The Fediverse Of Football? Could such a thing exist?
With all the news going on currently and how it is tying back to “The Shield” in the worst ways imaginable, maybe instead of just one league we have regional leagues all on equal footing where the league champs advance to a playoff to see who the champion of them all. I mean, why not right? The Bowl of Bowls so to speak. It'd be fun, exciting, and add a flavor to professional sports that we don't currently have on this side of the proverbial pond.
Also, by decentralizing the power structure to that degree, you don't have one body rule over everything because if one governing body has too much power and the wrong people rise to the top of said governing body, bad things happen. It's literally the history of sports organizations around the world. NFL, FIFA, PGA, IOC, you name the sport and the organization, there have been some shenanigans with unruly people at the top doing bad things. Single ownership models of several regional leagues who are linked together through some sort of football confederation and that confederation has a playoff to determine the champion of champions? By making said leagues regional you'd lower travel costs. You could theoretically buy buses and make most travel some sort of bus trip instead of buying plane tickets over and over again for cross-country flights and such. There are definitely advantages to this idea, just some details would need to be flushed out to make this a fully functional business proposal of sorts.
However many leagues and teams per league (all leagues in such an arrangement would need the same number of teams) is something that'd have to be determined. The opportunity is definitely there with the appropriate resources (which I currently do not have, full disclosure). Getting funding, distribution, what have you would be discussions for another time. The A7FL is the league that operates most closely to this vision I am writing about here, but they have “league owners” and a more vertical power structure than I am envisioning. The leagues should be the true power centers here, not the overarching body.
What if the “Brand New Shield” isn't just one organization but multiple organizations who operate on the same platform and use a more decentralized, confederated model than most professional sports? It's definitely an interesting idea to think about and something that is definitely going to be written about more on this blog.