The call for more teams in The Outbox League was met with trepidation. Outbox Restaurants and the League itself were allegedly making money hand over fist, if you believed the "clearly screenshotted from [spreadsheet software]" tables and graphs the League office interns put in their quarterly recap presentations. In addition to some ... "friction" with IFCF officials, TOL was incentivized to add more teams to the league, as well as adjust the schedule to be a little more travel-friendly by playing more head-to-head games between in-nation teams and reducing international travel.
The problem? TOL charged the Drawkian office with bringing two more teams to the Outbox cause, for a total of six entries from Sonnel. That proved to be a bigger challenge than previously thought: only one DLK team was willing to cross the aisle to TOL, that being the Hessport Pioneers. Like the Sadeg Strikers, the Pioneers were one of the more recent expansion additions to DLK, so moving to TOL wasn't uprooting a long-lived domestic legacy. No other team wanted to play Outbox ball, however.
TOL's Drawkian office was in panic mode. Without a sixth Drawkian team, their holiday bonuses were in jeopardy. This could not come to pass. So, with the deadline looming and options dwindling, they opted for the insane route. They had to sign a sixth soccer team to the league? Fine. There will be a group of professional players (because they're technically paid a wage) comprising a soccer team. The catch: they're all bargain bin free agent castoffs from DLK. Uncs past their prime. Noobs who never got drafted out of college. People with literally nothing better to do, who would rather play for league minimum than finding real jobs and actually contributing to society.
It was malcompliance at its finest. Appropriately, the guy with the idea/team owner/team manager was Vincent Malcolm, the middle-aged Social Media Manager in TOL's Drawkland office. He named the team after himself, Sporting Malcolm, and found a suitable home ground at Pliance Field (the venue owned and used by the high school Malcolm's children attend) in Drawk City. Malcolm kicked back and prepared to pull in the minimal TOL revenue sharing package and pay his ringers the bare minimum. Malcolm got money. The players got money. The league got money. Everybody wins!
Sporting Malcolm went without a logo in their debut season. Vincent Malcolm refused to pay for a real graphic designer, and the intern he tried to coerce into slapping one together said there was some issue with online image sharing software that made distributing the logo simply impossible. Sporting Malcolm plays in bright orange and cyan, because those were the only colors with a full team's worth of jerseys still available at the sporting goods store closest to TOL's Drawkian office. It's appropriate considering watching these has-beens and never-weres play in a 10 formation (or 0-10-0 if you're picky) is the sporting equivalent of drinking orange juice right after brushing your teeth.
Earning 30 points in their debut season wasn't part of the plan, but that's what happens when you trust your league management to some bawdy trollop named Lisa. Typical TOL antics! Whether Sporting Malcolm returns for TOL Season Five (and if TOL returns for TOL Season Five at all) is mostly contingent on whether those pesky Conflict of Interest lawsuits go anywhere during the offseason. Come Get What You Crave, assuming you crave nothing but chaos!
