expansion isn’t on the table right now.”)
So the first step in Hambrecht’s plan is to enter big cities where the N.F.L. isn’t. As Mark Cuban put it to me in an e-mail, “There are quite a few good-sized non-N.F.L. cities that can support a pro team.” So far, the U.F.L. has decided to put teams in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Mexico City. (Cuban is considering taking the Las Vegas franchise.) Each owner will put up $30 million, giving him an initial half-interest in the team; the league will own the other half. But eventually the fans themselves will become shareholders — because each team is going to sell shares to the public. Then the owner, the league and the fans will each own a third of every franchise.
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I like the idea of fan ownership quite a bit. Fan
ownership could change the way the league operates, particularly if a significant portion of the fan ownership disagrees with ownership. The selloff would lower share value. I have read that the league might try and find a way to buy/sell shares on a mobile phone, which could lead to a trade market based on performance of actual cash. Similar to WallStreetSports or Protrade, but with real money.
United Football League (planned) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Borrowing from my post on population centers that might get baseball by 2030.
LA, Portland, Sacramento, SanAntonio, LasVegas, VirginiaBeach, Memphis, Louisville, Richmond, Birmingham are the ten largest cities without an NFL franchise in the US that don't share neilson/arbitron markets with current teams. Most of those have a major stadium (40k+) available nearby, though a collegiate one.
The stadium issue, is well one of the larger issues facing this endevour. Would anyone in Portland really drive to Corvalis or Eugene to see an expansion league rather than Seattle?