Fox's Eric Shanks confirms 'many' UFL games will move to Fridays in 2025 (2024)

FoxUFLBy Andrew Bucholtz on 06/16/202406/16/2024

The current United Football League’s first season (following its creation out of the merger of the XFL and the USFL) wraps up with the Birmingham Stallions-San Antonio Brahmas championship game Sunday, but there are already changes afoot for its second season. In particular, Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks confirmed Friday on a call about the company gaining IndyCar rights that a lot of UFL games in 2025 will move to Friday nights to clear the way for IndyCar.

The plan for the main Fox network to consistently show UFL games on Fridays was first reported back in May by Deadline’s Neelie Andreeva. Andreeva discussed that as part of Fox’s plan to replace WWE Smackdown (which heads to USA in September), saying “the network is replacing the departing wrestling franchise with sports coverage of college football and basketball as well as UFL.” Now, Shanks has confirmed that a lot of UFL games will head there following this IndyCar deal, as Mike Mitchell writes atSports Illustrated‘s UFL FanNation site:

In a Zoom call announcing FOX’s new exclusive broadcasting rights pact with NTT IndyCar Series, FOX Sports CEO Eric Shanks confirmed Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva’s report from last month that the network would be moving UFL games in 2025 to Friday nights.

FOX’s deal with IndyCar was made possible because the network was able to free up broadcasting windows on weekends. IndyCar CEO Mark D Miles said that the new pact with FOX happened because NBC Sports could not offer the same amount of national broadcast slots.

So in essence, the United Football League took one for the team. The UFL on FOX’s move to Friday nights in 2025 was the seed work for the network clearing the slate to strike this new pact.

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As noted in our coverage of Andreeva’s report, there have been plenty of spring leagues airing games on Fridays in the past, but it’s been rarer to see that on broadcast TV. However, that does fit with the company’s broader “new Fox” strategy of emphasizing news and sports after their 2019 sale of many assets (including their TV studio) to Disney.Smackdown‘s highly-promoted move to Fox that fall was a key part of that, and their first consistent use of Friday nights as a big sports window on the broadcast network.

Now, withSmackDown leaving for a USA return, Fox needs other content for the broadcast network on Friday nights. It looks like they plan to keep those as a sports window, though, using college football in the fall, college basketball in the winter, and now, the UFL in the spring.

We don’t yet have details on how many UFL games will head to Fridays. Jenna Fryer of the Associated Press summarized Shanks’ comments with “many,” but that isn’t necessarily all of Fox’s games, and Fox had only 22 of the league’s 43 games this year (the others were on Disney’s ABC and ESPN). Some also mused about potential league expansion with this Friday window, but that’s far from proven at this point either. And we also don’t know if the UFL will start in March again or move its start date earlier.

For the UFL, there are pros and cons to this. Friday nights have often been a difficult night to attract audiences. But there is some value to a consistent broadcasting slot, especially on a broadcast network rather than a cable one. And the UFL has built a reasonably solid TV audience this year, averaging 816,000 viewers per game for the regular season and drawing 1.09 and 1.27 million viewers for the conference championship games.

In-person attendance is more of a concern, especially outside St. Louis. And there are other issues facing the league. But they have relatively solid ownership, including Fox (probably a big part of why this move to Fridays could happen), The Rock, Dany Garcia, and RedBird Capital. We’ll see how the move to Fridays, and the broader second season, works out for them.

[UFL FanNation]