The St. Louis Battlehawks will travel to a few new cities next spring and play in some smaller, more intimate venues as the United Football League announced several franchise relocations and venue changes on Tuesday.
Three of the eight teams in the league will move to new cities, and two more will move to new stadiums within the same metropolitan areas. St. Louis, the league’s lone attendance success story, is one just of three teams staying in the same city and venue.
The three relocated franchises will now play in Columbus (Ohio), Louisville (Kentucky) and Orlando (Florida). Those teams replace Memphis, Michigan and San Antonio (Texas).
The Houston Roughnecks will become the Houston Gamblers and move to that city’s Major League Soccer stadium. The Arlington (Texas) Renegades will become the Dallas Renegades, though they still won’t play in Dallas. They’re moving to the MLS stadium in Frisco, in suburban Dallas.
The move to smaller stadiums is intentional after the team has struggled with attendance in all of its non-St. Louis markets. The three new teams will also play in stadiums built for soccer.
“It’s going to feel real, real different, and it’s going to show better on TV,” said Mike Repole, the league’s newest investor. “The sound is going to be better, and the experience and the engagement is going to be better.”
Repole, a billionaire who made his money in sports beverages, joined the UFL ownership group in July and one of his chief complaints then was the enormous swaths of empty seats and quiet environments at the league’s cavernous venues.
“The vibe hasn’t been to where it should be,” he told ESPN in July. “You can hear a pin drop when someone runs 80 yards. That’s not so good. Nobody wants to turn on the TV and see 10,000 fans in a 65,000-seat stadium. It’s like watching a COVID game.”
The Battlehawks averaged 29,537 fans per game last season, which is more than the capacity of six of the seven other UFL stadiums entering next season. Only the Battlehawks and Birmingham Stallions will play in venues seating more than 25,000.
Of the four teams with the lowest average attendance numbers last season, only one (Memphis) was relocated to a new city.
The changes also include killing off the two-division format. The top four teams in the eight-team league will earn playoff berths. The league will begin play on March 27, 2026, with a schedule to be announced at a later date.
The one thing changing for the Battlehawks: a jersey redesign. All UFL teams will be getting new-look uniforms for 2026.
When play starts then, the UFL will join the USFL from the mid-1980s as the longest-running spring league at three seasons, with plenty of failed attempts since then.
Repole believes the league can sell out stadiums in smaller venues, and he hopes to double the size of the league to 16 teams by the mid-2030s. He gets the skepticism as he joins a group that includes RedBird Capital Partners, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Dany Garcia, Fox and ESPN.
“I think all the stars are aligned for football to be a dominant year-round sport, and we just want to fill the void of spring football,” said Repole, who also owns race horses. “It’s a big investment and it’s a big bet, and the league, the investor group and I are up to the challenge.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Ethan Erickson | Post-Dispatch
Digital production editor
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