There are five in NFL cities -- New York, Chicago, Detroit, Boston and Denver. The others include two in the Los Angeles area and franchises in Toronto, San Jose, Calif., Texas, Toronto and Connecticut.

"I want football 12 months of the year," said entertainer Dionne Warwick, who will be a part owner of the two franchises in Southern California, which lost two NFL teams after the 1994 season and is having trouble getting together on an expansion team.

The new league is the brainchild of Dennis Murphy, who helped found both the American Basketball Association and the World Hockey Association in the '70s. They eventually merged some of their franchise with the NBA and NHL.

"The marketplace is better now than it was then," Murphy said at a news conference. "Then there were three networks. Now there are 200 channels on Direct TV, cable, what have you."

Davidson and Edward Litwack, the league's president and chief executive officer, acknowledged having preliminary discussions with NBC and Turner Broadcasting, the networks that lost out in the $18 billion NFL contract negotiated in 1998.

But both executives said neither NBC nor Turner will be ready for the inaugural season, which will run from February to July next year.

NBC and Turner Sports previously said they are considering sponsorship of a new football league but no plan has been put forward.

Litwack runs his own cable television systems that could be used for a syndicated package and sold individually to local stations or cable networks. He also said the games could be shown on the Internet.

Litwack emphasized that unlike the earlier leagues, the IFF would not threaten the NFL.

"We want to live in harmony," he said.

 

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