Though the XFL 2.0 suspended its season after just five weeks because of the coronavirus pandemic, there’s actually a lot we can glean from the half-season reboot of Vince McMahon’s alternative league.

First, and perhaps most importantly, it wasn’t a disaster. The original XFL was an overhyped, tawdry pastiche of bad football and smut that deserved all the mockery it got and didn’t so much slide into oblivion as fall off a cliff into the junkyard of failed leagues. But this reincarnation stayed away from the carnival barker/Vegas strip club hypeman ethos of the original, focused largely on the game on the field, hired actual football people with gravitas and – and this can’t be overstated – downplayed McMahon’s involvement. The result was a league that proved it could stage games that people would attend, watch on television and talk about. (I don’t subscribe to the idea that there were five things the league needed to or could do rightthissecond that would have righted the ship. Their situation wasn’t nearly that dire.)

But the signs were obvious that it wasn’t taking off and that it would only last as long as McMahon’s ego and checkbook would permit it. While attendance was promising in a couple of markets, it was an overall “meh” and could not have come close to paying the bills. Below are the crowd figures for the eight XFL 2.0 teams, which you can compare to the final numbers for the 2001 edition, but, again, this is just barely enough data to draw some conclusions from:



Team G Total Average Median High Low St. Louis BattleHawks 2 57,081 28,541 28,541 29,554 27,527 Seattle Dragons 2 51,232 25,616 25,616 29,172 22,060 Houston Roughnecks 3 54,691 18,230 17,815 19,773 17,103 Dallas Renegades 3 51,308 17,103 17,026 18,332 15,950 DC Defenders 3 48,536 16,179 16,342 17,163 15,031 Tampa Bay Vipers 2 30,366 15,183 15,183 18,117 12,249 New York Guardians 2 29,750 14,875 14,875 17,634 12,116 Los Angeles Wildcats 3 39,371 13,124 12,211 14,979 12,181 XFL TOTAL 20 362,335 18,117 17,133 29,554 12,116

Obviously, New York (pictured at top) and Los Angeles were trouble spots, which is kind of a red flag from the get-go. Leagues always seem to make noise about having a presence in the two largest markets, but people there largely ignored the XFL. St. Louis, the only XFL market without an NFL team currently, led the league in attendance, but spite doesn’t feel like a sustainable business model. Overall, 18 thousand fans per game was not going to be enough for this league to make it, especially with no TV revenue coming in.



And television was another issue. As you might expect (and as was the case for last year’s Alliance of American Football) ratings were strong initially but then slid to the point where the fifth week of games drew audiences less than half the size of week one on all the networks carrying games.

Still, a million and a half viewers isn’t nothing, and had they been able to stanch the bleeding and maintain that audience, that would be one thing. While we’ll never know now, I think it’s more likely the downward trend would have continued, and once March Madness took hold, the XFL would have been hard-pressed to grab eyeballs. And given the long-term future of an alternative football league lies in its ability to generate media revenue, it’s hard to see how networks would have ponied up enough cash to close the gap between revenue and expense, which had to be substantial. (Do the math here: if their final projected attendance, assuming every team kept its initial average, was 750,000 in total, and they were able to get $25 a ticket – a bit of a stretch, maybe – that’s a little under $19 million in gate revenue, or $2.3 million per team . Even at an average wage of $55,000 per player, those costs alone are around $22 million. And that’s before you buy one set of shoulder pads, pay one coach, buy one airline ticket or rent one stadium. The startup costs for any enterprise are substantial, and football is the most expensive sport to pull off, given the size of rosters and support staffs, equipment, travel, technology and advertising.)

Yes, McMahon has a lot of money to devote to this effort, as much as half a billion, reportedly, so losing even $20 million the first year wouldn’t seriously dent that nest egg. But you don’t get to have $500 million to spend on a vanity project by being dumb, and if there’s no clear way forward, there’s no clear way forward. No one throws money at an unsustainable investment forever.

And this version of the XFL – even though it avoided the mistakes of the original – was unsustainable. The football was spotty, the vaunted all-access, though raw and interesting at times, grew tedious, and the most memorable play of the season was the beer snake in DC. Those aren’t promising signs.

The XFL insists it will be back in 2021 “and future years,” and it wouldn’t be surprising at all if, barring completely unforeseen circumstances, we see the league back (with some tweaks) next year.