Lingerie football still expanding despite canceled season

There will be no Mist in Seattle this year. The Lingerie Football League
canceled the 2012-13 season. League founder Mitch Mortaza
said the decision was to take the time to properly brand
the game and expand it. Some people surmise the league
isn’t playing this year because it’s struggling
financially.

But if the league is struggling as it prepares for its
fourth
season, it certainly isn’t showing it on the outside. A
team of all-stars just played to packed houses in
Australia and Mexico, and Mortaza said the league is going
ahead with full expansion plans in Canada, Australia, and
Europe.

This is where I’ll take you back to the first tryouts for
the Seattle Mist in 2009. They were held on a cloudy day
at Greenlake. Men gathered to gawk at the beautiful women
in tiny sports bras. Women shook their heads as they
thought about how far this would set back women’s sports.

Three seasons later, the Seattle Mist pack the ShoWare
Center in Kent, 5,000 people a game, and we discovered the
eye-candy in lingerie were legitimate athletes.

Mortaza, too, is surprised by how well the league has been
received.

“It’s been an incredible ride,” he said. “Nothing that
anybody expected, not just here in the states, but what’s
happening internationally.”

The league has expanded to 14 teams in the U.S. with new
clubs in Omaha and St.Louis, and now the LFL is working on
a video game. It is partnering with YUKE’s Co.
Ltd from Japan to build a legitimate sports game.

“It
will look and feel like a real, actual football game,”
Mortaza said. “It won’t be a spoofy game.”

He wants a good game with good game play. His league’s
core fans are also gamers who won’t be interested in a
poorly designed game, even if it features scantily clad
women playing football.

“We’re definitely going to have a
little fun with it, for example, you can build your own
all-star team of redheads or blondes,” he said. “At the
core, the game is going to be, believe it or not, kind of
sophisticated, similar to Madden in terms of movement and
strategy. You are really going to have to know
our game, the speed of our game, and the strategy of our
game.”

Mortaza said his star players will go to Japan and use
motion-capture technology so the movements will be
accurate. He’s also trying to get the rights to arenas
around the league so he can use them to duplicate the game
experience.

He expects the game to be ready for the start of the 2014
season, if there is one.

The jury’s still out on whether this league, despite it’s
hardcore fans, will survive, though the ShoWare Center has
no doubt this league isn’t going anywhere.