Gridiron Enterprises
Gridiron Enterprises is a sports consulting company based in Chicago, Illinois. Although they offer services to the public, their primary focus and notability is in having been the patent holder of the system of play for Arena football until the patent expired on March 27, 2007, as well as being an equity member of the league.
The company is owned by James F. Foster, Jr., the original founder of the Arena Football League (AFL), attorney William Niro, and Jerry Kurz. Gridiron was one of the parties that forced the original Arena Football League into Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation; Kurz then went on to set up a new league originally known as Arena Football 1 (AF1), separate from the original AFL organization, for some of the surviving AFL teams as well as those from its former minor league, af2. AF1 went on to purchase all of the assets of the AFL organization in a bankruptcy auction in December 2009, enabling it to brand itself as a continuation of the original AFL.