This afternoon, we interviewed Mitch Mortaza, founder of the Lingerie Football League, to talk about the launching of his dream.
Darren: The idea of the league has been floating around for at least five years now. Why is now especially the time to go from one game a year to 20 games featuring 10 teams?
Mortaza:I think obviously more now than ever before we all need an escape from what's going on around us. And just the success we've had with the Lingerie Bowl (opposite halftime during Super Bowl), we thought if we can grab that kind of audience as a one-off halftime special, what if we built a year-round brand in all these pockets of fan bases around the country to watch their teams year round? That's why came to the realization we need to launch a league here.
Darren: What's the ownership model? What type of benchmarks do you have to set on attendance and revenue?
Mortaza: So it's a single entity league. We will retain 51 percent ownership of the teams, but have in-market majority team owners. The benchmarks - we will have to be at least 60 percent capacity of these major NBA, NHL, MLS venues that we're in.
Darren: What's that number? 10,000?