At a time when — frankly — the third season of the UFL is barely creating a ripple in the American sports pond, the UFL has announced plans to place a team in a new city.
In two years.
On Thursday morning, the UFL announced that it will launch a new team in Oklahoma City for the 2028 season.
The to-be-named team will play in a downtown, 10,000-seat stadium that is currently under construction.
The announcement that arrived via email this morning doesn’t specify that the OKC TBD will be a brand-new franchise. The item posted by Fox Sports says the UFL will be expanding to 10 teams in 2028.
Spring football continues to be a hard sell. It has nevertheless endured, in some form or another, for most of the past eight years. From the short-lived AAF to the pandemic-hampered XFL reboot to the resurrected USFL to XFL 3.0 to the merged USFL and XFL into the UFL, non-football-season football has persisted.
But how is it really doing? St. Louis supports the Battlehawks in impressive numbers, relatively speaking. (It’s embarrassing when only 30,000 fans show up for an NFL game; for the UFL, it’s the good kind of aberration.) The UFL has moved most of the teams to smaller stadiums, in order to reduce the sea-of-empty-seats impression that was created in venues like Ford Field.
On one hand, we’d like to see the UFL thrive. On the other hand, there’s never a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday when I ask myself, “Who’s playing today in the UFL?”
The UFL badly needs a better P.R. and media strategy. ESPN televises games, but its online UFL page continues to be woefully outdated. Fox’s UFL page is more robust, even if the current lead item is calculated to entice readers to make a bet on who will win the title.
It’s no coincidence that spring football returned the year after the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for state-by-state legalized betting. Spring football gives the sportsbooks more ways to generate wagers. Which, in theory, will generate more interest in watching the games in which viewers have skin.
The ratings are small, but they’re better than what otherwise would be televised in the windows when the games are played. Given that the UFL operates on a shoestring budget, it may indeed be profitable.
How profitable can it be? At some point, it needs to be something more than easily overlooked background noise at a time when other sports are, you know, in season.
That’s why the best long-term strategy would be to play UFL games during, you know, football season. On the nights when the NFL isn’t playing games, like Tuesday and Wednesday.
With the NFL seemingly inching toward embracing those two days of the week, any success by the UFL in those standalone windows could prompt the NFL to swoop in. Which would leave the UFL SOL.
That moment may eventually arrive under the current approach. If it’s going to stay in the spring, the UFL needs to find a way to move the needle when it’s not football season. To become appointment viewing for folks other than degenerate gamblers who are looking for ways to chase their losses.
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