At Raw 25 on Monday, Vince McMahon treated us to a rare (these days) WWE television appearance, as he ran into his eternal nemesis Steve Austin and ate a spectacular Stone Cold Stunner for old time’s sake. It was the first time we’d seen McMahon on WWE TV since Kevin Owens busted him open with a headbutt back in September, which is still pretty intense to think about.
But besides running all of WWE and overseeing at least five hours of live pro wrestling programming every single week, McMahon is ramping up some extracurricular sports/entertainment ventures, and those ventures may be on the verge of coming to fruition.
Rumors first sparked in mid-December that McMahon might actually be thinking of starting up a new football company, or even working towards a relaunch of the long-defunct but fondly-remembered XFL experiment of the early 2000s.
There’s no telling what a new XFL in the current sports climate would look like, or if it would be called XFL, or if a new football league is even what McMahon is really planning, but here’s what we do know: McMahon has indeed created a new company, separate from WWE, called Alpha Entertainment. That company has filed for a new XFL trademark, and Alpha Entertainment is funded partially by McMahon selling off small chunks of WWE stock, while still easily retaining majority control of the company.
The latest reports, however, do indeed indicate that McMahon’s new venture is building toward a new football league, and that it will likely have that same XFL branding the second time around. PWInsider is reporting that WWE’s spectacular, endlessly lauded production team is already hard at work on video packages, sizzle reels and similar media intended to help hype and sell the new league.
What’s more, PWI’s sources believe that there will soon be an announcement that the new XFL will launch in the year 2020, because there is the need to build a vast infrastructure and scout players and other talent in order to create an entirely new football league. Taking an entire two-plus years to create a new league is much more lead time than went into the first XFL, and it seems McMahon is hellbent on getting it right this time around.
But we may not have to wait long at all to see if this report is true. The earliest reports indicated that an announcement of the new league would come the week prior to the Royal Rumble and … it appears that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Early on Thursday, WWE announced that there will be an Alpha Entertainment “sports announcement” at 3 p.m., so let’s start getting ready for XFL news … immediately!
