Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson announced an official merger between the USFL and XFL on Thursday morning. Where two spring football leagues competed against each other for ratings over the last few seasons, there will be just one spring football league starting in 2024.
The Rock says that there is more work to be done. Details will be announced at a later date.
This is a great thing for spring football fanatics, of which there are 10s, I’m sure. No longer will the top non-NFL talent have to choose between the XFL and USFL.
The best (active) professional football players who are not on an NFL roster will all be on the same field together. Well, they’ll actually be on different teams with different fields, but you get the idea.
McLeod Bethel-Thompson, Case Cookus, Ben DiNucci and Jordan Ta’amu — the four best quarterbacks in both leagues last season — will compete against each other each week. Guys like Corey Coleman, a former first-round NFL Draft pick, will have all eyes on him instead of having to compete with a whole different league for eyeballs.
Finding enough high-level talent for two leagues was very difficult. The merger will help to get all of the best non-NFL talent in the same league.
However, those names aren’t exactly driving viewership…
It has yet to be seen if there is enough talent to field one successful spring football league.
Will the XFL/USFL merger help viewership?
Increased viewership, of course, is the goal.
The XFL and USFL finished with very similar regular season ratings in 2023. The XFL averaged 602,073 viewers per game. The USFL averaged 604,175 viewers per game.
The XFL title game saw 1.4 million viewers. The USFL title game saw 1.2 million viewers.
Those are not bad numbers! They actually out-performed the average viewership for regular season NHL games on ABC, ESPN and Turner.
By consolidating two competitors and reducing the amount of spring football will directly correlate to an immediate boost in viewership. Even if it may not be a significant boost, there will be more eyeballs on the new XFL/USFL league.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be enough viewers for the league to survive, let alone thrive. There is still a long way to go.
What is the best path forward for The Rock and the XFL?
A merger allows for the new league to pluck the top markets and put all of its resources behind them. Growing individual markets will grow the league.
Is that feasible? The XFL headquartered all of its teams in one location last season and traveled to host cities for games. The USFL used hub cities.
To expand out and really build a fanbase for individual markets would be a costly venture. It’s an expensive sport to begin with, and that doesn’t including housing, insurance, marketing, etc.
Perhaps the best way to move forward is in the gambling space. If the new XFL/USFL can put emphasis on the betting element, it may be able to increase the amount of people who are invested in a random game between two small-market cities on a Saturday night in April.
There is also the minor league idea. The XFL/USFL could — down the road — partner with the NFL and serve as something of a farm system. Both leagues already did that, to some extent, and college football exists as a minor league equivalent.
All of this goes to say that there are a lot of questions surrounding the XFL/USFL merger and non-NFL professional football in general. Barring an unforeseen setback, there will be spring ball in 2024.
What will it look like? That is what The Rock is referring to when he says that there is “more work to be done.”