Arena Football League (1987-2019)

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Arena Football League
1987-2002 Logo T-Shirt

This logo tee from Old School Shirts reps the original Arena Football League logo, used for the league’s first 16 seasons as the circuit grew from four to sixteen franchises. The design includes uprights to imply one of the most unique innovations of the  indoor game –  the taut netting surrounding narrowed uprights that ricocheted kickoffs and missed field goals back into live play. Curiously, the netting wasn’t incorporated into the graphic which seems like a missed opportunity.

This design is also available as a Hooded or Crewneck Sweatshirt from Old School Shirts today!

When you make a purchase through an affiliate link like this one, Fun While It Lasted earns a commission at no additional cost to you. Thanks for your support!

Background

The original Arena Football League was a patented 50-yard indoor football game system developed by a former NFL employee named Jim Foster. Foster first came up with the idea while watching a Major Indoor Soccer League match at Madison Square Garden in 1981.  It took six years for Foster to fully develop the concept and launch the league in 1987. The first season was modest but Arena Football had an ESPN contract for that first campaign, which helped Foster’s strange little league gain a modest measure of national attention.

The league muddled along in fits and starts through the rest of the 1980’s and most of the 1990’s.  Towards the end of the Nineties a sequence of events came together to raise Arena Football’s profile.  In 1998, ABC broadcast Arena Bowl XII to a national broadcast audience on Wide World of Sports.  Two years later, a former grocery store clerk and Arena Football star named Kurt Warner rose from obscurity to win first the St. Louis Rams’ quarterback job and then MVP honors in Super Bowl XXXIV.

NFL Investment Fuels Speculative Bubble

As the 2000’s dawned, Arena Football franchise valuations shot upwards.  Expansion fees increased from $250,000 in 1993 to $16.2 million by 2003.  A national broadcast contract with NBC made the league sexier to speculators, as did the influx of investment from the National Football League.  Eventually six NFL ownership groups would purchase Arena Football franchises in the early 2000’s: the Atlanta Falcons, Dallas Cowboys, Denver Broncos, Detroit Lions, New Orleans Saints and Tennessee Titans.

For a time the league gorged on fat expansion fees and trumpeted rising attendance, which helped to paper over large operational losses. But by the mid-2000’s, the expansion pipeline began to dry up.  The Lions, Saints and Titans shuttered their Arena League franchises. The bubble burst when the 2009 season was cancelled as league attempted a financial restructuring. The effort failed and the original league closed down and filed for bankruptcy in August 2009.

Relaunch & Final Bankruptcy

Throughout the 2000’s, the Arena Football League had an affiliated “minor league” known as AF2, which ran lower-budget clubs in small markets like Shreveport, Spokane and Tulsa.  A group of AF2 investors plus a few of the non-NFL investors in the original Arena League banded together to purchase the intellectual property rights to Arena Football from the bankruptcy court for $6.1 million in late 2009.

This group of owners re-launched the Arena Football League in 2010 and claims the records and history of the original 1987-2008 league. In a few cases, franchise names and owners carried over between the two leagues. But for the most part, the new league was substantially poorer and less disciplined than the original organization.

In a bid for attention, the league awarded expansion franchises to KISS stars Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley (Anaheim) and Motley Crue front man Vince Neil. Both clubs soon folded, with Neil’s Las Vegas Outlaws supplying an especially embarrassing black eye to the league by going out of business in 2015 without completing a full season of play.

By 2018 the AFL was reduced to just four active teams in the Northeastern U.S. In October 2019, shortly after concluding its 32nd season of play, the AFL closed location operations of all its remaining teams while it explored a new business model. On November 27, 2019 the AFL filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and closed permanently.

Arena Football League Franchise List

Arena Football League Shop

Arena Football Shop

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Arena Football League
2003-2018 Logo T-Shirt

After sixteen seasons of using their original logo, the Arena Football League introduced this new look in 2003, coinciding with the league’s landmark national broadcast partnership with NBC. Though the NBC deal would end after four seasons in 2006, the AFL would use this logo for most of its remaining life, before introducing a third and final logo for its last season in 2019.  

This design is also available as a Hooded or Crewneck Sweatshirt from the guys at Old School Shirts!

When you make a purchase through an affiliate link like this one, Fun While It Lasted earns a commission at no additional cost to you. Thanks for your support!

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