Tracking UFL Social Media Numbers, Before, During and After 2025 Season

A big part of the UFL’s outreach to fans during the first two seasons of its existence has been through social and digital platforms. This is purposeful: UFL ownership spoke about their presence in those areas last November at the Sports Business Journal Media Innovators conference.

Generally speaking, social and digital is where you attract a younger audience. Pulling in that key 18-49 demographic is what advertisers look for when they decide where to spend their money, and UFL brain trust knows that. At the conference, ESPN President of Content Burke Magnus spoke about the league’s digital engagement through social media and elsewhere, so these are numbers that management is keeping an eye on.

Later in the presentation, Managing Director of RedBird Capital Kevin LaForce answered a question about potential UFL shoulder programming by noting they had decided to focus more on the social and digital aspect, which he termed “a lighter lift” (which could be taken, in part, as “cheaper”), and again mentioned the aim to attract a younger audience.

Another piece of the social and digital that was emphasized was the fact that the league could utilize this 365 days a year. In other words, pre-and-post game shows might be nice, but they go dark when the UFL is in its off-season. Social media can reach people year-round with content. Calling it “smart” and “tactical,” Magnus said, “A year-round, always-on philosophy, particularly on social and digital, is critically important and that’s a focus.”

To underscore this fact, one needs to look no further than how the league makes UFL transactions public. News that all other major sports leagues make readily available on their websites and in countless other locations can only be found on the X feed of the UFL Communications Department. TheUFL.com, the league’s official site, has no transaction page and they don’t post the information anywhere else.

Knowing the league’s emphasis on this aspect of promotion, I wanted to look at the UFL’s social media numbers during the course of the 2025 season. I tracked league and team accounts on Twitter/X and Instagram, two of the most prominent social media sites, and I also looked at viewership numbers on the official UFL account on YouTube.

X

I measured X follower numbers on the following occasions: December 19, March 1 (around the start of training camp), March 19, April 3 (after week one), May 17 (week eight), and June 15 (the day after the UFL Championship). While most accounts at least stayed static, it was interesting to see the official UFL steadily lost followers. They started with 382,300 in December, and finished with 380,500. They even lost about 400 followers between week eight and the championship, when you’d think a gain would occur.

At a number that high, you might figure bot accounts and duplicates may get cleaned out by the system every once in a while. That could explain some of the loss, but not the steady loss over time. X’s user base has declined the last few years – an article on Mashable cited an 8.4% decline in daily active users from October to December 2024, with that number expected to continue to fall in 2025. But if that were the explanation, we’d also see consistent decline from team accounts, which has not happened.

Here are the team accounts and their net gains from December to June (the numbers are an estimation as I don’t have information as to whether X rounds up its numbers in the hundreds spot).

Arlington: +400

Birmingham: +800

D.C.: +600

Houston: Even

Memphis: +600

Michigan: +1,100

San Antonio: +1,100

St. Louis: +2,500

St. Louis already started with by far the largest following of any team account, then added more followers than any other team throughout this period. Birmingham added a healthy number, pairing nicely with their local market television ratings. The league now has to figure out how to translate that interest to game day attendance. D.C. didn’t gain much by appearing in the championship game, whereas Michigan did. That tracks with being the only team in the league to increase attendance year over year. San Antonio’s gain is a real mystery for the worst team in the league. And Houston’s four-win improvement from 2024 didn’t mean much in social media circles.

Instagram

Instagram is in some ways more important as a metric because it attracts the younger audience that the UFL is looking for than does X. The official UFL account did not have the kind of drop-off seen on X – in fact, it increased significantly – further lending credence to the idea that people deleting their X account and leaving the platform may have been followers of the UFL.

Below are the net Instagram gains for each team and the league, with the same rounding caveat as with X:

UFL: +48,000

Arlington: +1,000

Birmingham: +6,600

D.C.: +3,000

Houston: +1,000

Memphis: +2,700

Michigan: +5,700

San Antonio: -3,000

St. Louis: +3,000

A lot of strong growth on Instagram. It’s important to note that not all of these accounts started at the same time: St. Louis, D.C, Arlington and Houston were part of XFL 2020 and should be expected to see a higher number of followers, leaving theoretically less potential for gain than their USFL and XFL 2023 counterparts. For example, D.C. and Michigan both went to the championship, but Michigan developed more followers than D.C. on both platforms. D.C. has more total followers on both and thus, in theory, less growth potential.

San Antonio was the only entity to lose followers on Instagram, and it was not a small number. That can almost assuredly be chalked up to their down year on the field in 2025, which also shows that the ebb and flow of followers on Instagram may be more tied to wins and losses than on X.

The teams that grew the most between week eight and the day after the championship were, predictably, the championship teams. D.C. increased its X follower account by 500 during that span, while Michigan was up 400. That was first and second among teams during that period. On Instagram, D.C. gained 2,000 between week eight and the day after, while Michigan netted 1,200, again, good for number one and number two. As for the other playoff teams: Birmingham was +200 on X, and +700 on Instagram, while St. Louis netted 300 on X, and stayed even on Instagram.

YouTube

Even more than Instagram these days, YouTube is where young people go to get their video fix. They don’t watch traditional TV anymore – they watch YouTube. As the parent of an eight-year old, I can attest to this. As of June 30, the UFL account on YouTube has 191,000 subscribers. It’s really using the old XFL 2023 YouTube account, renamed after the merger.

The most viewed on the channel is from one year ago, and features all of Deestroying’s moments in San Antonio’s victory over D.C. It has 328,000 views, 80,000 more than the next-most-viewed video (the full XFL Championship game between D.C. and Arlington from 2023). The other videos that top 200,000 views all-time are Birmingham Stallions vs. Arlington Renegades extended highlights (first UFL game, 221,000 views), Dany Garcia and Dwayne Johnson announcing the merger on the FOX NFL pre-game show (207,000 views) and full game highlights of the St. Louis Battlehawks vs. Houston Roughnecks game from week one of this season (the debut on Friday night, 200,000 views).

YouTube views should not be confused with NIelsen television viewership measurements, as they use two different metrics to “count” viewers. If you watch a YouTube video for 30 seconds, for example, you’re counted as viewing it. So this isn’t 200,00-plus people watching the entirety of these videos.

The UFL YouTube channel separates videos into categories. For example, they have uploaded post-game press conferences, so that’s a section. Full game highlights, locker room victory speeches, Know My Name, and a few others are the options from which to choose. Of the more recent uploads, the full game highlights of the playoff games and championship are the most popular, all topping 40,000 views.

YouTube shorts is also an area for vertical videos no longer than three minutes, very similar to Instagram Reels or TikTok. There’s a wider variation in viewership on these, with some doing a few thousand views and others over 20,000. That could be because it’s more based on an algorithm and what comes up on your feed as opposed to someone going and seeking out the videos as is the case elsewhere on the channel. So if enough people “like” one of the videos, it becomes hot and is passed along to more and more people who fit the algorithm.

While the UFL’s dedication to attracting fans via social media and through digital means is an admirable plan, the results have been mixed at best. Attendance was sluggish in 2025 and television viewership declined sharply. Those two numbers are the lifeblood of any professional sports entity, regardless of the numbers they pull on social media. The UFL may have decided to focus on social media in part because it saves the company money but for how long can they continue in that fashion and expect different results elsewhere in the business? The best solution may be to continue hammering the league’s message through these means, while adding more traditional advertising and public relations locally and nationally along with it.