February 06, 2019
Before I get into the characters of Future Football League or any of the conflicts in the world, I feel like I need to lay out the major events that happen in the 21st century that lead to the chaotic and corrupt world that the FFL thrives in.
History is usually boring as hell and this is no exception, so here’s a link to facebook that you can have running in the background. Also permissible is just closing this tab altogether and flipping through your Instagram feed for a few hours or until you finish taking this shit, whichever comes first.
In the late Twenty Teens, the NFL faces a serious hurdle when it is forced to lockout the players due to escalating NFL Player’s Association salary disputes. This lockout lasts for two seasons, ending all NFL games for 30 months.
During this time, several professional football offshoots gain some traction, including the newly rebooted XFL, an all-black player league called the Black Football Alliance, as well as a staged league spun off from an ultra-successful reoccurring Kyle Mooney skit on Saturday Night Live.
When the NFL resumes after contract negotiations have been settled, it finds itself in a highly fractured landscape of professional football and it struggles to stay as relevant as it once was.
Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, the United States and China battle for Solar System dominion in the Twenty Twenties. Out to negate the US claim to the moon, China makes a promise to colonize it before anyone else.
A new space race is born and the US is able to be the first nation to establish a self-sustaining colony on the moon. Within 2 years, China colonizes the moon. Within 5 more years, it colonizes Mars as well. The US is unable to keep up.
International alarm is raised when the US moon colony stops communicating with Earth. When the US sends an envoy to investigate, they discover a mass slaughter of the colony. China denies any involvement and there is no proof, aside from the obvious proximity to the disaster.
No actions are taken back on Earth, but these simmering tensions become known as the Interworld War.
New York City gets hit with a previously unseen Category 6 hurricane that decimates the city and causes a major depression in the world economies in the early Twenty Thirties. It takes decades for New York to recover, as it final adopts a floating city model in the Fifties.
In the meanwhile, there is a race amongst previously insignificant American towns and cities to supplant New York for the nation’s leading economic center. The top three cities to emerge are South Carolina’s Greenville, Kolby in Kansas and Boise, Idaho.
In the late Twenty Forties, the entrepreneur and Boise native, Dradum McQuait Sr. standardizes the splintered professional football landscape by creating the Future Football League. It is not an immediate success, but McQuait persists, pouring a countless fortune into keeping the league buoyant. He headquarters his league in his hometown, Boise.
In the Twenty Fifties, an existential crisis hits earth as China reveals that it has been using its Mars colony to create sophisticated wartime androids. The Chinese researchers on Mars lose control of the machines and they kill their masters. The androids move quickly to overtake the moon and use it as a base to launch attacks on Earth. Within the course of a week, the Chinese wartime androids of Mars and the Moon and the humans of Earth are in full blown war.
During the war, world leaders go into hiding in bunkers trying to lead from a place of safety, while average citizens are living in constant fear of android attack. McQuait’s efforts of weathering his league through near financial ruin pays off as he refuses to stop gameplay during the war.
During Interworld War 2, the FFL grows enormously popular worldwide as a touchstone for unity and courage. McQuait uses his position as commissioner to be the leader the world needs — one who people can trust and one who won’t back down from the insurmountable odds of taking on sophisticated killing machines.
Earth is dealt a heavy blow when, in a single day, the androids send nuclear strikes to wipe out Los Angeles, Paris, London, Beijing, Frankfurt and Olympia, Washington, confusing it with Washington DC. This day becomes known as Annihilation Day. Earth strikes back by coordinating an attack on the Moon to blow it out of the sky.
With androids and humans farther away, it takes longer to coordinate attacks, so humans act quickly to destroy Mars as well. Their attempt fails, but the attack turns the top 500 yards of crust of Mars into dust. This eliminates any chance of android survival and humans win the war.
When the Second Interworld War ends in the early Twenty Sixties, the world is devastated and humanity is reluctant to trust the old world powers to keep them safe from such monstrosities again. Seeing an opportunity, Dradum McQuait Sr. offers the world a new solution — a world based around entertainment, where the only battles are fought on the gridiron and advanced technology is shunned.
McQuait offers them a world of Future Football League. Within the course of five years following the war, most world governments have crumbled and in their place a FFL franchise thrives. Boise becomes the world’s greatest city, and the world exists in peace once again, but not forever.