The XFL and 17 Other Sports Leagues That Failed

4. SlamBall

For two seasons between 2002-03, Spike TV aired a fast, exciting and often brutal contact sport that blended the best of basketball, football and gymnastics. An ambitious entrepreneur and producer named Mason Gordon developed the concept of SlamBall himself, placing four large trampolines in front of the hoop on either side of a standard basketball court. He organized impromptu teams, scheduled a game and invited Spike TV executive Albie Hecht to watch. Impressed with the game’s dazzling acrobatics and contact-encouraging rules, the network picked up and promoted SlamBall.

Slamball’s Failure

The sport caught on slowly during the first season, but it did catch on. The first game of the second season was ratings gold, landing 2.3 million viewers with key demographics and even threatening juggernauts like Saturday Major League Baseball. That, however, would prove to be the high-water mark. Although it was undeniably exciting in small doses, the novelty soon wore off, viewership cratered and television management squabbles spelled the end. Although it popped back up on lower-tier channels periodically in the ensuing years, the SlamBall era had ended.

5. Women’s United Soccer Association

In 1999, America caught football fever when the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team, led by superstars Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain, won the World Cup in dramatic fashion. One year later, the bosses of Comcast, Time Warner, Cox Communications and Discovery Communications tried to capitalize on the country’s newfound soccer enthusiasm by organizing the eight-team Women’s United Soccer Association.

Women’s United Soccer Association’s Failure

The excitement that brewed during the ’99 World Cup did not bubble over into the new venture. Viewership — and therefore ad revenue — never matched expectations, and in 2003, the league folded after three seasons. League founder John Hendricks and his investors initially raised $40 million, which he believed would carry the league for five years. The WUSA lost $46 million in its first year alone, according to the Chicago Tribune, $24 million the following year and $18 million-$19 million during the third and final year. Investors had to add $20 million a year to the original budget and, in the end, lost $90 million on a $100 million outlay.

6. NFL Europe

Just as the U.S. doesn
’t have a national interest in soccer, which they call football in Europe, Europe still hasn’t come around to the brand of football Americans call football — but not for lack of effort. For 16 years between 1991-2007, the NFL tried to establish a beachhead across the Atlantic with a league that, despite several name changes, is known as NFL Europe.

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NFL Europe’s Failure

The NFL’s creation of a six-team spring league in Europe was supposed to do three things. First, it was to serve as a proving ground and learning experience for green coaches and players to hone their skills in the offseason. It accomplished that end — treating Europe as an NFL farm league — fairly well. The other two objectives, not so much. The NFL hoped it would serve as a catalyst for American-style football to finally sweep Europe. That never happened. The third goal was to give American diehard NFL fans a sort of minor league outlet to watch in the spring, but stateside football fans proved uninterested. By the time the NFL finally threw in the towel, NFL Europe proved to be a venture that lost $30 million a year.

7. Roller Hockey International

RHI was the first major professional league dedicated to inline hockey — hockey played on linear roller skates popularized by Rollerblade instead of ice skates. It operated in North America between 1993-1999. Two things happened that made it possible. First, Wayne Gretzky’s historic trade from Edmonton to Los Angeles opened up a new interest in hockey in the United States, particularly in Southern California. Second, the inline-skate craze took off in the ’90s, also primarily in Southern California.

Roller Hockey International’s Failure

From the very outset, RHI’s administration and management abilities never matched that of the promise that the sport showed. The league was based on a franchise model, and those franchises were known for their instability as much as for their hockey. The numbers tell the tale. In 1993, there were 12 teams, which doubled to 24 the following year. In 1995, that number dropped to 19 teams, then 18 in ’96, then 10 in ’97, none in ’98, and finally, during the league’s final year in 1999, there were only eight teams left. The front office was as unpredictable as the franchises and a multimillion-dollar dispute over a puck patent only made the perpetual infighting worse.

8. Arena Football League

The Arena Football League was created as a cheaper alternative for football fans as the cost of attending an NFL game became prohibitive to many regular families. Played indoors, it had a much smaller field — about a quarter the size of an NFL gridiron — and was governed by rules that favored the offense to encourage exciting, high-scoring games while ensuring every seat in the house was good. The formula worked. Founded in 1987, it ran all the way through 1999, making it one of the oldest active American football leagues in the world before it disbanded.

Arena Football League’s Failure

The Arena Football League never thr
eatened the NFL — it was never designed to — but it did enjoy a period of real mainstream success. At its peak, it had franchises in major American cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, and it boasted 2 million spectators a year. In 2009, however, the season was canceled due to a labor dispute. It returned the following year down from an average of 13,000 fans per game to 8,000. The league never recovered, dwindled consistently over the following decade and was canceled in 2019.

