Johnny Manziel is being courted to the Arena Football League.
The AFL is relaunching in April — the third iteration of the league — and commissioner Lee Hutton III made it clear he’d like to see the polarizing Manziel return to football.
“I reached out to Johnny Manziel,” Hutton told TMZ. “So, Johnny, I’m a Texas guy. So, if you’re ready to come back and indoors — because you did very well — we will take you. We will find a spot for you.”
Manziel, 31, most recently played in the seven-on-seven Fan Controlled Football league after brief stints in the Canadian Football League and Alliance of American Football when his tumultuous NFL career ended.
A first-round pick by the Browns in 2014, Manziel lasted just two years in the NFL after emerging as a superstar at Texas A&M, becoming the first freshman to win the Heisman Trophy.
He recently revealed that he lost 40 pounds after his NFL career ended due to his use of cocaine, OxyContin and Percocet while trying to cope in Las Vegas.
“At that point in time, man, I would look in a mirror, and I didn’t see myself any different than when I was in Cleveland,” Manziel said in February on the “Club Shay Shay” podcast. “Until I stepped on a scale at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, I didn’t realize I had lost 40 pounds at all.
“I remember these pictures came out, I was like, ‘Damn. What am I doing? Ah, whatever, we’ll figure that out later. Let’s go again.’”
F1 Sports & Entertainment purchased the rights to the AFL in January 2022 after the league folded in 2009.
“We love our football in this country,” Hutton said. “How do we fulfill that appetite of football during [the offseason]? So we designed a very short, compact season, 10 weeks, which will start literally right after [the NFL draft].”
