The Birmingham Stallions and the Memphis Showboats are two of the former USFL teams that have been carried over into the new league.getty images
For two years, the USFL and XFL battled in the spring football wars before merging in 2023. Now, as the United Football League prepares for the start of its debut season on March 30, the owners of those leagues — Fox Sports for the former, RedBird Capital for the latter — believe the combined entity is set up perfectly for one more try.
“Both leagues were completely sustainable in their own right, but if you take two successful models and put them together, I think it makes it even stronger,” said Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks.
It invites the question: Why didn’t these properties team up in the first place?
“The answer is: We should have, 100%,” said RedBird founder and managing partner Gerry Cardinale.
By last July, a merged league was so clearly the right move that Cardinale and Shanks agreed to a deal over a single red-wine-infused dinner, just days after the USFL championship game.
It was an about face from Fox and RedBird’s prior posture on spring football. They discussed bidding together to buy Vince McMahon’s XFL out of bankruptcy in 2021, but RedBird instead did the deal for about $15 million with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Dany Garcia. Then, Fox pursued its own strategy, buying the intellectual property of the old USFL and rushing to market to beat the XFL by playing its first game in April 2022. The XFL launched a year later.
Both leagues had some positive indicators from Nielsen-measured viewership figures, but neither was a breakout hit. Perhaps most critically for the merger, neither league established a clear lead, with both properties averaging just over 600,000 viewers per game last season.
Cardinale and Shanks agreed they should be spending their energy working together. They decided on a 50-50 blending of organizations, bringing over four teams and parts of the executive staff from each league. Russ Brandon, who had been president of the XFL, is president and CEO of the United Football League. Daryl Johnston, once a Pro Bowl fullback for the Dallas Cowboys and then a Fox Sports analyst, comes over from the USFL as executive vice president of football operations.
“There was no other way to do this and have it be healthy,” Shanks said. “Everybody has to understand that our competition wasn’t between USFL and XFL when we merged. Our competition is everything else in the second quarter.”
Fundamentally, Cardinale and Shanks are betting that prior attempts to build spring pro football have failed because of financial or business issues (or the pandemic) — not because American fans don’t want an option beyond the NCAA and the NFL. Now, they believe, they finally have all the business factors lined up to maximize their chances.
Most notably, that means prime TV windows controlled in a collaboration of Fox and Disney, which was an investor in the XFL and still holds equity in the UFL. Of the 42 games with TV times posted, over-the-air Fox will air 20, over-the-air ABC will air 10, and ESPN will air 10. (Three weeks will have two games regionalized on Fox.) Just two games will be on second-tier cable channels, one each on FS1 and ESPN2. TV plans for a championship game on June 16 are not yet announced.
Last year, distribution times and channels proved to be a major variable in viewership for both the USFL and XFL, and the XFL schedule on Disney properties struggled to establish a predictable pattern for fans. “When fans could easily find the football, they’d tune in and watch,” said Tim Reed, ESPN’s vice president of programming and acquisitions.
Even before the merger, Reed said, ESPN was working to solve those issues. Now, sharing the package with Fox allows both to elevate their own games and cross-promote each others’ games.
“The merger makes spring football in general stronger because the competing leagues were pulling from players, audience, talent, all the different pieces. By bringing them together it ultimately creates the strongest product for spring football,” Reed said.
UFL executives declined to detail financial arrangements or projections, but the dual roles of shareholder/distributor held by both Fox and Disney are bulwarks against cash burn. McMahon spent $200 million on the XFL’s second iteration that was cut short by the pandemic; the XFL lost a reported $60 million last year.
“I don’t think you could have a better combination than Fox and ESPN, when they’re both incentivized in that way, to make this a success,” Shanks said.
(Fox Sports owned all of the USFL at the merger, and Disney, Johnson and Garcia all joined RedBird in the XFL deal. Together, those five entities own the UFL.)
On the revenue front, the UFL has just a few commercial deals to date. It has a uniform and apparel deal with Under Armour, and an off-field apparel deal with MSX by Michael Strahan.
The league will have eight teams of 50 players each, and the total cost of salaries and housing stipends will be about $24 million. The league’s non-player headcount is 260.
Fox and RedBird are providing key business services to the UFL, and may continue that indefinitely, Shanks said.
“We’re actually both providing services to this league, so the league itself is more profitable until it does stand on its own two feet, if it ever does,” Shanks said. “You may always get marketing help from Fox, you may always get sponsorship help from RedBird, that might be the right model going forward. We’re starting on second or third base with this thing because the infrastructure RedBird and Fox have, and the media expertise from ESPN and Fox.”
Neither Cardinale nor Shanks was specific on his viewership or attendance goals, other than to say they expect growth over time. Also, they emphasize their benchmark is other sports properties in the spring, not the NFL or NCAA fall football viewership.
Cardinale says the league is “very self-sufficient from a capital standpoint” and would not, on its face, need more strategic involvement from potential new investors. But they may be open to local investors, a la an MLS-style owner-operator arrangement.
“If you subscribe to our view that this is a very national quality product with a very local orientation, maybe there’s an opportunity to bring in local partners in the markets we’re in,” Cardinale said. “Maybe that adds value in terms of continuing to deepen the fans’ connective tissue, if you will.”
