This league is a bad business idea fueled by social engineering.
Each team has 25 players on the roster. The player salaries range from $55K to $80K. Using 55K, that's a player payroll of $1,375,000. Toronto is the best market in the league. The seating capacity in Toronto is 2600. They have sold that out. There are boxes and standing room, but lets face it, there will be little additional net gate revenue (concessions, parking?) beyond the seats. There are only 12 home games per team during the season. The average ticket price is claimed by the team to be $117.11 (that seems dubiously high, but let's roll with it). That means the anticipated gate revenue (in the best market) should be anticipated to be $3,653,832. That means, barring other revenue streams (such as TV, which should not be substantial because there is no big US deal) after paying ONLY players, there is only $2,278,832 to pay:
a. For the venues
b. For the advertising
c. For all the team staff and executives
d. For the overhead and operating costs of the team (including any capital or operating financing)
e. For commission and service fees to ticket sellers
d. For the referees
e. To investors
This is NOT a complete list of operating expenses.
In short, this league is a guaranteed money loser!
Like many sports fans, I did check out the opening Toronto game on TV to see what this would look like. Several observations;
1. This hockey is noticeably not as good as what we see in the international competitions that we're used to seeing, and THAT hockey is about at the level of 14 or 15 year old boys AAA hockey (except without body checking and the fact that none of these players can shoot the puck).
2. The TV presentation was POOR. I counted only 3 different cameras, and these camerapersons could NOT keep the puck in frame. The predominant camera angle was fairly high up, so watching the game on TV was like watching it from standing room. In short, even an experienced hockey fan would have difficulty seeing the puck (even when it was occasionally in frame).
3. Choosing to launch a hockey league with an appearance by a tennis player and well known gay icon is NOT the way to attract more male (or even more STRAIGHT female) fans to the game. That choice SCREAMED ideology over sport.
4. No logos for team jerseys? At least TRY to build some identity and branding!
This is a poor product with poor economics behind it. Some female professional sports can succeed (golf and tennis come to mind), but this one won't. First, they are giving straight male sports fans absolutely nothing to look at (even if there are a couple of attractive women in the league, they are covered up by hockey equipment), and there's just not enough camera focus on any individual players. This is clearly a sports league that's not being run by sports fans. They will attract and get support from the usual equality advocacy types, but the problem is that these people are too few and just don't spend enough disposable income on sports entertainment.
Major fail!
