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Wednesday, April 17, 2024

#AsForDynamite: Building Competitor Brands is *NOT* Easy

Watching the combined United Football League (UFL) struggle this week to build and maintain an audience reminded me of some of AEW’s recent struggles with ratings and attendance. 

The UFL is, of course, the fifth recent attempt at launching a spring league of American Football in the United States, following on from the AAF, XFL 2.0, XFL 3.0, and the USFL. This newest league is an amalgamation of the most successful half of the XFL 3.0 -- the one owned by The Rock -- and the most successful half of the USFL. It’s notable because it’s launched to markedly less overall fanfare amongst the general populace of football viewers than several of these other leagues. This has happened despite the UFL producing by far the best on field product of any spring football league in American history. 

It reminded me of AEW in the sense that AEW has also struggled to maintain buzz and overall audience despite producing the best, most consistent in-ring product of any major American pro-wrestling brand.

The original XFL generated massive buzz when it launched back in the fall of 2000. Ratings started super-high, but the on-field product couldn’t deliver over time, and it turned out that the performative “soap opera” aspects the league attempted to interweave within its games weren’t enough to hold fans’ interest. 

The “sport” became more important than the “story”. This happened despite the fact that several of the stories themselves had real staying power.



Despite having perhaps the lowest quality on-field product of any of these leagues, the XFL 2.0 proved to be much more successful commercially. Vince McMahon invested $100M of his own money, built hype slowly over time, and then launched a well-produced league with solid backing from several major networks. Viewership and attendance actually grew over the league’s first five weeks, to the point where even the NY Guardians had started to make inroads into the Greater New York market before the league shut down midseason due to the COVID pandemic. 

Ironically, XFL 2.0 teams were mostly inept on offense. They almost all started by trying to run NFL-style under-center offenses, realized after a few games that they simply didn’t have the talent to make that work, and then slowly switched to college-style read-option offenses over the course of that first season. The only teams that didn’t go through this evolution were the St. Louis Battlehawks, who started with a read-option offense and saw massive early success running it behind QB Jordan Ta’amu, and the Guardians, who somehow stumbled into QB Luis Perez, the only XFL 2.0 quarterback capable of competently running an NFL-style under-center offense.

By switching to variations of the read-option, though, the XFL 2.0 offenses eventually managed to produce highly entertaining contests. This alongside the league’s production values and the fact that it was only the second of the spring leagues to launch provided a window of opportunity. 

Were it not for the pandemic, XFL 2.0 would probably still be a going concern.

Flash forward several years, and spring football has become part of the background noise within American culture. Ho hum. It’s another spring football league. Will any of these leagues ever make it? Which is again ironic, this time in a much less fortunate way, because the new UFL has the combined resources of both the former USFL and the former XFL 3.0 while fielding half the number of total teams. As a result, they have much, much, MUCH better players, resulting in an astronomically better on-field product.


Will Anyone Notice?

If you're wondering, here's how the UFL is holding up after three weeks:

These viewership numbers may very well keep the UFL in business through this season and into the next if they can hold steady. However, these numbers are also not particularly better than what AEW is doing right now, and UFL football is far more expensive to produce. Among other things, there are 90+ players combined in each game with four games each week, plus officials, TV crews, etc. All of that comes in addition to the costs of running stadium-sized venues.

So yeah. The football has been mostly really good. 

Even so, it’s no slam-dunk that this thing is going to survive.


Quality Matters?

Certainly, quality mattered back during the days of the original XFL. I don’t know if that’s because audiences were more sophisticated back then -- granted, this seems unlikely -- or if the original XFL’s issues stemmed from a disconnect between audience expectations and reality. Remember, the original XFL launched at the height of the Attitude Era, so folks expected it to present something wildly different than what we saw from the “No Fun League.” When the XFL’s product turned out to be regular old (mediocre quality) football, folks got real bored, real fast.

XFL 2.0 conquered this issue by promising real football and then adjusting to a style it could actually deliver. The XFL 3.0 and USFL have since struggled with this, though, because they’ve promised their players another shot at making the NFL, and ain’t no one making it back to the League based on their performance in a read-option offense. Getting more college-style game tape isn’t gonna help anyone. 

They had to run pro-style offenses.

Now with the UFL we finally have pro-quality players playing pro-style football to a -- mostly -- professional level…

Unfortunately, the audience has maybe burned out on this experiment altogether.


What Does Any of This Mean for AEW? 

Maybe nothing. The company has been in business for five years and is on the verge of signing a new TV rights deal that promises to change its business model forever. On top of that, Warner Brothers-Discovery said via press release recently that AEW averages some four million viewers per week, which is more than enough to keep everyone happy. 

It is for damned sure more total viewers than the UFL is garnering.

Still, it’s worrying that the company has done exactly one “bad” show this calendar year, and that show seemingly saw the sky falling amongst the fanbase. And we have to put “bad” in quotation marks here because the fallout from the angle that everyone hated so much is hardly finished. Among other things, that “bad” show appears to have launched a former midcard talent to new heights of popularity based on recent merchandise and affiliated ticket sales.

And yet, here we are.



Friends, launching a competitor brand is tough. A window of excitement exists for the new thing to present itself as an alternative to the staid, established brand. However, that window closes, and then the competitor has to survive based on the quality of its own product and its ability to keep fans engaged. The UFL is maybe getting a raw deal in this respect, but AEW has been around for five years and has long since established its own identity.

Whether that is for you as a viewer is a different story.

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