Donald Trump helped kill the first USFL. Now a new version has risen in its place

Just for fun, suppose you are a pro football fan from, say, Philadelphia. That would mean you probably like/love/fixate on the Eagles. It would probably mean that you’d root for any other pro football team attaching “Philadelphia” to its nickname, as long as it did not play in the fall.

Philadelphia and seven other cities, states or regions are getting new pro football teams next month, when the second version of the United States Football League makes its debut. The Philadelphia team will be called the Stars, after the team in the first iteration of the USFL.

Although the Philadelphia Stars last played a USFL game in 1984 before spending their final season in Baltimore, the team’s name seems logical, perhaps until you find out that they won’t be playing any games in Philadelphia for at least this season and maybe in 2023.

All USFL teams, bar one, won’t play any “home” games this year, because the 10-game regular season will be played at two stadiums in Birmingham, Alabama (home of the Stallions), with the USFL playoffs scheduled to be played in Canton, Ohio. Birmingham was booked.

So it goes for the newest NFL rival. Perhaps the new USFL – which league officials stress is not associated with the old USFL or its owners – will draw plenty of fans tuning into Fox, FS1, NBC, USA and Peacock thirsting for out-of-NFL-season pro football action.

The first version of the USFL, which also had a spring schedule, lasted three seasons in the 1980s, and it was somewhat successful before a notorious USFL team owner aiming to use the team to elbow his way into the NFL ran the league into the ground.

That owner was Donald J Trump, a relatively obscure New York real-estate developer at the time who, you may have heard, went on to find