Talen Energy Stadium to host Premier League Lacrosse championship game on Sept. 21

Premier League Lacrosse, a new outdoor lacrosse competition with some famous-name financial backing, will play its championship game at Talen Energy Stadium on Sept. 21.

“Philadelphia has been home to many final fours at the collegiate level, which is the gold standard for our game [below] the professional ranks,” said PLL co-founder Paul Rabil, a former player for the Philadelphia Wings. “Talen Energy is a beautiful venue.”

In addition to the championship game, the stadium will host a playoff consolation game that will determine the team that gets next year’s No. 1 draft pick. PLL won’t give it to the last-place team; instead, the playoff system will be a double-elimination format, and the two teams not contesting the final will play for the draft slot.

“We don’t want to have someone playing for a loss,” Rabil said. “There’s going to be a celebration for [awarding] the first-round pick for actually winning, not for losing.”

The PLL’s season format is also different from those of most pro sports leagues. Instead of city-based franchises, there will be six teams that play each other in a barnstorming tour across 12 cities in the United States and Canada.

Rabil does not shy away from the uniqueness of that, and the financial benefits of it. He speaks the language of business and venture capital as easily as he speaks the language of lacrosse.

“There’s some substantial market opportunity for the business to optimize fundamentals,” he said. “In a non-core sports league like lacrosse, with six teams, had we chosen the city-based model, we would have been very exclusive, or even hyper-localized, to six markets only. ... By becoming a tour-based model, we’re now in 13 cities over the course of a 14-weekend season. That gives not only fans in markets access to the best teams and the best players, but it also gives our players an opportunity to showcase their talent in new markets.”

The format helped secure TV coverage from Comcast-owned NBC Sports. All 19 games in the season will be televised, with 17 on NBCSN and two on the main NBC broadcast network.

In addition to the TV deal, the PLL has equity investors, including Joseph Tsai, co-owner of the Brooklyn Nets and owner of the New York Liberty. All 160 players in the league -- 28 per team, plus a backup player pool -- will also have stock options, to go with minimum salaries that start at $25,000, and health-care benefits. There is no salary cap.

The minimum wage is a dramatic increase from the existing outdoor lacrosse competition, Major League Lacrosse. Salaries there run from $9,200 for rookies to $34,000 for a few stars, and MLL does not give its players health insurance.

Talen Energy Stadium general manager Jason Blumenfeld said that the lacrosse games will be among a very small number of non-Union events held at the venue this year. The other major ones are the annual college rugby sevens tournament May 31-June 2, and a drum-and- bugle corps competition in July. There will also be a handful of high school and college soccer games.

The Union don’t have a home game between Sept. 14 and Oct. 6, which means the grass at the stadium will have time to regrow after the lacrosse games.

“Obviously, the field is a top priority, and we’re also looking to bring in as many other events as we can, as long as it makes sense, and the Union sign off on that,” Blumenfeld said.