If you haven’t been paying attention to the latest iteration of the USFL, well, who can really blame you: The first version lasted three years in the 1980s before some delusional rich developer’s son destroyed it, someone attempted a reboot in 2010 that went nowhere, and the latest version is brought to you by a completely different set of people, including a semipro spring league called The Spring League and, perhaps inevitably, Fox Sports. When it takes the field in spring 2022 it will, however, allegedly feature the same teams as when it gave up the ghost in 1986 — though not, bizarrely, in the same cities.
That’s because the entire USFL season is, if all goes according to plan, set to be played in one city: Birmingham, Alabama. This is being called a “bubble,” because bubbles are an established sports thing now even if this one has nothing to do with protecting public health, but more likely is about cutting costs while providing some made-for-TV product. (I did mention that one of the owners of the league is Fox Sports, yes?) And, of course, extracting some money from Birmingham city government in exchange for hosting games of a sports league with no fans: The Greater Birmingham Convention and Visitors Bureau, the city of Birmingham, and Jefferson County are collectively putting up $3 million to cover “expenses” in the league’s first year, as well as providing free rent on two Birmingham football stadiums. Plus whatever the hell is going on in this paragraph from AL.com:
An accord was reached when the [Birmingham Jefferson Civic Center] restructured its budget to include projected revenues. The agency originally said it would cost $3.7 to host the league, still $700,00 short of the $3 million committed by various stakeholders to fund the losses. Late Tuesday, the BJCC added “additional” projected revenue into the model, bringing the numbers more in alignment.
You can’t just add $700,000 to your revenue projections and pretend your books are balanced! Though you also can’t forget to write “million” after your cost projections or leave off an entire zero from one of your figures, but I guess that’s just how they roll in Birmingham.
The interesting thing here … okay, there are many interesting things here, but the one that stands out is that we’re seeing the emergence of a totally new business model for sports extortion: Instead of shopping around franchises to different cities to see who’ll pay for the right to host them, shop around the entire league for one season at a time and see what cities will cough up. Presumably if the Birmingham goes well and the league is renewed for Season 2, they’ll go shopping for another city to host them then — it’ll be like Top Chef, only with host cities paying for the privilege. Wait, does Top Chef get paid to locate in particular locations? Does that explain the season spent entirely in Kentucky? I’m seriously afraid to Google this now.
Anyway, the official announcement of your New Jersey Generals brought to you by Birmingham is tentatively scheduled for next week, and we already have lots of local elected officials saying things like “this is what regional cooperation looks like” and “this will work if everyone pitches in” and “think of all the other sports that could come once people see how well things are run.” Which, yes, it’s impressive in a way to see everyone in Birmingham pulling together to send public money to Fox Sports so as to find a use for the football stadium they just spent $250 million to build, but maybe not the kind of impressive you want.
Hi Neil! Somehow I linked to the “the mayor of Birminham is out of his goddamm mind” and the comments were fabulous! I love your comments section. Too bad you close comments but I get it. Some horses are just too dead to keep beating…..
It’s more that spammers love to try to sneak in comments on old posts, and I got tired of playing whack-a-mole to delete them. If there’s significant interest in being able to comment on posts older than 60 days, though, I could reopen them and see how it goes.
Oh no please don’t if spammers are involved!
My great joy is reading the comments, responding to a 3 year old story is a rabbit hole I best stay out of…..
If you had googled whether Top Chef gets money from city, regional, and state public and quasi-public agencies that answer would be yes — a surprising amount of yes. I remember back when I watched the show there was some outrage that the Top Chef production would take the money. This seemed like weird misdirection from some in that they seemed not to be upset that cities/states were GIVING the money. It also ultimately makes a good chunk of the show unwatchable as we learn what sponsored car the contestants are riding in to what sponsored store while drinking sponsored (and properly faced) drinks and eating sponsored food on the regions sponsored streets.
Oh, I am well aware of all the sponsor money that leads to long, lingering shots of the logos of the SUVs that are lugging all the cheftestants to the grocery store to search in vain for live lobsters or whatever. But it hadn’t actually occurred to me until now that the actual host cities are chosen less for whether they have interesting local cuisines than for whether they agreed to pay (gives up, Googles) … a few hundred thousand dollars to the producers, man, that’s nothing. Top Chef needs to up its game, if it’s getting outextorted by a football league that doesn’t even exist yet.
https://tamaratattles.com/2017/03/26/behind-the-scenes-look-at-how-top-chef-locations-are-decided-announcement-of-the-next-city/
How new is this? The Olympics have been doing this for decades now.