9. Negro League Baseball

In the years following the Civil War, both baseball and segregation became deeply entrenched pastimes in America and black ballplayers were relegated mostly to amateur leagues and traveling teams until 1920. That year, an African-American pitcher and visionary named Rube Foster created the Negro National League, the first of several significant professional baseball leagues for black, and occasionally Hispanic, players, which came to be known collectively as Negro League Baseball. Sometimes called the Negro Leagues, it flourished for three decades.

Negro League Baseball’s Failure

On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Major League Baseball color line had officially been broken, spelling the beginning of the end for the Negro Leagues. First a trickle, then a wave of black players were signed to big league ball, the Negro Leagues were rapidly depleted of talent and, soon after, fans. The grand experiment came to an end following the 1951 season.

It’s impossible to categorize Negro League Baseball as a failure, and if it failed, it failed for all the right reasons — but there was an unintended consequence. One of America’s most remarkable pre-Civil Rights black-owned business enterprises was lost to history.

10. Roller Derby

The fast, rough and wild sport of roller derby can be traced to Aug. 13, 1935, when event promoter Leo Seltzer staged an event that capitalized on both the widespread popularity of roller skating and a public yearning for a distraction during the Depression. A spectacle that started as team roller skate racing became increasingly more violent — and more popular — until Roller Derby and its rival league Roller Games were enormous spectacles that sold tens of thousands of tickets to single events and enjoyed widespread television broadcasts during the sport’s heydey.

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Roller Derby’s Failure

Roller Derby was one of the earliest examples of men and women competing together — and of women competing at all in any physical sport — and of leagues welcoming blacks and other minorities, including openly gay players, into their ranks. Men were almost always paid more, but according to Smithsonian, Roller Derby’s women skaters were the highest-paid female athletes in America, earning as much as $30,000 a year. Just as the sport hit its zenith in the mid-1970s, so, too, did oil prices. Seltzer found it too expensive to provide transportation to the teams and too costly to heat the arenas they played in. In 1973, Seltzer sold Roller Derby’s rights to Roller Games, which continued in various forms to much lesser success through the 1980s.

11. North American Soccer League

The North American Soccer League (NASL) stands out as being the first significant pro soccer league to generate a real following in the United States. Existing from 1968-1984, its teams drew some of the world’s top talent — including Pele — and launched the modern soccer boom, and it laid the groundwork that would lead to America’s hosting the World Cup in 1994 and the arrival of MLS.

North American Soccer League’s Failure

Money was always tight and, although owners overpaid for stars like Pele, nonstar players earned only around $3,000 per season. They played mostly in baseball parks, which were hard to convert, and mismanagement was rampant. By 1980, the league engaged in a bitter squabble that ended with the elimination of several teams that had performed poorly. Three of the remaining teams dropped out in 1980 and seven more in 1981, including Pele’s New York Cosmos, which was owned by a company that had to cut its budget after losing money on Atari games. Finally, after the 1984 season, NASL was no more.

12. Pro Cricket

Today, organizers are attempting to establish a cricket league in the United States, which is estimated to be home to 20 million fans of the internationally appreciated sport. They wouldn’t be the first. In 2004, the Pro Cricket league launched in the U.S. playing a faster-moving, abbreviated variation of the game — normally, a single match can last for days — called Twenty20 (T20).

Pro Cricket’s Failure

Unlike soccer, which is familiar to many Americans even if they don’t watch it, cricket is completely alien. Most Americans don’t understand the game or even know the positions. That hurdle proved too big for Pro Cricket. Like the NASL, Pro Cricket also struggled with converting the baseball fields on which their games were played. It folded after just one season in 2004.

13. PRO Rugby

Since at least the late 1990s, organizers had been attempting to establish a professional rugby league in the United States to no avail. In 2016, however, the dream finally came to fruition when a five-team league called PRO Rugby was sanctioned by the sport’s governing body in America, USA Rugby. It started well, with thousands of fans turning out for matches even in bad weather — there was even a proposed expansion into Canada — but things soon began unraveling.

PRO Rugby’s Failure

Like so many other imported sports, securing a fitting venue and attracting and retaining fans was a struggle from the outset. The league received virtually no attention from local media. The Canada expansion fell through and the director of PRO Rugby quit without naming a replacement, which led to legal disputes. There were also legal disputes between the league and USA Rugby. Players weren’t paid, which led to them filing their own legal claims, and one year later in 2017, PRO Rugby folded after just two seasons.

