We’ve also got a lot of hidden expenses that nobody ever seems to think about. Tape, for instance. At the beginning of a season, when a man’s fairly tight, each guy gets wound with maybe four rolls of aluminum, three rolls of surgical. Toward the end of the year, when a man is more prone to injury, we double the amount of surgical tape. (We still use four rolls of aluminum.) Our tape bill for the season averages out to roughly $300 per man.

We have eighty two specially decorated traveling trunks that we use to carry equipment to away games. (You talk about a job. Manhandling those trunks around is one of the worst there is. They’re heavy going out, but they’re even heavier coming back. Every man’s uniform picks up roughly eight pounds worth of sweat during a game.) The trunks cost $6oo each.

We also change shoelaces before every game. If a man’s shoelace breaks during a crucial series and his shoe falls off, that’s one more vulnerable area of his body exposed, not to mention a loss of mobility. Shoelaces are cheap, but you buy enough of them and it all adds up. $20 per man for shoelaces every year.

It costs us $80,000 in flight insurance every time we fly to an away game. (The team is insured for $90,000,000.) Our average cost for airplane tickets is $60,000 per flight. You have to add the Environmental Protection Agency’s ten per cent surcharge, or $6,000, on top of that.

While it varies, up and down, depending on where we play and how rough the action gets, I’d say we wind up paying off maybe around $500,000 in damage claims after every game.

We’ve also got to spring for the cost of evacuating residents from the playing area and keeping up the displacement villages. Figure $60,000,000 a year for that.

Then there’s the player’s salaries. They vary, but the average is somewhere around $550,000 per man per year.

Last but not least is the football itself. It costs us $35, and for every home game we have to provide 24 new ones. The footballs are a standard league item made by Spaulding, who calls them “The SFL Special.” They’re exactly 11¼ inches long, 21½ inches in circumference. They’re made out of a special weatherproof Naugahyde with a nubbly texture to make them feel like leather. (Footballs used to be called “pigskins” but were really made out of cowhide. The current lack of cows makes that pretty impractical nowadays.) The lacings are made of the same stuff. We make it a practice to give the touchdown ball to the man who scored it, a custom that’s starting to catch on with other teams in the league.

So there you’ve got it. Cough up maybe ninety, maybe one hundred million dollars’ worth of seed money, and you too can field your own professional street football team.

Me, I’ll stick with the one I’ve got.