I’ve heard over the years from a number of USFL/NFL players and sports commentators that if Donald Trump hadn’t tried to directly compete with the NFL by having them play in the same season and then later try to sue the NFL, that playing in the NFL off-season would have actually worked and the USFL would have existed well until 2020.
The problem is though since the fall of the USFL we’ve had all sorts of “professional” football leagues pop up, last a season and then immediately collapse which makes me think the odds of the USFL survival are actually slim. Is this just all weird “Trump Derangement Syndrome”?
As a casual fan, I’ve heard those same opinions since the 80s, long before Donald Trump was anything more than a property developer who had somehow parlayed that into minor celebrity. I don’t think it has anything to do with TDS. I think it’s garden variety armchair and Monday morning quarterbacking, motivated reasoning, and cognitive dissonance.
Pro football is very popular in the U.S. It has seemed to a lot of people for a long time that there must be a market for another league. When someone launches a league to great fanfare and fails, those who think there must be a market for another league are faced with a choice: they can either decide they were wrong, and often loudly wrong, and there’s not actually a market for another pro football league in the U.S.; or they can decide the folks who ran that particular league made a series of stupid mistakes that wrecked an otherwise viable product.
USFL. World Football League. Arena League. XFL. XFL 2.0. And on and on and on. Heck, the NFL tried it, and failed, with the World League of American Football/NFL Europe. I think there’s definitely some derangement involved in all these attempts at creating another pro football league in the U.S., but I don’t think it has anything to do with Donald Trump.
I can’t say for sure if the USFL would have had any chance for long term survival even if Trump had never gotten involved. The league had a lot of other issues with overspending and poor attendance in several markets that were unrelated to him.
Trump certainly didn’t help though; having read books and watched docs on the history of that league, it is readily apparent that Trump never had any intention of making the league a going concern. The plan (to the extent that Trump had one, which is debatable) seems to have been to try to force a merger with the NFL. Trump desperately wanted to own an NFL team, but the league had rejected him out of hand (Pete Rozelle didn’t believe Trump actually had the funds to buy a team, even at the lower prices of the 1980s, and also was fearful about Trump’s connections to numerous shady characters).
Ultimately, I think the issue with establishing a spring league is the simple fact that people just don’t want to watch football all year round. They need a break from it to build up longing for it to return.
I’ve never understood how the idea of a “merger” was supposed to work. There were 28 teams in the NFL at the time and 18 in the USFL. That’s not an AFL/NFL style merger of 24 total and expanding to 28.
I think part of the issue now (with XFL 2.0, for example) is that there have been so many failed attempts in the past to start a new league fans are reluctant to put their money, time and energy into it. Almost dooming a league’s chances before the first season ends.
Trump didn’t care about an actual merger. If Trump could have gotten just his team, the New Jersey Generals, into the NFL, he’d have cast off all the other team owners in a heartbeat.
Would the USFL have survived without Donald Trump? I don’t know, but I do know how long they lasted with him.
I haven’t read the book “Football For A Buck” which is where most of the people who claim that “The USFL would have survived” use as a source, so I have no idea if the book is Pro/Anti Survival. But from what little I know about the book it also pointed out there were a number of teams in the USFL that straight up weren’t paying their players which doesn’t sound good for long-term survival prospects.
When the NFL merged with the AAFC in 1950, they only brought in three AAFC teams – the Browns, the 49ers, and the Colts*; three other AAFC teams folded entirely, and the Los Angeles Dons were consolidated with the Los Angeles Rams.
So, in a theoretical merger, the NFL could, in theory, have brought in a handful of the financially stronger/more viable USFL teams, and allowed the rest to fold (presumably with some form of payment or compensation to the owners of the teams that were eliminated).
*- Those were the original Baltimore Colts; they were a mess, and folded after the 1950 season. The NFL then awarded a new expansion team to Baltimore, which was also named the Colts, but was considered to be an entirely new team.
Yeah, I think the idea behind a merger would be that some teams that were located in places where there weren’t any NFL teams at the time (Jacksonville, Baltimore, Phoenix) would be absorbed by the NFL and the rest of the owners would get a payoff.
This was what happened when the NBA and ABA merged in 1976. The Nuggets, Pacers, Nets and Spurs were all taken in by the NBA, while the Kentucky Colonels and Spirits of St. Louis folded after their owners were paid off (the Silna Brothers, who owned the Spirits, famously struck the deal of the century with their payoff).
Upstart football leagues fail, I think, because their product is terrible.
The NFL has the 1,696 best football players in the world on their rosters and several hundred of the next tier on their practice squads. You need roughly 400 players to field an 8-team league, and there just aren’t anywhere near that many NFL-caliber players available.
Throw in third-tier coaching and iffy financials, and the game people see on TV is awful compared to a typical NFL game.
