Vince McMahon announced that he would be relaunching the XFL in a teleconference during the 2017 NFL season. He promised to move slower in organizing the league, so that it would be more ready for primetime when play began.
Not long after that announcement, Charlie Ebersol announced the formation of another professional spring football league, the Alliance of American Football. The AAF is getting a jump on the competition by launching first. McMahon is trying to make his extra time count by pulling off a bigger launch.
The AAF begins play on February 9 with a doubleheader on CBS. Most of the games in the league’s first season will air on CBS Sports Network though.
According to a report from John Ourand and Terry Lofton in the Sports Business Journal, McMahon is in talks with both Fox and Disney to put a number of games in the rebooted XFL’s inaugural season on broadcast television.
Sources say the league expects to have at least two-thirds of its games appear on broadcast television, underscoring the league’s strategy to get its games in front of the biggest potential audiences.
The XFL is deep in discussions with Fox and ESPN, in a pair of deals that would see games on ABC and Fox, as well as ESPN and FS1. So far, talks do not involve ESPN’s streaming service, ESPN+, sources said.
John Ourand & Terry Lofton, Sports Business Journal
The report stresses that those talks have only recently begun. With so much time before the XFL launches, things could certainly change, but the goal is in keeping with the “bigger impact” strategy McMahon is taking into the reformed league.
Both leagues are launching with eight teams. The difference being that only two AAF teams are in NFL markets compared to the XFL’s seven. The XFL will also have an advantage in terms of audience size. It will have five teams located in the top ten TV markets. The AAF will only have one.