What the AFL Got for Christmas
ESPN delivers the Arena Football League a television package worth opening.

Jim MANDELARO
MLNSportsZone.com

Are you ready for some Arena Football? Football-mad ESPN is. The Disney-owned mother of all sports cable networks is betting millions that the American public is, too.

ESPN and the 12-team Arena Football League (AFL) exchanged perhaps the biggest Christmas gifts in history, when they announced in December that they had signed a five-year agreement that gave ESPN partial ownership of the 20-year-old league and will put at least 26 AFL games on one of the many ESPN outlets each season

“This is a great opportunity to grow the [Arena Football] League,” ESPN spokesman Bill Hofheimer says. “It’s a terrific product.”

“We see a bright future for us both,” says John Skipper, ESPN executive vice president for content.

ESPN executives declined to comment on the size of the network’s ownership “minority” stake in the AFL.

This was the major media commitment that commissioner David Baker promised to deliver when Arena Football lost its contract with NBC.

The AFL was founded in 1987 as an American football indoor league, and the inaugural season featured a mere four teams: the Chicago Bruisers, Denver Dynamite, Pittsburgh Gladiators and Washington Commandos. The teams played a six-game  season, and Denver beat Pittsburgh in ArenaBowl I.

The league has experienced soaring increases in popularity over the last half decade. The AFL’s attendance has grown dramatically, rising to more than 12,400 people per game in 2005. TV numbers steadily have risen, too: From 12 million viewers in 2002 to 65 million last year, as the league divided its coverage among NBC, Fox Sports Network, Comcast and the Outdoor Life Network, now renamed Versus.

“We’ve had an increase of 442 percent in total viewers since 2002,” McCloskey says, “and we’re looking to increase that again through ESPN.”

Coverage begins on ABC on Sunday, March 4 with a pair of regional games – defending ArenaBowl champion Chicago at Kansas City and Dallas at New York.

The heart of the TV schedule, though, and one of the main reasons that ESPN jumped aboard with an alternative football format very different from the NFL, is the chance to show games on Monday night and keep that TV slot warm for ESPN’s flagship Monday Night Football NFL program.

 “Now,” Hofheimer says, “we have the ability to offer football on Mondays almost year-round. And this country has an insatiable appetite for football, whether it’s NFL, college or Arena.”

Over the last half-decade, ESPN has made a conscious and dramatic shift towards a football...

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