14. World Hockey Association

Although several tried, no hockey league had ever truly competed with the NHL since the 1920s, but by the ’70s — following a major NHL expansion in 1967 — the sport was going mainstream and growing in popularity every year. Many cities, however, still didn’t have an NHL team, and the Wo
rld Hockey Association (WHA) was formed in an effort to fill that void. The WHA’s organizers won a landmark case that allowed players in both leagues wide freedom in determining where they would play. Almost immediately, 67 players stunned the NHL by signing with the WHA. Many of them — like Gerry Cheevers, Bernie Parent and eventually, Mr. Hockey himself, Gordie Howe — were the biggest stars in the game. The WHA had deep pockets. Bobby Hull’s $2.75 million, 10-year WHA contract was a record at the time.

World Hockey Association’s Failure

From the outset, the NHL took an if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them approach and began discussing a merger with the WHA. Despite this intention, the relationship between the two leagues was hostile and several legal battles ensued. The WHA balked at talks of a merger and quickly began expanding — too quickly, actually. The league and its bankroll were spread too thin across too many cities with too many teams and by 1979, it was forced to acquiesce to the NHL’s push for a merger. That year, the NHL began gobbling up WHA teams, and the WHA was forced to fold.

15. Major League Ultimate

Ultimate is a light-contact sport often called ultimate frisbee, but since Frisbee is a Wham-O trademark, it’s not part of the sport’s official title. Created in the 1960s, ultimate frisbee had gained cult popularity by the 2000s and in 2013, Major League Ultimate (MLU) was formed as an eight-team, semiprofessional organization representing the U.S. and Canada.

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Major League Ultimate’s Failure

MLU was not the only game in town. The American Ultimate Disc League (AUDL) played its inaugural game in 2012, the year before MLU emerged. That early jump gave AUDL an advantage in both name recognition and in signing the sport’s top talent. By 2016, MLU was hemorrhaging money, investors were pulling out, and AUDL was clearly dominant. Before the start of the 2017 season, players received this email from MLU brass: “Due to the past losses, future projected losses and the inherent issues that we have found in our business model the Board of Directors has decided to suspend operations, effective immediately, and the company will be issuing a public statement shortly.”

16. Championship Gaming Series

For a short while, video games became an international sport — esport, that is. The Championship Gaming Series was launched in 2007 as an international gaming competition based in the United States. It was backed by huge promotional events and was modeled on real sports leagues, complete with a draft, qualifying matches and full-time team managers. Players who were drafted earned a base annual salary of $30,000 and were eligible for bonuses.

Championship Gaming Series’ Failure

The grandiose production and marketing schemes promoters used to try to propel the league into the mainstream helped hasten the league’s downfall. Expensive events like drafts at the Playboy Mansion and the SXSW festival bled the league’s budget. Also, the idea of watching people play video games on television simply never caught on with the masses. Just one year and two seasons later in 2008, Championship Gaming Series buckled under the realities of its huge expenditures and almost nonexistent income.

17. International Fight League

By 2006, mixed martial arts (MMA) was a mainstream sport thanks almost exclusively to the raging success of the UFC. Many lesser organizations tried to capitalize on the craze, but none were quite like the International Fight League (IFL), which proposed the first-ever team-based MMA league competition. A real estate developer and several well-heeled investors formed the league, which pitted two teams of at least three fighters each against each other in one-on-one bouts.

International Fight League’s Failure

The IFL was a unique and innovative idea — and a well-funded one at that. The league even went public and was valued at $150 million. The problems, however, piled up quickly. The IFL sensationalized the violence that’s inherent to the sport, which turned off many fans and fighters who had struggled so hard to improve its image as human cockfighting.

There was also a significant shortage of talent at both the fighter and trainer/coach levels. Also, the UFC continued to dominate and grow, overshadowing all other MMA enterprises. The league was burning through cash at an unsustainable pace, at one point spending $1 million per event despite receiving only $50,000 from its television contracts. By 2008, the IFL was reporting losses of $31 million and the company’s stock price plummeted from $17 to less than $1 per share. The league folded that year.

18. All-American Girls Professional Baseball League

The most famous defunct league in history is famous thanks to the mostly fictionalized movie “A League of Their Own.” The AAGPBL, however, was most certainly real. More than 600 women played in the league, and although everyone knows the story about women packing baseball stadiums while the men were off at war, it’s less known that the league, founded by Philip K. Wrigley, enjoyed nearly a decade of success after World War II.

All-American Girls Professional Baseball League’s Failure

The AAGPBL endured from its founding in 1943 to 1954. The inaugural season tallied 176,612 paid fans and by war’s end in 1945, that number climbed to almost a half million. After the war, the league remained successful, peaking at 910,000 paid fans in 1948. The arrival of television, however, as well as a huge variety of new entertainment offerings during the post-war boom, triggered a decline in attendance. In 1950, the business model changed to individual team operation, and with no central leadership or marketing, interest plummeted, teams began dropping off and in 1954, the league folded with only five remaining teams.

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