Hope springs eternal, but perhaps not for professional football in the Spring.
The USFL and the XFL, two football leagues that were revived in recent years in a bid to bolster the sport during the NFL’s off-season, have decided to merge.
The new entity will “establish best-in-class operations based on the most recent seasons of both league,” the two sports groups said in a terse statement Thursday, noting that more details about the new organization would be released at a later date.
The USFL is backed by Fox Corp., and its games aired on both Fox entities and NBC, while the XFL was controlled by RedBird Capital and Dwayne Johnson and Dany Garcia. Its games were shown on platforms backed by Disney.
There’s good reason for interest in more football. It’s the most-watched programming on linear TV and commands the medium’s highest ad prices. TV networks, beholden to the NFL and the billions of dollars in rights fees it seeks, could stand to gain some leverage if they were able to turn to a rival league at a different time of the year to deliver a similar product.
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The media companies are also testing out their own sports creations, in hopes original events might draw viewers without the need to pay outsize figures to league partners. WarnerMedia, for example, has found some success with “The Match,” a celebrity golf tournament that attracts professionals as well as athletes from other sports.
But launching a sustainable NFL counterpart hasn’t proven easy. In recent years, the Alliance of American Football gained early traction with broadcasts on CBS and elsewhere before collapsing under shaky finances. WWE leader Vince McMahon initially backed the latest edition of the XFL that was halted by the coronavirus pandemic and bankruptcy before Redbird, Johnson and Garcia tried to make a go of it.
Both of the new leagues have a not-so-storied past. McMahon originally launched the XFL in 2001. It lasted just one season. The original USFL lasted three seasons, from 1983 through 1985.
