The UFL is surviving. The question is whether it is, or will be, thriving.
Via Manny Soloway of Awful Announcing, attendance dropped in the spring league’s third season while TV ratings increased.
Despite moving three teams to supposedly better markets, in-person attendance dropped by 20 percent from 2025. The average paid crowd was 10,501, with only 16 games attracting five figures of fans.
Ratings for Fox games increased by four percent, to an average of 670,000. For ESPN (and NFL Network), the average increased by eight percent, to 686,000.
The biggest gains came on ABC, where a 14-percent jump pushed the average to 941,000.
As Soloway notes, the rating increase could be a product of the Big Data + Panel technology deployed by Nielsen, which has generally pushed TV numbers higher since its full deployment over the course of the past year.
The good news is that the UFL has managed to do what its non-football-season football predecessors couldn’t. It is persisting. Spring football generally has endured, with the USFL and XFL separately making it through multiple seasons before the merger that became effective in 2024.
The legalization of gambling helps. People are looking for things on which to bet, and spring football increases the inventory.
And the numbers, while not stellar, are solid relative to other live programming. Indeed, the NHL averaged only 546,000 viewers per game across TNT Sports, ESPN, and ABC — and that was a 25-percent jump.
The question is whether there’s a higher ceiling, or whether spring football has settled in to what it will be. If it keeps the costs low enough to make the ticket sales and TV revenue combine for a profit margin deemed to be worth the effort, the UFL will keep going, indefinitely.
