I’d imagine that you could have each team play each other team twice (once at home, once away). That would give 12 total games. So with teams A, B, C, and D you’d have these games:
A@B
A@C
A@D
B@A
B@C
B@D
C@A
C@B
C@D
D@A
D@B
D@C
Each team plays 6 games, 3 home and 3 away. At the end of the regular season you play a championship with the two teams with the best record, and whoever wins that game gets the “Arena Cup” or whatever. In this structure it’s easy to have tied records at the end of the year, so I might just use something like overall point differential as a tiebreaker.
It’s not perfect but it gets you a reasonable number of games and resembles a real schedule despite only having 4 teams.
Again I don’t know how they actually do it but I can see it being doable.
Every play in Arena is either a touchdown or an incompletion. That gets old. There’s no drama, no tension, just pinball scoring.
That, in fact, is exactly what they did for a 2018 schedule. All four teams made the playoffs, with round 1 being the #1 seed vs. #4, and #2 vs. #3, then the Arenabowl game being between the two winners from round 1.
That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not entirely unfair. I’ve long referred to arena football as being like a video game. 
Go back 119 years and you could ask the same thing about baseball.
Baseball had an advantage: it was enormously popular as a spectator sport. Every town of any size had a semipro team and it was a major source of entertainment. But sports fans were fickle even back then: if the team performed poorly, attendance would drop and they’d go under.
It’s not a coincidence that MLB stabilized about the time radio became popular. This brought a new income stream to a business that previously depended solely on attendance. Minor League baseball only stabilized (to some degree) as MLB teams started using them to develop talent, giving them a marketing hook (See tomorrow’s stars!) and a MLB team that had a vested interest in their survival.
Pro football was in the same boat until the collapse of the AAFC.
Arena football struggles because it competes with the cheap versions of the sport on TV.
I too am mystified by the constant proliferation of Arena Football and Indoor Soccer franchises and leagues popping up even though there is a decades long history of almost 100% failure of these teams.
A recent article on MLS expansion might offer some insight. There is now a record amount of millionaires and billionaires in the United States now but still only 120 or so franchises to buy; for that reason the price of entry into even the MLS has risen from a $10 million franchise fee to $250 million!
For a male there may be few ego strokes that match owning your own sports team. So what we have in an unprecedented number of rich guys with a few million burning a hole in their pockets making easy marks for those running these leagues.
Who wins? I’m guessing commissioners and league officials creating jobs for themselves over and over again and other franchise owners collecting franchise fees until they also go six feet under. At the end of the day if you are worth $50 mil and lose a couple on a fun 1-2 year ride you probably don’t give that much of a shit anyway.
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At least at the highest level of indoor football (the AFL), I can see that point, especially given that they’ve had several rock musicians as owners in recent years (Jon Bon Jovi, Vince Neil, and Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons).
At the minor-league level, I don’t get the impression that the team owners are millionairs with money to burn – I rather get the impression that it’s people who do have a little (not a lot) of money to spare, whose love for the game may well be overriding their business sense.