Hurdles remain, but UFL upbeat in 2026: 'Didn't th...

The United Football League had a problem earlier this month. Its Orlando Storm franchise had earned a home game in the semifinal round of the 2026 playoffs, but Inter&Co Stadium was already booked for the weekend. League officials failed to find a nearby alternative and settled on a neutral site nearly 1,000 miles away in Columbus, Ohio. The local pushback was fierce -- and UFL co-owner Mike Repole was thrilled. "It was a great problem and a terrible problem," said Repole, a billionaire entrepreneur who lives near Orlando, Florida, and invested in the UFL last summer. "I mean, I was the most hated guy in Orlando. I joked that I had to pull my daughter out of school. It was amazing the negativity that we got. Honestly, I didn't think people would care that much. There was an uproar and it was nuts, and that was a good thing." Spring football leagues have struggled to connect with fans for decades. Unintentionally, Repole believed, the Orlando stadium crisis revealed that the UFL had penetrated local markets with more intensity than the league realized. League officials made another run at Florida-area stadium operators and, six days before kickoff, they reached agreement to stage the game 50 miles away at Daytona Stadium. A crowd of 6,317 fans showed up for the Storm's 28-22 loss to the D.C. Defenders. As the UFL approaches Saturday's United Bowl between the Defenders and Louisville Kings (3 p.m. ET, ABC), it faces many of the challenges of its upstart predecessors. Attendance dropped slightly leaguewide in 2026. Some coaches complained about a lack of control over their rosters. Merchandise stores were thinly stocked early in the season. And games that drew more than 1 million television viewers -- about 20% of a typical NFL game -- were celebrated as major accomplishments. There were also reasons for optimism on Repole's vision. Regular-season ratings rose 8% for Disney networks and 5% for Fox Sports compared with 2025. Scoring totals rebounded after a down year. The league's fan base showed signs of growth, and in an interview with ESPN, Repole said he is moving forward with plans to expand beyond the current eight teams, and insisted he would rather go into personal bankruptcy than close the league. "One of my business philosophies is to look at what's working, what's not working and what we need to do better," Repole said. "... The football quality was working, but if nobody was watching the games and nobody was at the games, who really knew? And then when I looked at what's not working, that list kind of became longer and longer as I got more involved and asked a lot more questions. "As a serial entrepreneur, that list of what do we need to do better keeps me up every night. So, I would say my first year was my internship to sports league ownership, and I've had an amazing education." REPOLE AND THE league are already mulling plans to put that education to work for the 2027 season. Once Sunday's game is complete, league officials will evaluate each existing market. Repole -- whose goal has been to place teams in smaller venues in less saturated markets that better fit attendance realities -- said there is an 80% chance the UFL will retain all eight local markets. But he also noted that his public talk of expansion has prompted interest from several new markets. The league has already announced plans to expand in Oklahoma City in 2028, and Repole rattled off a list of other possible UFL landing sites, including New England; Austin, Texas; Raleigh, North Carolina; Queens, New York; New Mexico; Greenville or Charleston, South Carolina; Utah; and Boise, Idaho. UFL fans have a healthy online presence, and many of them have wondered about the future of the Birmingham Stallions, whose attendance dropped 16% from 2025 to 2026. Repole exchanged social media barbs with the Stallions' fan base throughout the season, including in Week 7, when an announced crowd of 4,705 at Protective Stadium prompted him to post on X: "Birmingham fans must've thought today's game was an away game." Birmingham fans must've thought today's game was an away game. 🤦♂️😂 https://t.co/MbyJu95PrB — Repole Stable (@RepoleStable) May 17, 2026 Earlier in the spring, Repole joked publicly about scheduling every Birmingham home game at 11 a.m. on Sunday, which could conflict with church attendance. Asked if in retrospect he worried about offending or alienating fans -- the league's customers -- he said: "I never worry about that." He added: "The intent is really not to offend because at the end of the day, if you're just bluntly honest, people are going to laugh, and people are going to get offended. I'm not here to do a poll who gets offended or not. I can never control how someone else takes it. I mean, even if I take a shot at Birmingham, I think there's many fans in that market that say, 'Hey, Repole's a f---ing a--hole.' But they also say, 'Hey, that's pretty funny.'" On the football side, Repole reiterated that coaches and league personnel evaluators will focus heavily on the quarterbacks they recruit in 2027, following a season in which the league's centralized personnel staff shuffled more than half the teams' quarterbacks at midseason. Several coaches were outspoken about their limited roster flexibility as well. Those concerns came after the league dismissed the personnel directors for each team and empowered officials in the league office to manage rosters. In one notable instance during a midweek news conference, Birmingham coach A.J. McCarron said "the math ain't mathing" as he tried to work through multiple offensive line injuries while having "no say" on how the game-day roster was constructed. "I think we'll see a change next year in that, and it's going to help the quality of football," McCarron said. THERE ARE SOME achievements to build on, however. Repole's signature rule change -- four points awarded for field goals of 60 yards or longer -- added a new element to pro football. Kickers converted 4 of 10 such attempts in the regular season, and there have been three conversions in the playoffs. Two of them helped seal victories in the fourth quarter for the Defenders and Kings. Per-team scoring jumped by 2.1 points per game compared with 2025, prompted, in part, because of a rule that prohibited punts once an offense crossed the 50-yard line. The league's merchandise store eventually was stocked. "Our merch [demand] was going through the roof, and honestly, we had no merch," Repole said. "They were making fun of us. The whole league's [fans] were like, 'Mr. Repole, here's my credit card. I want to give you my money. What's so hard about this?' We weren't prepared, and we didn't sell as much merchandise. It was like, 'Hey, good news. We got jerseys in Week 9.'" Perhaps the UFL's most notable accomplishment this season is cultivating the Louisville and Columbus markets, which ranked No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, in league attendance. The teams' game in Week 9 set a league ratings record when it peaked at 1.59 million viewers on Fox. Repole also noticed a social media post of a Kings fan with a Kings tattoo on his leg. "I see that and I'm like, 'I have an obligation to keep this around for 40 or 50 years,'" he said. "I can't have that guy with that tattoo and no team. We're in a market for eight weeks and you've got a guy with a tattoo. I mean, that was something that made me say, 'Wow, we've got something special in this league.'"