Ex-NFL Star Ricky Williams Says New Football League Will Update Old-School Ownership Structure
*By Michael Teich*
A group of former NFL stars are launching an alternative professional football league for the offseason that will give players and fans a financial stake in their team's success.
“We looked for markets where there was not a professional team, but a big enough market to support a team,” Ricky Williams, former two-time All American and one of the founders, told Cheddar in an interview on Tuesday.
The planned Freedom Football League will initially have 10 teams ー San Diego, Oakland, Birmingham, St. Louis, Texas, Oklahoma City, Portland, Ohio, Floria, and Connecticut were named as the first crop of cities to welcome teams from the FFL.
It marks a major divergence from the XFL, another professional league aiming to give fans a dose of football during the NFL offseason. The XFL, backed by WWE Chairman and CEO Vince McMahon, announced last week the eight cities it will bring teams to in its inaugural season in 2020. The XFL will reportedly be targeting major TV markets including New York City, Los Angeles, and Dallas.
Williams said part of what makes the Freedom Football League unique is its ownership structure ー the purchase of season tickets will allow fans to own part of the team.
“It’ll be like owning a stock. If you’re team is doing well and making money, you’ll be getting a check in the mail.”
Players, too, will own part of the team, Williams added.
Williams also referenced the Freedom Football League’s approach to player health and safety as a differentiator from the NFL. Concussions and CTE have been a difficult issue for the NFL to manage. Almost 300 concussions were reported during the 2017 season, the highest total in any season since the league began sharing data in 2012.
“They’re making an attempt,” he said. But “the structure of the ownership is really old-school.”
His main role in the league will be director of health and wellness, a position that will allow him to make players’ safety on and off the field a priority.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/football-league-launched-by-nfl-stars-gives-fans-chance-to-own-stock-in-teams).
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
The Trump administration has ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop nearly all its work, effectively shutting down the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal. Russell Vought is the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought directed the CFPB in a Saturday night email to stop work on proposed rules, to suspend the effective dates on any rules that were finalized but not yet effective, and to stop investigative work and not begin any new investigations. The agency has been a target of conservatives since President Barack Obama created it following the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
