Professional American football in Mexico, a modest option for university students

Leonardo Mena Gil

Newspaper La Jornada
Thursday February 16, 2023, p. a10

He draft Collegiate is the main provider of the Professional American Football League (LFA). Recruitment in Mexico comes from the universities that participate in Onefa and Conadeip. It is practically one of the few opportunities that students have to make the leap to professionalism, with salaries that average 5,000 pesos per game.

The championship has 10 teams. In total, 50 games are played in 10 weeks of the regular season and six qualify. If we add the match for the championship (Mexico Bowl) and the previous rounds of playoffs, the sum increases to 55 duels in three months. In other words, a team has the possibility of facing up to 13 games per campaign, which gives a monthly average of 20,000 pesos per player, without counting the extra bonuses.

In this sense, the LFA, without the commercial machinery that soccer does have, uses a salary tabulator to balance the competition.

We use it to ensure that all teams have the same opportunity to hire and that there is no inflation in the salary part. Unlike other professional sports, where the law of supply and demand is what determines salaries, we still have it under control here.stated yesterday the commissioner of the LFA, Alejandro Jaimes Trujillo, in a press conference that was broadcast on Facebook.

in full development

Trujillo acknowledged that the tournament is still in full swing, but great projects are born from great dreams. And what we visualized since 2016, is taking more and more shape.

The circuit only allows 12 foreigners and six on the field, since The idea is to privilege national talentadded the manager, who visualizes that by 2026 the championship will be made up of 14 teams.

The LFA not only takes the sporting prototype from the NFL, it also does so in the way it runs the business. The incorporation of partners, where everyone owns a percentage of the league, is part of the strategy that they have followed since their founding in 2016.

The model contemplates the non-sale of franchises, but an invitation to associate. This means that all participating teams own a percentage of the league. That makes everyone interested in us doing well. It is a prototype like the one used by the MLS or the NFLTrujillo explained.

All teams own each other. They have a majority percentage and a percentage equivalent to the number of templates there are. That way they are interested in growthhe added.

The tournament begins on March 4 and culminates on June 10 with the Mexico Bowl, which will be held at the Estadio Olímpico Universitario, in Chihuahua, and in which, similar to the Super Bowl, there will be a show at half time.