AFL - Less than Impressive

We love our Arena Football.  We would love it more if the league set pay standards that would attract the better players who are not locked into another Professional Football team.  Prior to the collapse of the AFL in 2009, the average wage of an AFL player was around 85,000 a year.  That's nothing to sneeze at.  However, with the restructuring of the Arena Football League, and the 2010 failure of the newly formed AFL Player's Union, the average Arena Football Player only makes $400 per game.  On a 16 game schedule, that works out to a staggering ... wait for it ... $6,400 per year.  Wow, don't quit your day job.  No seriously, the League has even told them ... keep a day job.

Now I did find a resource that claimed that the top players in the League make around 50,000 per year.  The average income for a team player would depend on the number of higher paid stars and the Salary Cap for the league ... a cap that I've heard about, but can't find any information on.

The toothless Player's Union is not going to make matters any better any time soon.  In 2010, it was made clear by the Team Owners that they will use Union Breaking Tactics to prevent the Player's Union from gaining any real control.  When the Player's decided to boycott the games at the opening of the 2010 season, after the owners and league were not willing to come to terms with the Players Union, the owners locked out their players and brought in people who were willing to cross the line and play for a team that they had originally failed to make the roster for.  This caused the league's players to cross their own picket lines, breaking the attempt of the Player's Union to get back some of the five thousand dollars in "per game" salary cuts.

Now, the money stats are based on information available on the Internet.  The story of how the player's boycott was broken by the team owners was a story told by a team rep for the Spokane Shock during the television broadcast streamed via uStream.tv this past Monday night.  What should be a hint of how things are is the fact that he seemed proud of the event and how it turned out.

So, despite the banner that says "25 Years", this is not the Arena Football League that captured the hearts of  fans for over twenty years.  This is a new version, with less of a focus on the fans and more on making big money for the little men who are Arena Football team owners.