United States Football League

In our previous class lecture we talked a lot about new products and why they so often fail.  This got me to researching major new products that failed in the past.  I have a great interest in sports and when I came across an article on the United States Football League, I thought it would be perfectly related to our class lecture.

Looking back on it, I am not sure why anyone would ever try to compete with the NFL.  Maybe back in the 80s the NFL was nowhere as popular as it is today, however it was still the dominant league.  The USFL started out with the concept that they would have their games in the spring and summer when there was no NFL to watch.  It seemed like a pretty smart idea on the surface, but did anyone really do the required market research.  Here is why I believe the USFL failed.

For starters, maybe there was no real demand for a second league.  Yes, people love football and many are depressed through the long off season waiting for it to return, but that doesn't mean that another product could satisfy their hunger.  That brings me to the main reason I believed it failed.  It was most likely based on the competition.  If the NFL was playing all year then the consumers would most likely watch it all year.  But they do not want an inferior product to satisfy their demand.  The USFL might have had talented athletes, but no matter what it was going to be compared to the NFL.  If the athletes were not the quality that the fans were used to, then the league was likely destined to fail.  Here is where I believe the owner, Donald Trump got overly ambitious.

He just presumed that a good enough league would allow for profits and gain customers.  He never realized the importance of being able to compete with the NFL.  Although he finally saw how inferior his product was when after two seasons he tried to directly compete with the NFL by moving the USFL games to the fall.  The league was unable to compete with the NFL and ultimately the teams pulled out and went bankrupt.

The main lesson learned here is that new products are fragile, and almost all aspects must be accounted for before you invest a large amount of money into a new product.