MILWAUKEE, Wis. — Professional football could soon make its return to Milwaukee after a nearly 15 year absence.
Milwaukee Pro Football would be an 2027 expansion market along with Indianapolis and Cincinnati in the Continental Football League. The league launched in 2025 and has no affiliation with the league of the same name from the 1960s.
“Milwaukee is a football town. Always has been. This is a city that shows up for the Bucks in the winter and the Brewers in the summer — and that shows up for the game of football at every level, in every neighborhood, all year long. The Continental Football League belongs in a city like this, and Milwaukee Pro Football is exactly the kind of ownership group we built the CoFL to work with,” said league founder and CEO Manny Matsakis in a news release.
The team will be lead by President Ahmed Hollowell while his son Ameer will serve as COO. Ahmed is a Milwaukee Public Schools high school administrator, according to his online Linkedin profile. Both formally unveiled the team during a press event at the Ambassador Hotel in Milwaukee September 16.
A team name and venue has not yet been chosen for the Milwaukee franchise, though a community ballot on the team’s website lists American Family Field, The Milwaukee Mile, Hart Park, and a temporary location along the lakefront as venue possibilities.
Six games in total including three home games are proposed for the inaugural season between May and July, as part of what the team calls a “controlled market test, not an oversized promise”. The team website lists an initial working minimum venue capacity near 3,500 seats.
Professional football has had a turbulent history in Milwaukee since the Green Bay Packers played their final home game at Milwaukee County Stadium in 1994, and has mostly existed in the indoor realm. The sport has been absent from the city proper at the pro level since the second iteration of the Arena Football League’s Milwaukee Mustangs ceased operations in 2012; the franchise existed in two separate stints, playing games between 1994 and 2001 at the Bradley Center before losing their lease, then returning for two seasons in 2011 and 2012 at the now-named UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena after a two-year window in the developmental af2 as the Milwaukee Iron.
Before that, the Milwaukee Bonecrushers played two seasons at the downtown arena between 2008 and 2009, though their tenure was marked with scrutiny after the sudden exodus of head coach and former Green Bay Packer nose tackle Gilbert Brown in the team’s first season, followed by a court ruling ordering the team to pay $29,539.29 in unpaid bills to turf provider Challenger Industries in 2009. The team would relocate to Chicago in 2010.
Player tryouts for Milwaukee Pro Football are scheduled for January 10.
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