In the internet age, sports fans are smarter than they’ve ever been. We have access to so much information.
When know when player X’s contract expires or how player Y’s new deal will count against the salary cap in two years. We know how every little detail in every transaction plays out.
We also think we’re smart enough to make play calls for our favorite teams in the midst of the action. We think we know what those players should be doing or how the head coach should be calling the game. And if they don’t do it like that? Then we want them out.
Now, in this new sports league coming soon to a mobile device near you, fans will finally get a chance to prove it. They’ll have pivotal decisions for their teams literally at their fingertips.
Welcome to Fan Controlled Football, where the fans control everything. The league made news on Wednesday when it announced that it had signed former NFL QB Johnny Manziel. Now, fans will select him, decide whether to start him and then pick what plays to have him run.
Yes, you read that correctly. And it’s exactly what it sounds like. This is a real, actual football league where fans control everything about their team from the name of it to the coaches they sign and the decisions those same coaches make.
Everything about this league is wild. It’s 7-on-7, the field is just 50 yards and everything is filmed inside of a television studio. The league consists of four teams — the Glacier Boyz, the Beats, the Zappers and the Wild Aces. The musician Quavo, NFL players Marshawn Lynch, Richard Sherman and Austin Ekeler and boxing legend Mike Tyson are all part of various ownership groups from around the league.
They had nothing to do with their team names. Instead, fans voted on them. And they’ll vote on everything else that these teams have to do, too, because that’s how FCF works.
The fans really run everything. And we’ll finally get a glimpse of it in February when the league starts.
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A new way to do sports
Every sports fan has a moment. A spot that we go back to in our fandom where we knew things were going to go wrong … and then things went horribly wrong as anticipated.
But you, sitting at home, honestly felt like you had the solution sitting in your brain the entire time. You think: If only I could call this shot. You know that moment I’m talking about.
For me, a lifelong, miserable Wizards fan, my moment is the 2009 NBA draft. They had the 5th pick in the draft that season. What’d they do with it, you ask? Traded it. To the Minnesota Timberwolves for Mike Miller and Randy Foy, who both played one single season for Washington before bouncing.
But it’s not even the fact that those player left that bothers me the most. It’s what could’ve been. No, what should’ve been. Two picks later, the Warriors drafted a skinny guard named Stephen Curry. Now, 11 years and 3 championships later, the rest is history. That should’ve been my team. I will always and forever argue that.
That’s the exact feeling that drives FCF.
“I guarantee you that there’s been a moment that you and every sports fan has had where you’re watching a game and you’re asking, ‘Why are they calling that play? That’s ridiculous,’ ” Patrick Dees, the Co-Founder and Chief Gaming Officer of FCF, told For The Win. “We’ve all had that moment. We’re just the ones who kind of put it in motion.”
And that’s been in the making for a while. Dees and business partner, Sohrob Farudi, partnered together to purchase an Indoor Football League team back in 2015. They turned the keys completely over to fans upon purchasing it. From there, they let them pick the name — the Salt Lake City Screaming Eagles. They also let them sit in on interviews to choose the coach, the GM, the players and even called the plays for the team.
“They literally ran it from start to finish,” Dees said.
This, on a larger scale, is how FCFL is going to work. Fans register for a team before the season begins, pick a name, design their jerseys, logos and even come up with league rules. They pick the staff and players and, eventually, they’ll play games. Once the games begin, fans will be able to vote on key roster decisions and choose plays as the armchair GM/coach from back home.
Yes, this is an innovative concept. And of course, like anything else on the internet, there is room for trolling. For example, Dees said, when choosing the Screaming Eagles’ name initially, fans suggested names like the Stormin’ Mormons and Teamy McTeamface — instant meme material.
But there are safeguards against things like that. First, team owners have some discretion here. Owners get say on the final name. It’s narrowed down to a few fan choices. “Using Quavo for example,” Dees said, “… if fans submit the name #QuavoSucks then he’s not going to pick it.”
Second, fans are incentivized to make serious decisions that are best for the team through a system called FanIQ. Think of this in the same way you’d think of experience points on a video game. Choosing a play that works nets you more FanIQ points, which means your play call will have more weight than other fans in the future — whether that’s the next play, the next series or the next game.
The system worked well enough to net the Screaming Eagles a Top-3 offense (in a league of 10), Dees said, despite going 5-11 in their inaugural season.
“We wanted to put our fans in a position to be successful and it worked,” Dees said.
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But can another league work at all?
