While veteran rockers Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of the band KISS still wanna rock and roll all nite, their parties now will be every week in the Arena Football League.
Yahoo! Sports posted a Reuters report that Simmons and Stanley, owners of the expansion AFL franchise the LA Kiss that will begin play on Saturday, will attempt to market the team as an entertainment option, rather than just a football team.
According to Reuters, games will have a carnival-like atmosphere with elephants, fire-breathers, stilt walkers, little people and go-go dancers.
"We don't compete with anybody else. We set our own trail," Stanley told media outside the Honda Center, home not only to the Kiss but also to the NHL's Anaheim Ducks and only a few miles down the road from Walt Disney Co's Disneyland theme park. "We are trailblazers, whether it's in rock and roll or now football. There's no rivalry because no one can rival us. We're going to stake our claims and mark our territory."
The 64-year-old Simmons and 62-year-old Stanley purchased the franchise with two other investors last year, the report stated.
The Kiss are the fourth team in the Los Angeles/Anaheim area to try to establish itself since the AFL began in 1987. The city, the second largest television market in the country, has been without an NFL team since the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Raiders both left after the 1994 season.
"There's no reason that we won't deliver exactly what we said we would," Simmons said. "Anyone else who has failed in the past may have tried valiantly, but trying isn't good enough."
Skeptics, however, are wary of any football team that tries to market itself beyond football. It cited Keith Willoughby, a business professor at the University of Saskatchewan, who brought to mind a similar attempt by the XFL to mesh football and the over-the-top culture of pro wrestling.
"The challenge the XFL ran into was that it wasn't football enough for the football fan and it wasn't entertainment enough for the wrestling fan," he said. "You're trying to straddle two different cultural markets, and the inability to do both is a recipe for disaster."
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