• Despite upheaval, NFL still big business
• Has McMahon learned from first XFL failure?
• League could draw Manziel, Tebow, others
It’s a straightforward proposition, based on the laws of supply and demand.
Though it has frayed around the edges in recent years, the National Football League remains the most successful sports/entertainment business in North America. Other games have their share of the pie, and who knows how shifting tastes, shifting demographics, safety concerns and all the rest might alter the landscape in coming decades. But right now, even taking into account some recent erosion, the NFL is, as it has been since the late 1960s, the undisputed king.
Combine that with the U.S. college game, now blessed with its own playoff and culmination event, and it’s pretty safe to say that even with all of the product available, the demand for football remains sky high — and at the same time is completely unsatisfied during the long NFL and college off-seasons.
Meanwhile the supply of football talent is all but limitless, and remarkably cheap. Each year those colleges, operating independently for their own economic benefit, crank out hundreds of players. No need to run a farm system, no need to invest in development. Just pick and use, sign and discard: Every year on the final cutdown before the season begins, NFL teams lop 1,200 players from their rosters.
The NFL players’ union is weak. There are no guaranteed contracts. It is a buyer’s market in every respect. Only the Canadian Football League offers theoretical competition, and in truth the CFL is more than happy to sit back and pick through the leftovers.
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So why not start your own league, exploit the unsated demand, hire the underpriced talent, and make easy money?
It sounds simple. And that’s what the smart people behind the World Football League, the United States Football League, the United Football League, the American expansion of the Canadian Football League, and the original iteration of the XFL were counting on.
They were all wrong. They all fell short. Not because they didn’t have television network backing — in most cases, they did. Not because the quality of the product was so terrible. In large part, it was actually pretty darned good.
They failed because in some fundamental way, they couldn’t make people care the way they cared about the teams they had grown up supporting. That emotional connection, which is way more important than any kind of qualitative, aesthetic assessment of the game, didn’t take hold before those leagues collapsed under their own weight — a process accelerated in a couple of cases because they decided to compete head to head with the NFL.
Now Vince McMahon re-enters the fray, all by himself, saying he’s learned from past mistakes. His new XFL promises fast games, players who dutifully stand for the anthem, no gimmicks, no talent signed simply for celebrity value, and no bad characters. (Why not? Exploiting anti-NFL backlash worked, albeit briefly, for the Baltimore Stallions….)
Those last two promises will surely be the first to fall by the wayside, which is good news for Tim Tebow and Johnny Manziel, respectively (the latter would have to cool his heels for another two years rather than signing with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, and if he’s willing to wait it would be bad news for the CFL, which would lose both an infusion of energy and, potentially, a player who could become a star in the three-down game.)
The new XFL will have its pick of accomplished players, including more than a few that football fans will recognize. If they want to go rogue, they can sign underclassmen tired of playing for free, but even without bucking the system, they’ll have a shot at a bunch of athletes who would otherwise fall through the cracks.
Consider star CFL running back James Wilder Jr., who explained this week that he isn’t going to come back and play for the Toronto Argonauts next season because it wasn’t worth the risk for the $45,000 USD he’d be paid for an 18-game schedule. Yesterday his teammate Victor Butler chimed in with similar sentiments. Hard to argue with that, and hard to believe that he and a whole bunch of players like him wouldn’t take a shot with a new league if it paid even a bit more money.
Also working in McMahon’s favour is the fact that the old model of network television rights-holders and conventional advertising platforms is on its way to extinction. He doesn’t need the kind of backing from NBC that he enjoyed the first time around. Games can now be delivered in all kinds of different ways, employing all kinds of different revenue models. And as for getting fans in the seats, which is becoming more and more problematic for all leagues, if you look back on that one XFL season, universally regarded as a disaster, it wasn’t actually as bad as you remember — sure, it’s a low bar, but only one franchise drew fewer fans that season than the Argos did in Toronto in 2017.
The conceit back in 2001 was that McMahon would bring the same marketing genius to football that he had employed to push professional wrestling into the mainstream. No one is going to buy that now, having watched the novelty wear off, fast. It’s a whole lot harder to do when you can’t script the outcome.
But this will be a more straightforward product, and still there’s the siren song of unassailable business logic — eventually someone is going to stay the course and make it work.
Maybe this is the time they avoid the rocks.
