The Alliance of American Football gets started next weekend, and the extent of people and companies with skin in the game remains unclear.
Here’s what is clear: Former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal a/k/a Shaq emerged on Friday as a partial owner.
The AAF disclosed on Friday that Shaq is indeed an investor in the upstart league. “We do everything real big in football,” co-founder Charlie Ebersol says in a video while gesturing toward O’Neal.
According to Daniel Kaplan of SportsBusiness Daily, the league has said that it has high-profile athletes and sports-team owners as investors. However, the AAF had yet to name any of them.
With the launch little more than a week away, why not let the names be known? Any buzz can be good buzz, and the AAF will need plenty of buzz if it hopes to survive and, ultimately, to thrive.