It didn’t take long for Sohrob Farudi to realize the Salt Lake Screaming Eagles fit like a square peg in a round hole during its lone season in the Indoor Football League. Owners in the league were gracious enough to give the fan-controlled team a chance, but both sides knew it wasn’t a fit.
To remedy the situation, Farudi has helped jumpstart a new league, the Fan Controlled Football League (FCFL). Scheduled to kick off in the summer, the FCFL will consist of eight (including the Screaming Eagles) teams entirely controlled by you, the fan.
“For us, this is about creating,” said Farudi, CEO of the FCFL. “If we could really reimagine football for the digital fan in the digital age, that’s what the FCFL is.”
Forget the idea of a traditional football league. Powered by Ethereum blockchain, fans will accumulate and spend FAN Tokens in the mobile app to participate in play-calling, personnel decisions with the 18-player rosters (that’s right, the hiring and firing of coaches and players) and even help shape identities for the remaining seven teams.
A major reason for the switch to blockchain stemmed from an Indoor Football League fan vote that prevented embattled former NFL star Greg Hardy from joining the league. Decided by the slimmest of margins, the vote left many fans not trusting the process.
“As soon as somebody doesn’t trust the system and doesn’t trust that we’re actually giving fans what they ultimately voted for, we immediately lose the trust of the fan,” Farudi said. “We want full transparency in the voting process, which blockchain allows. There’s just no way to change that vote or rig that vote. It’s all public, it’s all transparent and people can be confident that what’s been voted for is actually what they’re saying.
“We talk about this a lot, we’re building a real-life video game. That’s really what the FCFL is, a real-life version of Madden for fans to kind of run and control a real team. So in Madden and every other mobile game and video game people have ever played you collect points or gems or gold — all of these digital things where you’re kind of trying to earn more and with those things you can do more in the game.”
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Similarities between Madden and the FCFL don’t end there. Games will take just one hour (will be reducing penalties, eliminating kicking, etc.) from start to finish and will be played in a production studio.
You heard that right. There will still be room for 500-1,000 fans to be in attendance, but having all teams in one centralized location will reduce costs associated with travel and allow the league to experiment with new sports tech.
“Rather than try to stick what we want to do inside an existing arena, we can actually do a build-out in a big warehouse and have cameras wherever we want them, drones flying around and rig it with the latest and greatest (tech) whether it’s VR, chips in the ball, or distance markers,” Farudi said.
Farudi explained that the FCFL isn’t trying to compete with the NFL. Rather, he wants it to become a league that sports tech startups come to for implementation of their product. “We believe there’s plenty of football mindshare that fans can be fans of both. What we’d love to be is kind of the developmental league for sports technology.”
FCFL has launched a FAN Token pre-sale via MicroVentures where anyone can invest. Get involved now, choose a team and you will have a shot at part of a $1 million championship prize purse split amongst the winning team’s players, coaches and fans.