In the world of American football, the XFL and the USFL have merged into the United Football League (UFL). The league will be playing in the spring, which is the off-season for the National Football League (NFL), and has scheduled a first game for March 30.
The league’s President and CEO is Russ Brandon, former President and CEO of the XFL. Football operations will be in the charge of Daryl Johnston, who held the same duties at the USFL.
The XFL and USFL will now be conferences, with four teams apiece: respectively, the Birmingham Stallions, Houston Roughnecks, Memphis Showboats and Michigan Panthers and the Arlington Renegades, D.C. Defenders, San Antonio Brahmas and St. Louis Battlehawks.
Both of the leagues-turned-conferences are, in their current iterations, of recent vintage – the USFL dating to 2022, the XFL to 2018 – but both are, in fact, second comings.
The original XFL dates back to 1999 – the era of the X-Games and so-called extreme sports. It was founded by Vince McMahon, famous for co-founding and promoting World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and, nowadays, as the face of several internet memes, among them one we might call “making an entrance.”
The original USFL lasted for three seasons, from 1982 to 1985. Like the XFL, it was designed for the spring and summer, the off-seasons of the much larger NFL. There were, however, plans for a fourth season – one that was to take the USFL into competition with the NFL. Incidentally, one of the team owners urging the change was Donald Trump, who dedicated a chapter to the episode in his book The Art of the Deal.
There is also Canadian football, as played by the Canadian Football League (CFL), in which teams play on a larger gridiron and field 12 players instead of 11. A further variant, arena football, has a smaller gridiron and eight men to a side.
But the non-NFL money-maker in American football is college football – the play of university teams. It is a slight variant in its rules, and some of its big games are played in NFL stadiums. Here, a debate has been raging for years, as the top teams generate substantial revenues off the labor of players whose sole remuneration is usually scholarships. According to FootballScoop, ten US schools generated more than $100 million from football in 2021, and the Southeastern and Big Ten conferences each generated aggregate revenues in excess of $1 billion.
This is still chump change by comparison with the NFL, whose teams, according to Statista, generated aggregate revenues of $18.6 billion in 2022.
According to Sports Illustrated and others, the XFL generated a loss of more than $60 million in its most recent season. However, in the partial season of 2020 (interrupted by lockdowns), it generated about $20 million, according to WSN. The same source posits annual revenues of about $7.5 million for the USFL.