In America, football is king. There’s no disputing that, no matter what way you look at it.
There’s not a more popular sport in the country than the NFL. The entire world stops to watch the Super Bowl — some say it should even be declared a national holiday. That’s how much people love their football.
But that love is something only seems to be reserved for the NFL and absolutely nothing else. We’ve seen it. Football just doesn’t stick in other spaces unless it’s through college sports (which, duh) or the National Football League.
Other leagues have tried to tap into it. We’ve seen them come and go — the list goes on. The National Spring Football League for one season in 2000, the United Football League in 2009, the Alliance of American Football in 2019 and now, most recently, the XFL for a second time in 2020.
Here’s what normally happens: A set of teams and owners gather up a bunch of former NFLers and hopefuls, throw them on a team together with former NFL coaches and, essentially, just play NFL football. They try to pack venues without solidified fanbases or history. They try to sell merchandise for players no one would otherwise know.
These leagues seem to die off just as quickly as they pop up. There’s a chance the same thing happens to FCFL. Because we’ve seen this so many times: If it’s not actually NFL football, people just don’t seem to want more professional football.
And it’d be nearly impossible to run a true minor league without the backing of the NFL, as The Ringer’s Roger Sherman wrote in April of 2019 after the AAF’s fall and before the XFL’s rebirth.
For the most part, minor league sports are unprofitable. They generally struggle to attract enough interest from local and national fans to pay for the many expenses of sports, such as player and coach salaries, housing, travel, equipment, stadium operating fees, and insurance for players. The main reason some minor leagues are capable of long-term survival is because major leagues agree to subsidize their losses in the name of player development. In European soccer, teams in the lower ranks can be promoted to higher leagues or at the very least make money by selling their good players to bigger clubs. In America, where there is no upward mobility, the options are finding a benefactor or dying.
That doesn’t work. And that’s where the FCFL differs. They don’t see themselves as a traditional football operation in any way.
“Not to be reductive or denigrate those guys, but they were just trying to be another NFL. They were just trying to put butts in seats and sell those butts beers. They wanted to work their way up to rights fees,” Dees said. “That model is fundamentally broken.”
Money also shouldn’t be as much of an issue for the FCF. They aren’t looking to pack stadiums — instead, they film their games in a television studio. They also use shared facilities and services such as trainers and medical staff. The league just doesn’t come with the same overhead costs that an XFL would.
The league’s broadcast partner, Twitch, sees FCF as something completely different and separate from regular football, and they don’t believe it’s a bad thing.
FCF plays like a totally different sport. It’s small, compact and quick. It is also made to fit into a more modern viewing schedule: Games won’t last three hours, Mike Aragon, the Senior Vice President of content at Twitch, told For the Win.
“I think there are some commonalities. We do have elite athletes, DI athletes from DI programs. These are professionals,” Aragon said. “But, if you think about the gameplay, it’s a little different.”
But the biggest difference, by far, will be the interactivity for the fans. On top of fans just being able to have a direct impact on the game by being able to choose plays, they’ll also have Twitch’s full interactivity display on tap.
They’ll be able to communicate with team owners during the game, make choices, interact with other fans and respond to prompts that may come up on the screen.
Instead of just watching, the fan will be engaged and involved. “Things that make Twitch sticky on the gaming side, we’re just taking those elements and bringing them to FCF,” Aragon said.
All that’s left is to play
The parties involved are clearly confident in this new collision of esports and real sports. They believe it’ll work where other leagues have failed. They’re hoping the fan interactivity will set FCF apart: This is like Madden in real life, and everyone loves a good video game.
“My mother successfully called plays for the Screaming Eagles and she doesn’t even know what a football is,” Dees told For the Win.
Importantly, all of this can be produced on a relatively slim budget, in one spot. The AAF and XFL needed huge injections of cash at the start and tried to scale up fanbases quickly; the FCF should conceivably have a longer runway.
The founders believe they’ve found something that can work. They have a unique idea. They have interesting ownership groups who should attract fans. They have a wildly popular and growing platform in Twitch. They have football — at least some version of it. They just have to get people to love this combination enough to keep coming back to it.
They believe they do that by playing on that feeling, once again, that we all have as fans.
“People ask how we thought of this. Every sports fan has thought of this,” Dees said. And he’s right. We’ve all wanted this at some point. I certainly wish I had it back in 2009. And I bet you do, too, for whatever your moment is.
Now, you finally get that chance.
Johnny Manziel will continue his football career in the Fan Controlled Football league