The XFL is coming back, but it won’t be filling the hole the Oakland Raiders will leave when the franchise picks up and moves to Las Vegas.
The XFL’s rebirth is Vince McMahon’s second try at a football league. Earlier in the year, he officially announced the 8-team league and said an announcement of just where those teams would play is coming soon. We don’t know for sure where the league is headed, but it’s clear now that they tried hard to make Oakland work.
Oakland is a market that makes a lot of sense for the XFL. The Raiders are headed for Las Vegas, with a new stadium expected to be ready by 2020. That’s when the rival league is expected to debut as well. And the first version of the XFL played well in the area. The San Francisco Demons led the XFL’s attendance marks in 2001, putting an average of around 35000 people at AT&T Park.
But according to The Mercury News, the startup league has struck out twice when trying to find a venue in the bay area. Oakland’s Coliseum officials were concerned about growing grass for baseball, apparently, putting the tenant that’s actually expected to be in the stadium — the Athletics — before potential new business.
Scott McKibben, executive director of the stadium authority, this week said the XFL’s schedule conflicts with getting the Coliseum ready for the Oakland Athletics Opening Day in 2020.
“There just isn’t any way we are going to be an impediment or obstacle to the A’s,” said McKibben, head of the authority that manages the Coliseum and Oracle Arena.
A UC Berkeley athletics spokesman said the university also refused the XFL’s proposal to play at Memorial Stadium.
The article said details of the contract the Raiders have with the city are not final, but there’s expected to be an option for the Raiders to play one more season in Oakland if their stadium in Vegas isn’t ready yet. That could be another reason Coliseum officials were wary of making a deal, as they didn’t want to say no to a lucrative deal from the NFL should stadium construction lag behind.
