But Project Fanchise wasn’t satisfied. Following the season, they shut down the Screaming Eagles and exited the IFL. “We found a league [in the IFL] that was gracious enough to let in a bunch of crazy guys with a crazy idea,” Farudi says. But the fit had grown increasingly awkward. Farudi’s group initially hoped to license its fan control platform to the league’s other teams, transforming the “I” in IFL from “indoor” to “interactive.” That changed after the group saw how expensive it was to field a single team for a single season, with travel costs alone running as high as $40,000 per road game.

“It’s not impossible to make money in the indoor game, but it’s almost impossible,” Farudi says. “You have to sell out your arena, sell a ton of merchandise, and get a giant chunk of concessions” — in other words, earn revenue by putting fans in the stands, the traditional business model of minor league sports. Project Fanchise had a different idea: why not focus on a potentially much bigger digital

For now, the FCFL is a lot like blockchain itself — potentially game-changing, but very much a work in progress.

“Go to a NFL game,” Liotta says. “Take a look around. Every single person has their phone out. It could be a playoff game, and they’re texting and taking pictures. When you think about the future of sports, this is the future — engaging fans in a way that they can participate from their phones.”

As such, the FCFL will look less like the IFL — or, for that matter, the NFL — than “American Ninja Warrior.” To slash expenses, all eight teams will be located in a single city, sharing position coaches, medical staff, and a practice squad. They’ll play in the same arena, which will only hold a few thousand fans and otherwise function in the manner of a television soundstage, allowing the league and broadcast partners Twitch and IMG Productions to deliver a more seamless interactive experience and experiment with helmet cameras and overhead drones delivering Madden-style views of the action.

The game itself will be optimized for online viewers, such as the players on the high school football team Liotta coaches in suburban Pittsburgh. “I’m sure they will love this,” he says. “They love Fortnite.” Contests will be a hour long, fast-paced and high-scoring, with seven players per side on a 50-yard field. Oh, and no kicking extra points. “There’s nothing more boring,” Austin says. Instead, the FCFL will feature a one-on-one showdown between a receiver and a defensive back. “I went to [the University of] Tennessee, and Peyton Manning was my quarterback in practice,” Austin says. “The most exciting, competitive drill was the one-on-one with the receivers and DBs. You had the best athletes on the field, all the NFL scouts sitting on the sidelines, the whole team watching. And you never see it anywhere else! Imagine the anticipation when fans get to vote on who goes up against who.”

The FCFL’s owners plan to let fans select cheerleaders and vote for picks during a real-time, preseason player draft — which, naturally, will take place after a live-streamed scouting combine. They’re considering holding weekly contests that would award fans extra perks, like the ability to give their team an extra down during the next game. Farudi says his group also plans to expand something they call the “virtual front office,” which in Salt Lake City allowed fans to pay a monthly subscription fee to join management conference calls and connect with former NFL players and team investors Al Wilson and Ahman Green. “Fans don’t usually get to do this stuff,” Farudi says. “I was on the phone with Joe Montana two weeks ago, and even I’m like, ‘holy shit, I am talking to Joe Montana!’”

Underneath it all will be blockchain. In April, the FCFL partnered with New Alchemy, a Seattle-based consulting group, to implement the technology into their fan platform. In part, the league wanted to avoid a repeat of the Hardy vote. “For a while, we figured we would use, like, the accountants who verify the Oscars or the NBA Draft,” Dees says with a laugh. “We needed a better solution.” They also wanted to take advantage of the ability to create bitcoin-style tokens, the FCFL’s answer to the virtual currency found in popular sports video games such as NBA 2K.

The tokens will work in two ways. First, they’ll serve as a proxy for voting power: the more you have, the more your vote for a team logo or a quarterback sneak on fourth-and-short will count. Fans will receive tokens when they download the league’s app, and be able to earn more by being involved with the league — watching games, creating and sharing league content on social media, picking plays that produce yards and touchdowns. “If you choose a sweep right and that gets run and we gain six yards, then you gain six yards on your fan profile,” Farudi says. “We’ll have fan leader boards and a whole competitive ecosystem. And it’s not a pay-to-play thing. You earn more as you participate.”

Second, the FCFL wants to create individual player tokens that fans can collect and trade, akin to the baseball cards Farudi loved as a child. “What we really like about the blockchain is that we can give those tokens special properties,” he says, envisioning rare tokens that could be redeemed for a 30-minute Skype session with a star receiver, or the chance to warm up a favorite quarterback on the field before a game. “It’s all about unique experiences and opportunities,” Farudi says.

For now, the FCFL is a lot like blockchain itself — potentially game-changing, but very much a work in progress. “Nobody has done this before,” Dees says. “There’s no road map.” Challenges abound. Dees says that current blockchain tech may be too slow for real-time play-calling, and that building an intuitive online interface has proven thorny. “You see some pretty cumbersome stuff with blockchain, 13-step nonsense with using a special browser,” he says. “We have to distill everything into something accessible and instantly fun.” On the meatspace side of things, the league likely will play its games in Las Vegas, and possibly on the Strip. That has Austin — responsible for the care, feeding, and football development of the FCFL’s athletes — fretting. “Is that the right place for us?” he says. “I’ll be dealing with 200 young players, in Vegas, who will now be in the limelight.”

Fans are another wildcard. In Salt Lake City, they were good sports citizens, voting to help the home team win. But what if the FCFL’s larger, mostly digital, and less geographically loyal audience decides to act like … online trolls? Could they sabotage a team by calling crummy plays? Could fans of one team tank an opponent with a targeted barrage of bad faith votes? (According to Cohen, a prospective Screaming Eagles cheerleader tried, and failed, to stuff the ballot box in her favor). Then there’s the old school specter of gambling and game-fixing — could a bettor or bookie somehow amass tokens, then use that voting power to shade and swing games? “You make one mistake there, and you probably won’t get a chance to make a second, because you’ll be done in terms of credibility,” says Andy Dolich, a former professional sports executive who is advising the FCFL. “It’s like a terrorist attack at a sporting event.”

The Screaming Eagles were a successful proof of concept, but the dustbin of business history is overflowing with promising concepts that struggled to scale. For Farudi, the potential payoff is worth the risk. Global sports, he says, are a trillion dollar industry. Video gaming and fantasy sports are worth hundreds of billions. “We want to be at the intersection of those markets — the passion of live sports, the competition of fantasy sports, the engagement of video games,” he says. Dees sees the future in more intimate terms. Wandering the field after the Screaming Eagles’ first game, he watched a young fan approach receiver Devin Mahina and introduce himself. Hi, the boy said, I’m Billy. On that touchdown, I called that play. Mahina kneeled down. He looked the boy in the eye. Billy, he said, thank you for calling that play. “The kid lost his mind,” Dees says. “That’s when I knew we were onto something. This is going to be a thing.”