New pro football league includes Sacramento among list of debut cities for fall games

Sacramento will get a new pro football team that will play at Cal Expo’s Heart Health Park this fall.

Adam Mclean, commissioner of Major League Football, said Wednesday his new league will play a schedule that starts Oct. 2 with Sacramento playing against Oakland at Laney College’s stadium in the East Bay.

Other details weren’t ready to be announced, Mclean said, as the league is still being put together. The league’s website, majorleaguefootball.pro, has empty sections for the schedule, draft and news. The site does promise fans more-affordable tickets and concessions than NFL games while also including fewer penalties, to keep the pace of the game up.

Mclean said the best way to think of the league, which he says will have 16 to 18 teams, is akin to soccer’s USL, which runs parallel to the MLS season.

“We’re not a minor-league team,” Mclean said. “We’re a professional team running in a professional organization. About 98.4% of college football players don’t go pro. Can we put together a team that could beat an NFL franchise? You bet we could.”

Mclean and the MLF are fighting against decades of history stacked against the success of professional football outside of the NFL. Multiple indoor football leagues have folded, including one that had a Sacramento team. The NFL’s World League of American Football folded in the 1990s. The XFL started, folded and restarted again recently.

It doesn’t help, Mclean said, that a spring football league used the same name as the MLF. That league brought players to a training camp in Mobile, Alabama, last week and allegedly stranded players there after they were kicked out of their hotel because the league didn’t pay the bill.

Mclean said the other league has no connection to his league. He said he had a trademark on the name Major League Football dating back to 2001, when he first considered starting a league.

“As we speak, our trademark attorney is sending a cease and desist (letter),” Mclean said.

Unlike the other league, Mclean said MLF is on solid footing in Sacramento. The team has worked on scheduling games with Roger Shepherd, who manages Heart Health Park for the group that owns Cal Expo. The commissioner said Shepherd has been an enthusiastic partner and they expect to play home games at Heart Health Park.

The team will be league-owned for at least the first couple of seasons, Mclean said. With an Oct. 2 kickoff on the horizon, Mclean said the league will hold tryouts in the Sacramento area and begin to look for a coaching staff.

“We’re already getting players wanting a tryout,” he said. “We’re trying to put the best product on the field. I talked to a couple GMs of the spring league, the Alliance of American Football. They all said getting players is the easy part.”

This story was originally published August 3, 2022 at 12:00 PM.