USFL Reclaims Blue-Chip Sponsors With Horse Racing, IndyCar, EPL Pairings
When the USFL returns this weekend for its second season of 21st-century spring football, it will do so with a full complement of blue-chip advertisers in its corner. In a bid to better serve the sponsors, the league’s TV partners are optimizing their schedules to ensure that the turnout for the games is commensurate with their investment.
Among the new backers are FedEx, Molson Coors and Mars, which join returning sponsors Apple, T-Mobile, Gatorade and Jersey Mike’s. Despite its ongoing $4 billion cost-cutting push, the Memphis-based FedEx signed on with the USFL after the league placed a new franchise in the company’s home market. As it marks its 50th anniversary, FedEx will be conspicuous throughout this weekend’s Philadelphia Stars-Memphis Showboats opener, with plans to engineer a flyover of Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium while also airing some in-game commercial spots.
More from Sportico.com
Spring Football Returns as XFL Fans Smell What the Rock Is Cooking
Sporticast: Is Mac McClung the Solution to the All-Star Game Problem?
Along with the promotional activities, a FedEx rep will join a Fox Sports exec to present a $50,000 check to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. According to St. Jude, FedEx has donated north of $43 million to the hospital since 1986. The shipping giant also sponsors the PGA Tour’s FedEx St. Jude Championship and the season-long FedEx Cup competition.
As part of a new multiyear partnership, official USFL beer sponsor Molson-Coors will back the broadcasts with a slate of ads for its adult beverages, with Simply Spiked Lemonade serving as the company’s lead brand. At the same time, the Gen Z-targeting Mars has gone all-in on a buy to hype Snickers.
Back for a second round are Apple, which last season furnished iPads to coaches and players, and T-Mobile, which stamped its logo on each headset that was worn on the sidelines during the games. Gatorade will do the usual Gatorade-type things, while Jersey Mike’s, the USFL’s first signee of 2022, will again be holding down the fort for the quick-serve restaurant category. In terms of standard in-game ad buys, the sandwich chain and T-Mobile were among the USFL’s top 10 biggest spenders last season, per iSpot.tv data.
Many of the new USFL sponsorship deals were hashed out during the 2022-23 upfront bazaar, which coincided with the back end of the league’s comeback season. (After a strong start, the first incarnation of the USFL folded in 1986.) According to Fox Sports executive VP of ad sales Mark Evans, advertisers heading into last year’s ad haggle had familiarized themselves with the USFL, and were therefore more confident about investing in the televised product.
“The marketplace was a little skeptical in advance of year one, just based on some of the starts and stops that spring football has had in the past,” Evans said in a phone interview. “But we always felt, once we were able to get the season under our belt and marketers were able to see what this league was and where it was headed, that we would have significantly more success in year two. And fortunately, we’ve managed to exceed our internal expectations—which are always very aggressive.”
In nothing else, the USFL’s roster of top-tier sponsors may be interpreted as a vote of confidence in the startup. “These are some of the biggest marketers in the world and they’re seeing the value in what this league is,” Evans said. “And it’s not only for the short term, but for the long term, because they wouldn’t be in this if they didn’t think that this was an operation that was going to be sustainable.”
Set to kick off Saturday afternoon on Fox, the USFL’s return engagement will be fueled by more advantageous lead-ins than was the case a year ago. For example, co-broadcaster NBC will air the May 6 primetime game (Memphis Showboats-Michigan Panthers) after its coverage of the 149th running of the Kentucky Derby, in the hopes that the massive mint juleps-and-funny-hats crowd will stick around for some football.
Last year, NBC served up 15.8 million viewers during the Run for the Roses, only to lead into local news and a repeat of Dateline. If nothing else, this may have been a missed opportunity to boost impressions for the league during its fourth week of play. As it happens, Fox aired that Saturday’s primetime USFL matchup, while NBC carried an afternoon game on the Sunday after the Derby. Previous commitments prevented Fox and NBC from swapping their USFL dates.
Two weeks later, NBC aired a USFL game as the lead-out to the Preakness Stakes, which drew 5.26 million viewers. The subsequent Birmingham Stallions blowout of the Panthers averaged just shy of 1.2 million viewers, which marked a 32% improvement compared to NBC’s previous USFL outing and was the network’s third most-watched game of the season.
Along with the Derby, NBC will pair its upcoming USFL broadcasts with English Premier League matches and IndyCar Series races.
Fox, for its part, will lean hard on its Sunday MLB window, while also slotting in some football after NASCAR Cup Series races. On June 11, during the penultimate week of the USFL season, Fox is set to air a Stars-New Jersey Generals showdown after the dust has settled at Sonoma Raceway. Last year’s Toyota/Save Mart 350, which aired on Fox’s cable sibling, FS1, averaged 2.24 million viewers, although a significantly larger lead-in is expected when the race switches to the broadcast flagship. Season-to-date, Fox’s NASCAR coverage is averaging 4.4 million viewers per race.
While the goal is to ensure that the USFL draws an optimal number of impressions, the upstart league will serve as an anchor for a busy sports day in at least one instance. On June 10, a Panthers-Pittsburgh Maulers game will set the table for Fox’s first go-round at the Belmont Stakes, the rights for which it picked up in an eight-year deal back in January 2022. Following the race, Fox will throw to its MLB coverage, upon which most of its affiliates will be patched into the season’s first nationally televised Yankees-Red Sox game.
Fox has committed $150 million to the first three years of the revived USFL, which last season averaged 693,243 viewers per game. That’s 14% higher than the current TV turnout for the XFL, which through its first seven weeks is drawing 608,679 viewers per telecast on the Disney family of networks.
Best of Sportico.com
