2025 UFL season

The 2025 UFL season is the second season of the United Football League, which was created following the merger of the XFL and USFL.

2025 UFL season
League	United Football League
Sport	American football
Number of games	43 (40 regular-season games, 3 postseason games)
Number of teams	8
TV partner(s)	ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, Fox, FS1
2025 UFL Championship

The Birmingham Stallions are the defending champions where they defeated the San Antonio Brahmas 25–0 in the 2024 UFL Championship Game, the only shutout of the entire season, to win their third consecutive spring football championship, adding to their back-to-back championships in the rebooted USFL.

Offseason

The UFL exceeded internal expectations for the 2024 season, with Fox Sports executive Eric Shanks commenting that, though the league still lost money, it was "ahead of the expected pace" in terms of achieving self-sustenance, while the league long-term goal is to solicit local investors in an owner-operator arrangement similar to that used by Major League Soccer and the previous United Football League.

Television viewership rose substantially compared to the previous season as separate leagues, while ticket sales in most cities declined, prompting the league ownership to shift investment toward local ticket sales teams. The inaugural season of the UFL averaged 832,000 viewers per game this season, a 34% increase from the average of 619,000 viewers the USFL and XFL attracted last year, while the championship game on Fox drew the highest viewership with 1.596 million viewers. However, the average attendance dipped from the XFL’s 2023 season average of 14,703 to 13,512.

In an interview after the season Head of Football Operations Daryl Johnston said: "With our home markets, we’ve got to build that trust there — that we’re not going to leave or [that] the league isn’t going to fold. We’ve got a couple cities that historically have been a part of spring football, they’ve committed to a team and that team has left. … We’ve still got some trust to build in our home markets. We are going to be able to dial into the details. We’re going to have a traditional offseason calendar where we can be ahead of the curve instead of being in a position where we have to chase it a little bit".

Teams

As one of the conditions for approving the merger of the XFL and USFL, federal regulators were said to have "prefer(red) more opportunities" (eventual expansion teams) than the eight teams that were included in the 2024 season. No such expansion is planned for 2025, nor are any relocations, as Daryl Johnston stated that the ticket sales in most of the poorer-selling markets could be improved by showing stability and following a more "traditional offseason calendar."

Teams in the 2025 UFL season

Conference	Team	Location	Stadium	Capacity	First season	Head coach
USFL Conference	Birmingham Stallions	Birmingham, Alabama	Protective Stadium	47,100	2022	Skip Holtz
	Houston Roughnecks	Houston, Texas	Rice Stadium	47,000	2020	Curtis Johnson
	Memphis Showboats	Memphis, Tennessee	Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium	58,325	2023	John DeFilippo
	Michigan Panthers	Detroit, Michigan	Ford Field	65,000	2022	Mike Nolan
XFL Conference	Arlington Renegades	Arlington, Texas	Choctaw Stadium	25,000	2020	Bob Stoops
	DC Defenders	Washington, D.C.	Audi Field	20,000	2020	Reggie Barlow
	San Antonio Brahmas	San Antonio, Texas	Alamodome	64,000	2023	Wade Phillips
	St. Louis Battlehawks	St. Louis, Missouri	The Dome at America's Center	67,277	2020	Anthony Becht

Arlington

DC

Houston

Memphis

Michigan

Birmingham

San Antonio

St. Louis

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Locations of current teams for the 2025 UFL season, (USFL Conference – red; XFL Conference – blue)

Coaches

The four coaches who came into the UFL by way of the XFL—Arlington's Bob Stoops, San Antonio's Wade Phillips, St. Louis's Anthony Becht and DC's Reggie Barlow—are believed to be reaching the end of their guaranteed XFL contracts, and will be subject to new terms that the USFL coaches and all assistants agreed upon in 2024 that were less generous than the 2023 XFL's were. Stoops, the league's longest-tenured coach and the only remaining coach from the inaugural 2020 XFL season, was noncommittal about returning after the 2024 season, stating he was open to returning for 2025 but that "you never know what the structure is going to look like."

Season structure

Preseason

This is the third and final year of the league's agreement with Arlington, Texas, to serve as the league's centralized hub.

Regular season

The league is divided into two conferences, the USFL Conference and the XFL Conference, each a continuation of its respective league. Each team will play a ten-game schedule with no bye weeks, playing two games against each conference rival (one home and one away) and one game against each team in the other conference, all eight teams playing in their home markets.

Postseason

The postseason will have four teams, with the first and second-ranked team in each conference playing in the XFL Championship Game and USFL Championship Game, the winners of which will advance to the 2025 UFL Championship Game, which will be held at a neutral site chosen among the league's eight markets as a reward for strong fan support and attendance.

Media

Television

In the United States, the television rights for the UFL are held by Fox and ESPN (which is under its third season of a five year deal), On season two, some games are expected to be moved to Friday night broadcast windows, to accommodate Fox’s new IndyCar deal and to fill a notoriously difficult-to-fill void on the Friday schedule left when WWE SmackDown returned to USA Network. Most of the advertising revenue the networks will collect is being sold as part part of bulk agreements with Fox Sports and ESPN Inc. and not as a standalone television series.