Here are the keys for UFL, spring football’s survival

Football is well established as America’s most popular sport nowadays. Fans flood the stands to watch contests on the gridiron of the NFL, NCAA and even high school football.

But, for a few reasons, the magic fails to be captured when the spring rolls around.

Many have tried and none have succeeded in establishing a sustainable spring football league, but the United Football League might just have a chance.

The United Football League is now in its second year under the rebrand. Previously, the USFL and XFL both were attempting to make spring football mainstream for the second time. The USFL had tried and failed throughout the 1990s, with a revival in 2022, while the former WWE CEO Vince McMahan’s XFL saw huge success that quickly fizzled out in the 2000s. Now, under the leadership of WWE superstar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the XFL attempted its revival in 2020.

Both leagues saw minimal success as standalone products, and the COVID-19 pandemic certainly hurt the efforts of the XFL. In 2024, both leagues decided to merge, taking what they considered the eight best markets between the two leagues to form the United Football League.

In the first season of the UFL, the Birmingham Stallions were crowned champions, marking three straight titles for the team counting its USFL championships in years prior.

The Stallions were part of the top four teams in attendance last season with an average of 10,192 fans per game. The top of the pack was the Former NFL team host city St. Louis, Missouri, which crammed an average of 34,365 fans in to watch the St. Louis Battlehawks. Despite impressive numbers for some teams, others were severely lacking, with the Memphis Showboats averaging just 6,893 fans at their home games.

Despite the mixed performances of teams, the league had reached new highs for spring football, outperforming all previous renditions of spring leagues. Now four weeks into 2025 though, both attendance and viewership have fallen some. Average television viewership had decreased from 800,000 to about 600,000 per game, despite its games still airing on ESPN and Fox networks. This could be considered a time to panic, but there are changes the league can make to ensure this is not the beginning of the end.

One of the biggest issues with the UFL is a similar problem that the USFL faced: there is no such thing as a “home game.” With the league based in Arlington Texas, so are all of the teams. When the Birmingham Stallions play at Protective Stadium in Birmingham, Alabama, they have to fly from Arlington, Texas, just like whoever the “visiting” opponent does. These teams have no ties to the communities they play in beyond what they do on game day. One of the best ways to bring in more fans is to give them a reason to like these players, and putting them into their respective cities is a quick way to do that.

The next fix for these leagues is what the broadcasts themselves are promoting. If you watch on ESPN, you will notice the score bug featuring betting odds such as the over/under and spread. While the network wants to promote its new ESPN Bet app, it pulls the focus off of the result, stakes and story of a season, and instead puts it on how much someone wins by or how many points a team scores. Both Fox and ESPN also use the UFL as a test dummy of sorts for potential features in NFL games. They mic up players, coaches, referees and any other person of interest. While this sounds entertaining, it can quickly become confusing and alienate the common viewer, who may not understand what is being communicated by these people. Coaches speak in code for play calls, so when a coach says “spider Y banana Z Atlanta X,” it does not actually add any relevant information to the broadcast, only overstimulation.

Lastly, location. Of the eight current UFL teams, only three of them are not based in cities that already feature an NFL team. It is asking a lot out of communities to spend large portions of their fall supporting a football team, then for them to do it all again in the spring.

St. Louis, Missouri, is a perfect example of a city who lacks a professional team but has the market for it. Among other locations, there has been success in past leagues in Orlando, Florida. When the AAF’s Orlando Apollos played in 2019, the team averaged an attendance of 20,191 fans. This would be the second largest in today’s UFL. As the league hopes to potentially expand, it must look for more locations that lack pro football but still have a market for it.

The UFL is not currently in any known financial trouble, and although the numbers are down, it does not appear to be in danger of folding for the time being. I believe the league will need to take some steps to make sure it stays that way in order to survive long-term.

Week five of 10 for the UFL begins on April 25, with the four-team playoff starting on June 8. The 2025 UFL Championship will be in St. Louis, Missouri on June 14.