The Soul Of (Arena) Football, Or A Night With A League On The Brink

There’s a Billy Joel song about Allentown, Pennsylvania, and it is not any less overstated than you’d expect. It’s not a bad song, as Billy Joel’s touristic Songs Of The Working Class efforts go, although the bleakness of post-industrial Northeast ennui starts dragging you down even before the guitar riffs and literal steel mill sound effects come into play. The Allentown I visited on a recent Sunday, for an Arena Football League game played by a team from a city 60 miles away was not like the one Billy Joel imagined and sang about. This town has either moved on from its Reagan-era existential crisis, or simply learned to live with it. Either way, the PPL Center, opened in 2014, is a nice place to watch arena football, and any city hosting two arena football teams at the same time must count itself lucky.

The Philadelphia Soul have survived as one of the better teams in what survives of Arena Football, but that has yet to translate into a championship in the 2010’s. This year, the Soul are 12-4, and have home-field advantage for the first and second rounds. However, a front-loaded home schedule and regular season games in Trenton, NJ and Allentown could not prevent the recent Democratic National Convention from having an impact on the Soul’s playoff run. To the extent that the road to ArenaBowl XXIX still goes through the City of Brotherly Love, it’s that the fan bus to Allentown and the team’s temporary playoff home departs from the Wells Fargo Center parking lot. As the only non-Florida team in the American Conference, the Soul will take whatever home field advantage they can get. And as an Arena Football League team, they know not to expect perfection, or ever to be any venue’s first choice.

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Since the 1980’s, arena football has had peaks, valleys, and long sprawling flatlands of weird shit happening on and off the field. The Arena Football League is the largest and highest-tier among many leagues that pop in and out of the arena football economy, which is bigger than you think. Jim Foster came up with the idea of arena football (and the Arena Football League) after watching an indoor soccer exhibition in 1981, but shelved it for years while he worked with the Chicago Blitz of the United States Football League, learning from the league’s successes and mistakes. After the USFL moved its schedule to the fall and then folded outright, Foster held an arena football demonstration game in 1986 and a soft-launch season in 1987. In its first decade, the league would be peppered with former USFL talent, future World League of American Football talent, troubled NFL draft busts such as Art Schlichter and Todd Marinovich, and the odd cameo from a pre-fame Kurt Warner or Jay Gruden.

The game of arena football is faster paced and higher scoring than the NFL—playing on a 50-yard field tends to amplify things, and to say the AFL leans into this vigorously would be an understatement. In no small part because of the intensified effect that the condensed field brings, arena football became a solid niche sport, and a made-for-cable staple for lesser networks like TNN, ESPN2, and the CBS Sports Network, with enough of a cult following that allowed for the occasional video game or network television contract to slip through. At its height, there were a few franchises with NFL ownership attached, like the Dallas Desperadoes and the New Orleans Voodoo. The Philadelphia Soul was born of this era, debuting in 2004 with an original ownership group that included Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, and former Eagles quarterback Ron Jaworski.

The Soul won the 2008 ArenaBowl in dramatic fashion, holding up their end of the promise of a free Bon Jovi concert after a win at least on-field, but the AFL fell apart soon after. There was no 2009 season, the result of a clusterfuck involving the resignation of longtime commissioner David Baker, the demise of the Voodoo, and the league’s eventual, inevitable filing for bankruptcy. The Philadelphia Soul returned in 2011 with Jaworski as its frontman, but with neither Bon Jovi nor the promise/threat of that free concert. They have been successful on the field since, losing to the Arizona Rattlers in the ArenaBowl in 2012 and 2013, and under coach Clint Dolezel and quarterback and 2015 AFL MVP Dan Radabaugh. This year, they will probably lose to the Rattlers in the ArenaBowl again.

The Arena Football League has had a turbulent last year. What was a 12-team entity in 2015 shrank to just eight this year, down from a recent peak of 18 in 2011; the Spokane Shock moved to the Indoor Football League, and franchises in Las Vegas and New Orleans folded outright. Your San Jose SaberCats, who only lost one game last season, mysteriously disbanded months after winning a fourth ArenaBowl title, a season that coincided with a circus displacing them from the SAP Center to Stockton, CA. The announcement of a ninth franchise—this one in Washington, D.C., to be run by Wizards and Capitals owner Monumental Sports & Entertainment—sounds less like a hopeful note than a warning of further contraction.

