Skodnick: Down to four teams, Arena Football League's instability can't go much lower

And then there were four, as we found out on Thursday, when the Arena Football League's Tampa Bay Storm announced they would be the second team in the past month to suspend operations for the 2018 season.

Couple that with the two-year suspension of operations by the Cleveland Gladiators and the lack of a collective bargaining agreement with the players' union, and you'd be fair to question the health of the Arena Football League's business model.

In the two months since an as-yet-unnamed Albany AFL expansion team was announced, the league has lost one-third of its teams for the coming season. The 2018 season will be played with four teams. A source told the Times Union that there is, at best, a remote chance of a fifth team for 2018. Washington and Baltimore owner Ted Leonsis said in a blog post after the Tampa Bay announcement that the league is planning to move on with four teams for 2018, so those rumors of teams in Newark, N.J., or out on Long Island would seem to be dead.

That Arena Football has been successful in Albany, where 13,652 packed the Times Union Center for Arena Bowl XIII to watch the Albany Firebirds defeat the Orlando Predators 59-48 on Aug. 21, 1999, or that the game provides exciting family entertainment is beyond the pale of debate.

The league's model is to build the league around franchises that would be owned by NHL or NBA ownership groups. The Washington Valor and the Baltimore Brigade, both of which will play in 2018, are owned by Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the corporation that owns the NBA's Washington Wizards and the NHL's Washington Capitals.

"We'll take our best owners, and we're building the league around them," AFL commissioner Scott Butera said after the news conference announcing Albany's team.

Calls to the AFL league office in Las Vegas requesting comment from the league and voicemails left for Butera went unreturned. Multiple requests for interviews with the executive director of the Arena Football League Players' Union, Ivan F. Soto, have also gone unanswered.

The Tampa Bay Storm, owned by the same group that owns the NHL's Tampa Bay Lightning, are out for the 2018 season, citing the rising costs and declining revenues of doing business in the AFL in the news release announcing their suspension of operations.

Essentially, between the rising costs of team travel, insurance and player payroll (which, without a collective bargaining agreement, remains uncertain), Tampa Bay couldn't make the financials work.

The Cleveland Gladiators, owned by the group that owns the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers, are out for the next two seasons as $140 million in renovations are made to Quicken Loans Arena, though you have to wonder if they had done the same calculations as Tampa Bay and had a cover story with better spin.

And so the league is down to four teams owned, essentially, by the same two groups (while Albany does have local owners in Ed Swyer, Dan Nolan and Times Union publisher George Hearst, the team also shares multiple owners with the Philadelphia Soul).

Tampa Bay and Cleveland could restart operations in the future, and the Storm said in their statement, "Because of its tradition, history and strong fanbase, the organization will be pleased to explore future opportunities in a stronger, reinvented Arena Football League at the appropriate time."

Philadelphia Soul and the Albany club's president, John Adams, noted that there are a lot of indoor football leagues, but the Arena Football League has been around for 31 years, and said that despite some growing pains, it has the strongest brand to build around.

Ron Jaworski, a co-owner of the Philadelphia Soul and the Albany club who quarterbacked the Philadelphia Eagles to an NFC championship in 1980, said following the news conference announcing the Albany expansion team that with "rock-solid franchises," the league could build itself back to 12 teams within three years.

He also freely admitted that, "The instability in the league through the years has really hurt (the AFL), and Albany's been one of the areas affected by that."

This isn't the first time in the Arena Football League's history that they've played a season with four teams, though you have to go all the way back to 1987 — the first season of the AFL — when Pittsburgh, Denver, Washington and Chicago played a six-game regular season. This league also took the 2009 season off to go through a managed bankruptcy, and still emerged to play with 15 teams in 2010, so this is not rock bottom.

There are around 1,000 season tickets already sold, and there will be eight Arena Football League games played at the Times Union Center in 2018, both the Times Union Center's Bob Belber and Adams reiterated.

A league with six teams is more competitive and more interesting to watch than a league with four teams, and a league with three teams is, really, just a round robin.

The Albany expansion team's local owners — Swyer, Nolan and Hearst — may have indeed saved the Arena Football League by bringing a team to Times Union Center when they did.

At the very least, they prolonged what could reasonably be seen as inevitable.

lskodnick@timesunion.com • 518-454-5425