I think the problem is that these leagues try to go toe-to-toe with the NFL, and that’s not going to work. There might be room for a minor league of some kind between college and the NFL- that’s what NFL Europe was for the most part, and produced quite a few good NFL players. But it was in Europe. That wasn’t going to work because the teams were generally strapped for attendance in ways they might not be in the US.
The USFL was probably the best attempt at competing with the NFL, because it actually had high-talent players, as opposed to the scrubs and retreads that most alternative leagues have. And it was playing in the off-season, which was a great idea. Lots of people aren’t terribly interested in the later part of the NBA season or the beginning of the baseball season, and a decent football league could potentially do well. But playing at the same time as the NFL and college football? That’s a total recipe for disaster.
At any rate, many of the USFL franchises were folding or in financial trouble by the time that the lawsuit and attempt to go to the fall season happened, so the league wouldn’t have lasted anyway, IMO.
The other problem is that these rival leagues try to compete against the NFL with pretty much the exact same product, where any marketer will tell you that when you’re going up against a dominant #1, you need to establish a niche you can own. For instance …
… football combined with golf! It’s basically football, but instead of playing on a level, perfectly groomed field it’s played on something like a golf course, with longer grass, shorter grass, sand traps, water hazards, hills, valleys, etc. This adds an entirely new strategic dimension to every aspect of the game, and makes it better suited for smaller, more nimble athletes. You’d probably have fewer concussions, too, but a lot more ankle sprains.
This is the sport of the future but Big Football won’t let it happen.
Arena is a great example – same sport but a very different take, and it survived for a few years. The XFL was just the NFL with edgier graphics and neither iteration lasted a full season.
I kind of think that spring football is that niche, but that it would need to be that AND some degree of financial and marketing support from the NFL.
I mean, I’d watch D league pro football in the spring/summer. Why not? I like it more than baseball, and I used to watch the World League/NFL Europe when it was on.
But I don’t know if it would be a money-generating thing if it had to use all its own resources and negotiate all its own contracts with broadcasters, merchandisers, etc… But in the context of being something that gets bundled in with the NFL stuff, sure.
Some of them did, many didn’t. The World League of American Football actually had six of its 10 teams in the U.S., plus one in Canada. Only three were in Europe. It played in the NFL’s offseason, and was supposed to serve as a developmental league for near-NFL-ready and marginal players. And it was backed by the NFL. It still folded after only two seasons, and was then resurrected as NFL Europe.
Both iterations of the XFL also had their seasons during the NFL’s off-season and very much tried to avoid direct competition with the NFL. XFL 1.0 very explicitly marketed itself as offering a different product than the NFL, offering a gonzo version of American football. XFL 2.0 tried marketing itself more as an off-season minor league that was still professional and offering high-quality play. Neither succeeded. (Apparently Dwayne Johnson is leading a consortium that now owns the rights and is planning for an XFL 3.0 in 2023. Third time’s the charm, I’m sure…).
Arena football never tried to even remotely go toe-to-toe with the NFL. It was always a small-scale, gimmicky product. It was also probably the most successful of the alt-leagues. But the Arena Football League has now managed to go out of business twice, in 2008 and 2019. Apparently the only currently active arena football teams are in China.
Again, it clearly seems obvious to a lot of people that there must be a market for another professional American football league in the U.S., if only they could avoid the mistakes of the WFL. And the USFL. And the XFL. And the XFL 2.0. And the WLAF. And NFL Europe. And the Arena Football League. And the other Arena Football League. And…
Count me as one of them. I don’t necessarily think that there’s some set of obvious mistakes that the other leagues made, but there seems to definitely be room in the sports market for another league.
I often feel like a network or streaming service should buy the rights to promote and broadcast the CFL in the US.
My gut is that the real failure of all these leagues is one of expectations. They all seem to come in with a lot of pomp and circumstance expecting to somehow gross like 25-50% of the revenues that the NFL garners. The NFL has a century of loyalty and brand awareness. If these new leagues measured themselves against minor league baseball or the NBA G league I think they’d find that the numbers look pretty juicy.
As a bit of an aside, I think the move to start paying collegiate players will ultimately destroy college football as we know it. In 10-20 years it’ll be reduced to 20-30 teams and the rest of the schools will disband their programs. That may in fact be precisely what a second professional league needs to survive.
When I was a teenager in the early '80s, and mad for football, CFL games were among the things that ESPN ran, back when they didn’t yet have broadcast rights for any of the major U.S. sports.
There was a period of time, until a few years ago, when it was difficult to find CFL games on U.S. TV. But, ESPN (which is now a part-owner of the Canadian sports channel TSN) has run every CFL game for the past few years, across several of their channels (some on their satellite/cable channels, some on streaming).
