100 Dollars for a Pro Football Team

That's right, $100. Not $100,000. Not $100,000,000. Just a simple one double zero. When, in 1920, the eleven teams that would eventually form the NFL were offered for sale, as little as $100 would get you one. Once you had one there would, naturally enough, be additional expenses - salaries, equipment, facilities, etc, but hey, at least you could be a team owner.

When Peter Nye, author of Heart of Lions: The History of American Bicycle Racing wrote in an 1989 story at the Washington Post, about that extraordinary deal he was contrasting what would ultimately become an out of control capitalist behemoth of today with the (sort of) capitalist behemoth (my words not Nye's) of that earlier era - bicycle racing, in which a single win in a race on the Eastern circuit would award a rider enough to purchase not one, but two future NFL teams. Five years later (1925) the New York Giants sold for $500, while Australian champion, Alf Goulet, riding a Six Day race at Madison Square Garden the same year, earned $10,000, or enough to buy an entire league of football teams. That's some crazy turn around.

Anyway, that same year (1925) Goulet approached the manager of the Newark Velodrome, John M. Chapman, who in his racing heyday competed at the downtown indoor saucer track at Los Angeles, proposing to set up goal posts on the infield of the velodrome, lay some lines and have a ready-made football stadium for use during the bicycle racing off-season. Chapman allegedly replied that football was a game for "high school kids and college boys," and that "nobody would ever pay to watch football." With attendance at a typical Madison Square Garden Six Day reaching 150,000 spectators who "left their dollars and sense behind," Chapman may have been correct about the money-maker of those days but the future, thus far anyway, has had different plans.

Australian Alfred (Alf) Goulet