In building the Alliance of American Football, cofounder and CEO Charlie Ebersol is clear that “the most important thing is the football.” Having quality play is the engine that will drive his new pro league that kicks off its inaugural season in February on CBS, one week after the NFL’s Super Bowl.
Hall of Fame general manager Bill Polian, who built perennial contenders with the Bills in the early 1990s and the Colts in the 2000s, is the other cofounder and is overseeing football operations. The AAF has already signed 515 players for the eight teams in its South and West divisions. Steve Spurrier, Mike Singletary, Darryl (Moose) Johnston, Hines Ward, Justin Tuck, Michael Vick, and Troy Polamalu are among the former NFL and college stars who have signed on to be coaches and executives.
Creating an entirely new set of football franchises, rosters, and schedules is not the scope of the AAF’s ambitions, though.
“One of the things we’re building is a football league,” Ebersol said, “but on the other side, we’re building a technology company that allows direct and, for the first time ever, fully real-time data streaming out of the game for what we call Stats 2.0.”
At last month’s SportTechie NEXT conference, Ebersol discussed how the league plans to complement the sport with an engaging fan experience and also create a new model for the compensation structure of pro athletes.
The AAF has been building proprietary hardware and software for the past two years that Ebersol said will be “a couple of generations ahead of where everybody else is.” Every player will don some sort of wearable. The goal is to generate predictive data by tracking position, velocity, and biometrics and sharing that information in real-time.
That trove of data will power an active fan engagement platform. That app will include fantasy football and other social gaming options, as well as the potential for sports betting in states where it’s legal. MGM has signed on as an investor and the exclusive owner of in-game betting rights for the first three seasons. All in-play wagering will be hosted through MGM’s app and will tap into wearable data to better refine live oddsmaking. (An MGM executive told ESPN that the underlying tech could one day be adapted for other sports and leagues.)
Ebersol said he’s “all in” on sports betting, but cautioned that such a transformative change will take time to evolve.
“I personally believe we’re making a little bit too big a deal out of gambling right now,” he said. “Gambling is going to be a big deal, but it is legal in very few places, in very few buildings.”
Ebersol decried traditional fantasy football as a “passive experience” in which fans spend Sundays watching games and chatting on social media. He, and others, believe that’s not what many consumers want these days. As Julie Meringer, the president of Your Call Football, another new league that allows fans to call plays, said of the fans, “We want to control something. We want to have a say, we want to impact it. That’s why gaming is so big with the next generation.”
The AAF’s plan is to build a product that keeps fans participating throughout games, using its app during the lulls between plays. And the target audience for this product is a demographic delight for advertisers.
“Existing bettors on the big four sports leagues are younger, they’re wealthier, they’re better educated, and they’re more diverse than the general population,” said David Forman, the American Gaming Association’s senior director of research.
Facilitating the introduction of these wearables and the use of the data-crunching algorithms is the fact that the AAF is a single-entity league, with all eight franchises owned collectively. The players do not have a union or a collective bargaining agreement.
But Ebersol wants to include and reward the players for their role in the league enterprise. The technology will directly track the involvement of each player and monetize his contributions—whenever a fan selects him in a fantasy game, makes a wager on his performance, etc.
“You have to create a direct benefit to the player,” he said. “They have to have a direct relationship. Also, because morally, at the end of the day, what’s happened, I think, in the last 15 years in professional sports is that the athlete is becoming increasingly just a commodity.”
Ebersol, previously a TV and film producer, is the son of NBC Sports Group Chairman Dick Ebersol, an executive who led Olympics and NFL coverage at the network. The elder Ebersol, who sits on the AAF’s board, helped launch the original XFL. The younger Ebersol grew up on the sidelines of professional sports and has seen franchise valuations double and triple while the players received significant, but not corresponding, raises in their salaries.
“The conversation changes when you make the players a beneficiary and part of the entire conversation,” said former NFL linebacker Isaiah Kacyvenski, who cofounded the Sports Innovation Lab and Will Ventures. “For far too long, that hasn’t happened.”
In order to foster a thriving league in which all relevant parties share in the benefit, Ebersol said he is “betting big on data.”
“You have to create a situation where the actual environment is healthy,” he said. “The ecosystem has to be supportive of each individual person in it. The fan can’t be a human ATM card for professional sports. The player cannot be a commodity for professional sports. You have to create a situation where, when we talk about engagement, what we actually need is a symbiotic relationship.”