By Douglas Bryan
The PFL has announced its decision to contract, following debacles at four of the twenty teams this past year. The league have no choice with two of them (Seafax and Victoria), but have been said to have been ruthless in dealing with the Amorgan Blues and Pottsburgh Cardinals.
With four teams gone, a 20% reduction, the league now must find a way to re-house some of the staff (players, administration and coaches) and union officials are said to be holding the league to account to do this. The question remains is this a league in crisis, with financial prudence required to keep the whole thing together or are talking about a few badly managed teams?
In 1993 we lost the Adelphia Rams to bad finance. In 2008 we lost the Burnham Bulls in similar fashion, although they were replaced by the Harteford Hawks and Adelphia Phoenix respectively.
Looking at the state of the other teams, it appears everyone else is not overspending (the Eagles appear to be playing fair nowadays) and living within the leagues means. So, at face value, it appears that the rest of the league is doing just fine and without the tax cases we would have been looking at an 18 team league.
We await to see the financial projections and accounts of the remaining teams before we can be completely safe in the knowledge that all is okay.
The good news from the remaining teams is that for the next two seasons at least, they are likely to have a larger salary cap as the television money was guaranteed (and the number of live games will be unaffected) so there should be 20% of the pot to share around, theoretically!
How much of this can be pinned on Commissioner David Thomas and the administrators of the league and the affected teams is probably going to be debated for quite a time to come. Even being part of the league (yep, I’m on the payroll), I’m not sure exactly how much more could have been done from the league offices to prevent this from happening.