“Overall, the AFL is in worse shape than when it restarted, but it may have a more solid base of ownership groups on which to build,” says Paul Reeths, founder of the minor and mid-major league clearinghouse Our Sports Central. Reeths was disappointed that all eight Arena League teams made the playoffs this year, which diluted the importance of both the regular season and the postseason. Still, he is cautiously optimistic about the league’s future: “With [Monumental] coming in next season, most of the franchises appear fairly well capitalized,” Reeths says, “although there remain a couple question marks and the margin for error is smaller than ever.”

I watched the Soul host the Tampa Bay Storm, but the game was not really any more memorable than would be expected from a 13-3 team hosting a 2-14 team; the Soul and Storm were tied early in the second quarter at 14, but this was Philly’s game to lose and they didn’t. Arena football is Tecmo Super Bowl without the cool music but with the fast action, tipped passes and big plays intact, which meant the game was still fun, if also absolutely predictable. An announced crowd of 5,540 seemed generous, as the 8,000 seat PPL Center looked half-full at best, but the fans who did attend, including the ones on the bus from Philadelphia, were very enthusiastic. If and when the Soul return to South Philadelphia, the Lehigh Valley Steelhawks, an indoor team about to enter its fourth league, will still entertain those in Allentown still stoked for arena football.

“It’s hard for me to gauge the level of excitement Allentown has for the Soul,” says Morning Call reporter Lynn Worthy, a recent transplant to the Lehigh Valley who has been covering the Soul’s extended stay for the region’s newspaper. “I don’t think the attendance has been as high as it would be in Philadelphia, but the folks who have come out to the games in Allentown have definitely been emotionally invested in the games. I don’t think it hurts that Ron Jaworski… has been front and center at the games and interacting with fans.”

The Soul can count on a fanbase that travels pretty well, in addition to a growing contingent of Lehigh Valley arena fans. Jeffrey Myers of Coatesville travelled with his family to see the team he’s rooted for since its founding defeat Tampa: “We went to see a good game and support our Philadelphia Soul,” he told me. “Wherever they travel, they’ll be traveling with us.” Mike Glassic, who only had to trek from nearby Coopersburg with a friend to watch the game, was more concise. “Any football’s good football,” he said.

Arena Football is certainly different than NFL football. But the game had a sincere, if low-wattage, feel to it that was at a notably more human pitch than the NFL usual.

There was Prechae Rodriguez, a former Auburn and CFL wide receiver now with the Tampa Storm, with his arm in the air, getting pumped as the St. Francis of Assisi Parish Choir sang the national anthem. The sight of an arena football player too good for his team, and maybe too good for this league, getting psyched as if Whitney Houston herself was singing The Star-Spangled Banner before Super Bowl XXV was oddly moving. The minor league vibes, too, were more charming than overdetermined, as when a race in which little girls and their mothers raced inside trash cans devolved into a gloriously piping-hot mess. When I found my way down to Section 117 from Section 207, arena security were too busy trying to figure if club box members threw scoring pencils into the stands to notice or care about my presence.

“All-In-Town” hosted “Philadelphia” again on August 14, where the Soul defeated Jacksonville with four seconds left to advance to ArenaBowl XXIX. Any worrying about where the Soul would host the championship game was made moot when the Arizona Rattlers doubled-up on the Cleveland Gladiators 82-41 later that evening. The Soul are good enough to compete anywhere: as a home team in Philadelphia, as friendly visitors in Allentown, and as The Enemy in Glendale, Arizona this Friday night on ESPN. But whether they or their league will stick around in the long run is harder to know. It always is.

“When you put everything together I doubt they’ll move,” Edward Cruz told me. He’s a two-year season ticket holder and passionate Soul supporter, the type of fan who would know the players if he ran into them on the street. “That’s because of the bond [the team has] together. But money talks. There is a lot of competition… It’s a shame that most of Philly doesn’t support the Soul like they should.”

For now, the Soul and the Arena League have the present, and the team’s pursuit of a second ArenaBowl is as clear as the rest of the league’s future is murky. It’s probably best not to hold your breath for that Bon Jovi concert, but something real and strange is still alive, here. That’s something.