When billionaire entrepreneur Mike Repole acquired a piece of the UFL last year, he immediately articulated a bold goal: Sixteen teams by 2035.
Repole has an even bolder vision for the spring league. In a new interview with Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal, Repole says he wants to eventually get the UFL to 32 teams.
Of course, Repole also hopes to make apparel company NoBull bigger than Nike, so he’s no stranger to confidence that crosses the line of delusion.
Some would say that’s the spirit the struggling UFL needs. Last year, viewership for the UFL plunged by 20 percent. Attendance was down five percent.
One of Repole’s first orders of business was to move teams into smaller venues, in order to reduce the awkward images of wide swaths of vacant stands. Nothing makes a viewer ask “why am I watching this?” like a sea of endless seats with no asses in them.
Repole, per Fischer, even floated the idea of moving the popular St. Louis Battlehawks from the former home of the Rams into an MLS stadium.
The man who sold Vitaminwater to Coca-Cola for $4.1 billion also has rolled up his sleeves and pushed back against Birmingham Stallions fans who complained about the team’s new uniforms.
“‘Shockingly’ They are not happy,” Repole said on Twitter, according to the article. “Complaining already. This fan base is harder to please than my family. . . . My suggestion is that all the fans buy season tickets ASAP and protest the uniforms in the Stadium! Win games and suddenly everyone will love the uniforms.”
Repole defended antagonizing Stallions fans.
“What do I have to lose, right?” Repole told Fischer. “No one’s ever engaged with the fan base. And I guarantee no owner in fucking history is doing what I’m doing right now. I’m poking the Stallion, I guess, not the bear, right? I hear ‘I love you,’ ‘I like you,’ ‘I hate you,’ but — you’re writing about the UFL and talking about it. . . . We’ve got to get some noise. We’ve got to be the squeaky wheel.”
So far, the UFL hasn’t done much squeaking. The third season of the merged XFL and USFL opens on March 27. And while spring football generally does better than whatever else the Fox or ESPN networks would be televising in those windows, the UFL has a long way to go.
Spring football typically struggles. Because it’s not football season. The far better approach would be to provide an alternative to the NFL in football season — on the nights the NFL doesn’t play. (Then again, if the UFL started playing on Tuesday and/or Wednesday nights, the NFL would quickly follow suit.)
The UFL could play on Friday nights during football season, a place that remains off-limits to the NFL due to the broadcast antitrust exemption. But Saturdays during football are saturated with college football.
Repole’s only play, for now, is to make noise. And to hope the sound and fury will signify something. It made us interested enough to write about what he’s trying to do. Whether it will get viewers to reverse a negative growth trend for spring football remains to be seen.
Sixteen teams by 2035? Mere survival of the eight-team league for that long would be a feat equivalent to turning Vitaminwater into wine.
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