Tabletop football makes a big score

A company selling tabletop footballs expects revenues
of $1.5 million this year.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

LOS ANGELES — Richard Crasnick rode in three championship parades with the Los Angeles Lakers, wrote speeches for a basketball legend named Magic and toured Europe with Olympic gold medalists.

But the biggest sporting event of his life is playing out in a drab warehouse in California, using a thin triangle of leather less than half the size of a credit card.

Crasnick is president of FIKI Sports, which stands for “Flick It and Kick It,” a two-person business that includes his lifetime pal, Craig Matthews. They are betting on a sport that couldn’t be more low tech in an era of sophisticated game consoles that contain more technology than a supercomputer did 10 years ago.

Paper football is played by two people sitting across a table or desk. The “ball” usually is a sheet of notebook paper folded into a flat triangle. Touchdowns are scored by flicking the triangle until it hangs over the edge of the table without falling off. Points also are awarded for “kicking” the ball with your finger through your opponent’s goal posts — formed by his or her index fingers and thumbs.

How company started

Crasnick’s version, projected to bring in $1.5 million in revenue this year, is the result of a shared daydream with his brother, Michael, 16 years ago. They took a paper football, wrote the then-Los Angeles Raiders team logo on it and slipped it into a small plastic bag to mimic packaging.

“We had both played it growing up, and we thought, ‘What a great idea,’ but we decided that the ball had to be leather, like a real football. Then we tossed it in a drawer,” Crasnick said.

Almost nothing about Crasnick’s background prepared him for what was to come, and the 47-year-old entrepreneur admitted that he knew little about running a business. But Crasnick said he kept running into people who did know things, such as how to find the right factory in China to manufacture his product, develop a national sales team and break the ice with the National Football League.

Crasnick, who majored in journalism at California State, Northridge, worked for the Lakers from 1981-89, eventually becoming the team’s director of promotions. He later became a sports agent with Olympic athletes as clients and helped promote celebrity basketball games on MTV, among other things.

In 2000, “more out of desperation, not inspiration,” Crasnick said, he pulled the plastic bag out of the desk drawer and called Matthews, who owned a gym for children in Torrance, Calif.

It took months, sifting through samples from China, to find the right leather. Crasnick said he managed to stay afloat with financial help from family and friends as he searched.

Crasnick had a prototype made and launched a patent search, certain that no one else had come up with the idea. He was wrong.

“A retired schoolteacher had already made one, licensed to a company called Klutz. I was mortified. Someone had already done it,” Crasnick said.

Klutz turned out to be three Stanford graduates from Palo Alto, purveyors of “how-to” activity books, including one on tabletop football that came with a crudely stitched leather triangle. Klutz liked Crasnick’s stand-alone game with a plastic goal post, and, after negotiations, he came away with an agreement that promised Klutz a share of the profit.

Mass production

Crasnick had no idea how to find a factory in China to mass-produce his footballs, but he got lucky. A friend on a business flight had a seat next to a chatty agent from Hong Kong whose business was directing the right product to the right factory.

By 2001, Krasnick had 100,000 leather triangles but no warehouse. He moved most of the furniture out of his Santa Monica apartment and shipped directly from there.

His footballs were moving at game stores and gift shops, but it took three years to sell the first 100,000 units.

The big break came early in 2002, when Crasnick and Matthews visited Collegiate Licensing Co. in Atlanta, which handles brand management and trademark enforcement for 300 colleges and universities.

From that visit, and trips to Ohio State University and other schools, FIKI Sports obtained the right to have official team logos on its footballs. The entrepreneurs chose several perennial football powerhouses, including Ohio State, Michigan, Texas, Oklahoma and UCLA.

The leather triangles were an immediate hit, Crasnick said.

From 2004 to 2005, the number of colleges represented grew to 65. The company sold more than 1 million footballs at $8.95, or $9.95 if they carried a team logo. That wasn’t enough. Crasnick wanted to be back at the top again by getting an NFL license to print the 32 team logos on his footballs.

At first, in 2004, the NFL laughed.

In fact, the game was enjoying a resurgence. On any given week, there are 80 to 90 videos of paper football games showing on YouTube and Google Video.

Simple attraction

The attraction was simple, said Jeff Patterson, a medical equipment sales manager who founded the Paper Football Association this year to promote the game.

“Here’s your chance to play against a live person, with eyeball-to-eyeball contact that you don’t get in video games,” Patterson said.

But the NFL line didn’t budge until early 2006, when another friend of a friend intervened. One of them called Mike Ornstein, who had been a longtime executive with the Raiders. After Ornstein called the league, doors opened. FIKI got its NFL license last year.

More recently, FIKI landed contracts to sell products at Sears and Big 5 sporting goods stores.

Now, the company is introducing board-game versions of FIKI football, basketball, baseball and hockey for $29.95 each. Crasnick says he hopes to sell 3 million units in 2008.

Before the NFL license, “we had been trying to get Sears and Big 5 for four or five years. They’d always say that they didn’t see it. You hear ‘no’ in so many ways that you develop a thick skin. You learn that ‘no’ just means ‘no today,’ not tomorrow,” Crasnick said.