The BIG Ticket: UFL: Is Spring Football a Viable Spring Business?
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We will look at the UFL today.
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The UFL’s second championship game ended with the DC Defenders winning their first spring football title.
Attendance was down from 27,369 in 2024 to 14,559 in 2025.
TV ratings also fell 39% to 983,000 viewers on ABC.
This was the story of Year 2 of the UFL:
· Declining attendance
· Fewer TV viewers
It leads me to the question: Can the UFL become a growing and sustainable concern?
What’s the state of play with the UFL?
The UFL emerged from the merger of the USFL and XFL in 2024.
The first two seasons have kicked off on March 28th, giving the league some scheduling consistency.
The league has an impressive set of backers, including Dany Garcia, The Rock, Red Bird Capital, and Disney.
8 teams compete in several markets led by DC and St. Louis.
A working hypothesis for the league feels like, “People love football. Let’s give them spring football.”
Simplistic?
Yes.
But it helps highlight the heavy competition the league faces during a saturated sports calendar.
This leads to some interesting power dynamics.
Fans have choices because there is competition for their attention.
Distributors have other content that can take up their airwaves.
The UFL has to be different.
The UFL has to stand out.
The UFL should focus on differentiation.
Why should fans tune in?
The UFL can’t be another generic sports setup.
Standing Out
This is about marketing the UFL.
A lot has been written about UFL marketing challenges.
Marketing challenges are common.
There are good tools to turn around marketing issues.
The foundation lies in market orientation.
The league feels pulled in two directions:
· Go national.
· Go local.
Ideally, you’d like to do both.
But without a bottomless marketing budget, choices must be made.
National campaigns are tough.
The UFL has 8 teams. That’s 8 home cities.
That isn’t a huge footprint.
Going national means pushing your chips in on the TV audience.
Is your marketing budget large enough to make a real dent in viewership?
At the local level, the consideration is how much saturation can you achieve?
There is also the ongoing battle between brand building and sales activation.
It is a false choice.
Why?
Brand building ads can build short-term sales.
Sales activation without branding support falls flat.
What does a UFL fan look like?
Too often, we see teams fall into the “Data Trap”.
This is the seductive idea that the future will look like the past.
It is married to the idea that lookalike audiences can fill every building.
You need to draw out your fan profile.
My favorite example is from Australia.
AFLW didn’t assume their fans were AFL fans.
This isn’t an earth-shattering idea. But it did lead the AFLW to finding unique fans.
An assumption that all football fans are the same could be setting the UFL up for failure.
It is as likely as not that the UFL has a unique group of fans that like the UFL for its specific attributes.
I found a great example in politics this week.
Most polls missed Zohran Mamdani’s surge in the NYC Mayor’s primary, minus one.
Public Policy Polling was the only pollster that got it right.
Why?
They based their polling in the 2025 electorate, not the 2024 electorate.
This idea works for us.
You have to exist in the world as it is. Not as you want it to be.
Build Brand Assets:
The UFL’s IP is one of its best assets.
They have some pretty cool names and logos.
UFL teams have homes in great cities with unique histories, cool stadiums, and local flavor.
Use this to create strong brand assets.
These assets will build buyer recall.
Buyer recall feeds purchases when teams focus on physical and mental availability in ticket sales.
Brand assets drive top-of-the-funnel awareness.
This can increase TV viewership.
How do you create these assets?
I use a 3-question framework to think about branding:
· Who is the customer?
· Why us?
· How do we show up?
These answers matter because the data on consistency is clear.
My work shows that it takes an average of 11 touches to close a sale.
This is with teams that have decades of brand building, high name recognition, and large budgets.
The UFL doesn’t have these advantages.
So focus and consistent are key.
This begins by defining what UFL Football is.
Is the UFL a development league?
Is the UFL all about spring football?
Is it something else entirely?
The league needs to be clear so it can establish a clear position in its markets and on TV.
Why?
There’s so much competition.
They have to be unique and can’t just say, “You love sports/football. We are sports/football, come watch us.”
What would this look like?
A good position takes a stand.
I’ve written about the power of picking an enemy in the past.
Why?
Because it defines you.
That could be a starting point.
The key is with the foundations and things that are unique to the league:
· The history of the XFL
· The history of the USFL
· The Rock
Use these foundations to set core values.
Apple’s example is instructive.
For the UFL, what do you want to stand for?
Establish this.
Then, focus on delivering the message consistently using the 2D strategy of distinct and different.
The Business Model:
I spend a lot of time thinking about business models.
Why?
They are the secret to understanding strategy and macroeconomics.
In looking at the UFL, I come back to three questions:
· How will the business move forward?
· Is the strategy generic?
· Does this fit the UFL?
What do I mean?
Sports business is a copycat business.
It can feel like everyone wants to be first to be second in innovating.
This is fed by best practices being forced onto teams no matter the situation.
These best practices may improve things, but often just drive mediocrity.
A key for the UFL’s success is whether or not their employees and executives have new ideas, unique to the league and its markets…or they are falling back on the “tried and true”, the generic.
I ask because that’s a dangerous path.
It leads to “Death by Average”.
That is just what it means.
Good enough is good enough.
Each market is unique.
Best practices don’t reflect that.
These best practices and good enough thinking set traps.
You start measuring what is easy, not what is impactful.
You take easy actions, such as:
· Using influencers because you can tell how many impressions you are getting.
· Falling back on boiler rooms because one call is as good as the next.
· Heavy reliance on SEO and other digital tactics because click-throughs/etc. are easy to see.
Success will require being grounded in the market.
Being from St. Louis.
Being about Birmingham.
Knowing that the DC Defenders and the DC Commanders are worlds apart.
That means building a solid local business that measures and plans built in your market’s specific culture.
This means measuring what is important for you, not just what is a best practice.
The formula I teach is MEI:
· Measure
· Edit
· Improve
Measure what matters.
Edit the measures or process to reflect the real world.
Improve your performance based on the new information.
Repeat.
Wrapping Up:
What have we learned?
Is there a path to viability for the UFL?
I think there is.
I believe it is built on a few key ideas:
One, being uniquely the UFL.
A generic strategy and business approach won’t work.
There is too much competition to just be a “me too” product.
Use the example of the AFLW and find your audience, then build from there.
Two, build a better marketing engine.
Stop getting pulled in two directions.
Embrace the brands.
Be consistent.
Third, teams must build their unique businesses.
Best practices often open the door to “Death by Average.”
Each market is unique.
Each market is different.
Especially when you are dealing with a young brand like the UFL.
What’s your take?
Hit reply and let me know what you think about the UFL.