AFL to Cease Operation

[BurghFan]

ESPN.com is reporting that the AFL will soon announce it is ceasing operation due to continued financial difficulties. This is a sad day. I was really hoping that once the Consol Energy Center opened for the 2010-2011 NHL season, that Pittsburgh would soon land an AFL team.

http://sports.espn.go.com/extra/afl/...ory?id=4375473

[grunt]

a sad day for football fans.

[PantherBeast_OS]

AF was a nice little football show to pass the the time in the offseason why waiting on the real nfl season. But the AFL teams really never had a big fan base and they was losing a ton of money. I went to one live AFL game a few years back. It was exciting. But that is the way the world works sometime.

[MassNole]

What a shame.......

[hokupguy]

It's sad to see , take it from so one who played in the league for 4 years. But it's the case of to much to soon. When i started playing the player avg was 30k for the year in my last year it was at 50k. As soon as the we got the contract with espn and nbc sports and ea. The league started spending money on all type of un-need stuff.

I will always be a Pred, the best 4 years of my life.

[deaduck]

Sad to hear...

I could never really get behind the product but I know some big ole fans who are going to miss it.

[MassNole]

What would some of the unneeded stuff be teams were spending money on? With the cash infusion from ESPN, NBC, and EA it makes sense player salaries would go up, but nearly doubling in a short span in a bit much. Were all of the teams in economic trouble? Seem hard to believe the league survived a couple of recessions to die like this.

[hokupguy]

Over expansion in my eyes going into markets we shouldn't be in and keeping a float AFL2. And changing our start of season We would normally start in April-May and end in Aug. But then we started in Feb. Also all teams were getting new unis , logo's and fields. After maybe the season past just getting new stuff. With money coming in, teams started to aim for former NFL and NCAA guys. (peter warrick, lawernce philips). I still have friends who were still playing. And for the last 2 season there was chatter around the union that league was not doing as good as they thought they would be doing by then.

Dont get me wrong from 2000 till 2003 i was enjoying it. In my early 20's making 30-50k for 5 mths of playing not bad. And was planing to go back to play last season after some of my guys on team talked me to coming back. We had a great fan base. But you were either a fan are you weren't. No middle ground. But we in Orlando had great fan's and the arean would almost always be packed.