There are a whole lot of things I blame on Donald Trump, but destroying the original USFL isn’t one of them. The USFL had a long list of problems. The league tried to move to the fall because it wasn’t making a profit in the spring. Yes, Donald Trump encouraged them to move to the fall and sue the NFL, which turned out to be the wrong move. But they wouldn’t have been successful if they had stayed in the spring. Either way, that league was doomed.
Have you read on the history of the USFL? Yes, they had problems but Trump caused that leaky boat to sink a lot faster than it was going to…..
That league had multiple problems, Dave, it’s true. But it was Trump that bullied the remaining owners into moving to the fall in an attempt to force a merger with the NFL (a league he had tried and failed to get into before).
Johnny Bassett was the only person in the ownership group willing to stand up to DontheCon, and when he fell ill and died the other owners simply caved to the serial bankrupt and convicted fraudster’s “I want an NFL team and this is the only way I can get one” scheme.
It didn’t work, of course. It was never going to work. Just like his casinos, his airline, many of his golf courses, his fraudulent university, the branded products division and a lot of his hotels.
The USFL overexpanded and had undercapitalised ownership (what new sports league doesn’t?). Many markets were failing. However, they were also building a decent following in several of them.
Could they have survived as a spring league with 8-10 teams? We’ll never know. But if they had survived another 2-3 seasons with ABC, I have no doubt their next TV contract would have been enough to keep them afloat indefinitely.
People watched spring football. Not in NFL numbers, obviously, but there was enough interest to keep many of the franchises afloat. With the explosion of TV rights over the next 20 years, the league may have done really well (though we do have to account for how the NFL would have responded – likely with expansion to key USFL markets – if the league did look like it was going to survive)
And if the other owners hadn’t caved to Trump’s business incompetence and bluster, where the original USFL might be today is a really interesting topic for discussion.
JB
What new sports league(s) are you referring to? mls perhaps?
RJ: MLS was really well capitalized, given it had just two owners and both were incredibly wealthy.
By ‘new’ sports leagues I am referring to pretty much any startup… you could include the NASL, the WHA, the WFL, the ABA, and certainly some of the more recent ones like the AAFC or the UFL etc.
IMO, step one in starting any new professional sports league has got to be to find owners wealthy enough to fund the operation of their teams for five years more or less out of pocket. If you can do that you have a chance to build a following. If you are, like so many of the leagues I mentioned above, depending on gate receipts and advances on next year’s tv deal to make payroll in week 8, you have no chance. It always surprises me how many of these leagues have been started by people with wealth, but not the kind of wealth you need to run this sort of vanity enterprise.
And then there was, of course, the RollerJam bubble in Orlando with the California Quakes, New York Enforcers, etc.
Boy! Those were the days…
Wasn’t there also a roller derby league run out of the old LA Exposition center (where LAFC’s stadium is now) in the 1980s?
I was one of the people who enjoyed the USFL for a number of reasons: I liked football and it was fun having something to watch in the spring, there was enough talent to make it compelling, the competition was generally not bad, the league had some innovations (not that many as I recall but they were more “fun” than the nfl), the deal with a young espn meant they reshowed games (like you might do with a dvr today), and the league was a little more appealing to a college student in some ways. It wasn’t quite the nfl and it wasn’t quite college either.
I was sad to see it reach its demise. It really felt like it could be something.
And if you haven’t seen it, I recommend the espn 30 for 30 “who killed the usfl?” They point the finger directly at the Donald.
Actually it would be pretty cool to have an entire league in your city. I would totally want that in my city but I just love football
It seems like they’re giving that a try sort of. The teams in the Premiere Lacrosse League don’t represent cities; they just all play games in one venue each week (at different times, of course).
Now the women’s softball league National Pro Fastpitch has finally finished its long, stupid death, a new league (Women’s Pro Fastpitch WPF) in launching in June. They said they’re going to have a ‘mobile model,’ which I assume in similar to PLL.
The two teams announced so far (USSSA Pride and SmashIt Sports Vipers) don’t have city name just the corporate owners.
It seems like they’re giving that a try sort of in other leagues. The teams in the Premiere Lacrosse League don’t represent cities; they just all play games in one venue each week (at different times, of course).
Now the women’s softball league National Pro Fastpitch has finally finished its long, stupid death, a new league (Women’s Pro Fastpitch WPF) in launching in June. They said they’re going to have a ‘mobile model,’ which I assume in similar to PLL.
The two teams announced so far (USSSA Pride and SmashIt Sports Vipers) don’t have city name just the corporate owners.