The Alliance of American Football isn’t dead yet, but it certainly appears the league is on its death bed. According to multiple reports, the league is expected to suspend football operations on Tuesday.

Football fans yearning for a league to hold their attention during the NFL’s offseason will be disappointed but they won’t have to wait very long for a substitute to come along as the rebooted XFL’s inaugural season is slated to start in 2020.

So what can Vince McMahon and company learn from the AAF’s failure in order to avoid a similar fate for the XFL? Let’s list them all…

1. DON’T

That’s it. That’s the list. The XFL would be better off shutting things down now and just accepting that a second pro football league will NEVER work.

The XFL 2.0, like the AAF and the original XFL before it, is destined to fail. It does not matter how well things are planned out, there just isn’t a demand for a second professional sports league of any kind — regardless of the sport. The NFL, along with college football, is more than enough for football fans.

NFL fans don’t even want to watch preseason games, which feature teams they’re already connected to and players they already know. These lower-level leagues are not unlike watching that fourth preseason game in which none of the starters play and you haven’t heard of any of the players on the field … only without the recognizable team branding.

Making matters worse, the competition for viewers is just too strong once you hit the month of March. The NCAA tournament dominates every weekend that month. After that, our attention turns to the MLB’s opening month, when the season is still fresh and we’ve all forgotten how boring baseball is. And then we get the NBA playoffs, which gives us games every night for two months straight.

During all that, the NFL is still very much in the news. There’s the combine, free agency and then the draft. Football fans barely have time to breathe with just one pro league to follow.

The only alternative sports leagues that have enjoyed a modicum of success are those that offer a different product, like the Big3 basketball league, which features players we all know, and Arena Football, the high-scoring league that stuck around for a few decades before devolving into a league featuring only four teams.

The AAF and XFL aren’t looking for a niche market. They are looking to provide NFL fans with an imitation of a superior product, and they don’t appear to be interested. There’s no reason to believe they ever will be.