Butera takes big gamble, could hit jackpot with AFL

Adam Markowitz
Friday November 20, 2015

For months and months, all the Arena Football League had was nightmare after nightmare. Las Vegas. New Orleans. Spokane. San Jose. No expansion teams. Rumors of cheating. But the vision was always clear to Scott Butera. He saw sponsors. He saw television deals. He saw new teams. He saw a new country. He saw it all. And now we see it, too.

And it's awesome.

On Friday night, Craig Spencer, on behalf of Commissioner Butera, made major bombshell announcements which should've not only rocked the AFL, but the entire sports world.

Talk of new sponsors in the AFL began several weeks ago at AFL University, an offseason program for all of the teams to discuss operations and all things related to the league. New Era and Under Armor were inked as new sponsors for the 2016 season at that point. Spencer, one of the owners of the Philadelphia Soul, also mentioned a major technology company coming on as a sponsor, too. Could it be Google? AOL? Apple? Microsoft? Who knows? What we do know though, is the fact that it's going to be a huge company.

That's all proof that someone is buying into this crazy 50-yard indoor war we all love. Butera has always stood by the fact that this is a fantastic product that has always been run horribly. I mentioned last week that the AFL was always a league without a viable plan. But now, there's a plan in place. NBA and NHL owners are going to come into this league and give instant credibility.

Enter: Vivek Ranadive, the owner of the Sacramento Kings as well as Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Capitals, Washington Mystics and Washington Capitals. They're both in for AFL teams in the 2017 season. The San Antonio Spurs, long rumored to be the first of the NBA/NHL owners to join the league alongside the Cleveland Gladiators and Tampa Bay Lightning, are also likely in the mix for '17 as well.

But the bombshell of all bombshells came when Spencer announced that the league had a deal in place with the largest broadcasting company in Latin America. No name was put to the company, but one can assume that means Univision is onboard, too. Not only is said company going to be broadcasting games in Latin America, but it is going to be putting three teams in Mexico as well, presumably in Mexico City, Monterrey and perhaps Guadalajara or Morelia.

The ramifications here are huge. The AFL is no longer just a tiny little niche game where owners can come to the table with a few hundred thousand bucks and slap things together in 90 days. With all due respect to departed owners in New Orleans, Las Vegas, Spokane and some of the other recently departed teams, they were af2 owners trying to play in a league which was always supposed to be bigger than that.

And that's not meant to be disrespectful either, though I know it sounds quite condescending. The af2 was great for what it was. Small markets. Small budgets. Developemental players who were either incredibly young or were just playing for the love of the game in or near their home markets. And maybe one day, the af2 will come back in some form, and guys like Dan Newman, Doug MacGregor and Nader Naini can own teams.

But again, with all due respect, Butera was always out to make the AFL the big time again. No longer are we a league trying to operate like the af2 with slightly bigger budgets in hopes that our history and our name will carry us through. Now, we are legitimately putting in a case to be the sixth major sport in this country, assuming that you believe the MLS has become the fifth major sport as I've judged it to be.

While I've brought up the MLS, take a look at how that league has evolved. Teams have reached Montreal and Vancouver, and major television deals are in place with TSN, Canada's equivalent of ESPN. The league has built tremendous stability over the years, as only Chivas USA has folded in recent memory. Now, expansion is booming all over the country, and places which seemingly never had interest in soccer like Orlando and Atlanta have clubs.

Does this look familiar? Kick out the owners who aren't going to add any stability to the league, bring in owners who have little to lose and have bigger fish to fry who are going to keep their AFL teams as a part of their stable of franchises in their towns, expand internationally, and get a major television deal in place in that international market.

The difference is that Canada already has the CFL and the NHL that it is crazy about. Mexico has soccer, and that's really it. It's entirely possible that a game between the Orlando Predators and Cleveland Gladiators might end up being headline news in Mexico City one day in the not too distant future.

It's interesting that these major announcements came in Philadelphia, which was the de facto birthplace of AFL China. Two years ago was the first time that an American football game was ever played on Chinese soil, and it wasn't the commonplace 100-yard variety we're talking about.

And now, the AFL has won the race to Mexico as well. The NFL has long desired to expand into international markets, doing in England every single year with the international series. A game is likely going to be played in Mexico City in 2016, but that's just a precursor to what could end up being even bigger for football in Mexico in 2017. The culture of football in Mexico could legitimately be the indoor variety instead of the outdoor variety, and athletes could yearn to play for the Mexico City Fill-In-The-Blanks of the AFL even more than wanting to play soccer for Club America or any of the other Mexican Liga giants one day down the line.

"For a league that I would consider still in its infancy, I believe we have started to see the foundation being laid for something special," one AFL team official told me on Friday night after the news broke.

There's still a long way to go for the AFL to really realize all of this success Butera has brought about. We still have to get through what could be a challenging 2016 season with either eight or nine teams (with San Jose, at this hour, still pending). Clearly, these Mexican teams are going to have to find players who are willing to head south of the border to play. And furthermore, the AFL needs more talent in general, and that means likely having to pay players more money to make the league more attractive. There aren't 10 good quarterbacks in this league right now, let alone 15 starters plus backups.

Certainly, a new collective bargaining agreement is going to have to be put into play as well. Standard contracts have to go away, and teams have to have the ability to bid for players legally and legitimately via a salary cap that is both responsible for the owners and fiscally viable for the players.

There's also plenty of work to be done in Mexico to educate the fans about football, especially the indoor variety. One can't just merely expect Univision to open up its doors to three teams across the nation and expect that fans are going to show up. And that's why games are going to be broadcast in Mexico and Latin America in 2016 on a network which feels like is trying to develop into somewhat of a rival to ESPN Deportes, a la FOX Sports 1 here in the States. Though there are no sources which have said anything like this to me, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of the ArenaBowl being played in Mexico City this year.

Whereas all of the recent expansion teams in the AFL have more or less been thrown together in a matter of a few months without much in the way of good business though, San Antonio, Sacramento and Washington DC are all going to be spending this next year using their NBA/NHL/WNBA franchises to help bolster ticket sales and awareness to their new AFL products. Foundations will be put in place to make sure those markets hit the ground running instead of falling on their faces. I have no doubt that these teams aren't just flashes in the pan like Las Vegas or Pittsburgh. These are long-lasting franchises which will start right and turn into stalwarts for a league which could reasonably still double or triple in the next decade.

Just over a year ago at this time, Scott Butera was just another businessman to all of us in the AFL. He had a six-figure job working with the Foxwoods Casino, and he could've stayed there for the rest of his career and surely had plenty of success. But for a man with Las Vegas ties, he gambled. He left that job and latched on with the AFL, something that he called a "unique opporunity" at the time.

And for 12 months, Butera was reamed by the public and had to clean up the mess which he inherited from Jerry Kurz. That mess still isn't quite squeaky clean to this day, but enough of the spots are removed to go forward for the first time.

Butera was a savior to the Foxwoods, bringing it out of all sorts of debt and moving it forward into success. Now, he could be looked upon as not only the man who saved the sport of arena football, but the one who finally brought it to its capacity, just as Jim Foster envisioned it three decades ago.