Where Do Birmingham and Houston Go? Ranking the 2027 UFL Replacement Markets

The UFL has two open slots and hasn't said a word about who fills them. The league announced on July 30 that Birmingham and Houston are gone and that two markets take their place in 2027. That's as far as it went.

Mike Repole has been less careful. Back on June 13 the UFL co-owner rattled off nine markets to ESPN's Kevin Seifert: New England, Austin, Raleigh, Queens, New Mexico, Greenville, Charleston, Utah and Boise. In the same conversation he put the odds of keeping all eight current markets at 80 percent. Six weeks later, two were gone. We went through the venue behind every one of those nine the day he said it.

Here's the problem with the list. Repole wrote the test, and most of his own candidates don't pass it.

The Repole Test

The league release lays out three rules:

"the right market, the right sized venue, and a passionate fan base."

The middle one is the one that bites, and Repole has been repeating it for ten months. At the October 2025 announcement of the league's new markets he put it in plain numbers: "When you put 12–15,000 in a stadium that fits 60–70,000 it's empty. When you put 12,000–15,000 in a stadium that seats 25,000, it looks packed."

The next day, on Barstool, he got specific about the building.

"You can't put the United Football League into a stadium that fits 75 to 100,000 fans," he said. "Ten years ago, these soccer MLS stadiums or USL stadiums didn't exist. Now they have outdoor stadiums that fit 15 to 20,000."

So it isn't a capacity range in the abstract. It's a soccer stadium. Six of the eight 2026 UFL teams played in one, and the league walked away from Ford Field, the Alamodome, Choctaw Stadium and Memphis after 2025 to make that happen. Then it cut Birmingham and Houston on July 30. Repole's explanation for Birmingham was one sentence: "With Birmingham, this decision was 100% due to the wrong sized venue."

Protective Stadium seats 47,100. Birmingham drew 8,248 a game in 2026. Houston drew 5,683, worst in the league. St. Louis, in a dome twice the size of either, drew 23,239.

Worth noting what the rule doesn't require. Sharing a soccer stadium with its regular tenant is normal now. Lynn Family Stadium in Louisville seats 11,700 and hosts Louisville City FC and the Louisville Kings in the same months without much drama. The building doesn't have to be empty. It has to be a soccer stadium, roughly 15,000 to 25,000, and for 2027 it has to be open.

Four things to judge on, then: the venue, the NFL overlap Repole flagged back in April, the size of the TV market, and what names the league already owns on paper.

Sorted that way, the nine fall into five groups.

Tier 1: Clears the Rule Today

1. Austin

Q2 Stadium is a soccer stadium, it seats 20,738, it opened in 2021, and Austin FC plays there. That's the middle of the range Repole keeps describing, in a building that's five years old. Nothing about it needs a renovation, a lease workaround or a groundbreaking.

The market holds up too. Austin is the 34th TV market with 2.62 million people in the metro and no NFL, NBA, NHL or MLB team anywhere near it. Texas football owns the fall. Spring is wide open.

Then there's the part nobody's talking about. Austin is the only one of the nine where the league is sitting on a live trademark. The trademark office signed off on AUSTIN WRANGLERS on May 5, 2026 and is holding the name for the league. Six other Austin names have died off over the past few years. That one didn't.

And when Houston closes, the league is down to one Texas market. Austin covers the state without any of the problems Repole listed in Houston.

2. Utah

America First Field in Sandy checks the same boxes. Soccer stadium, 20,213 seats, 22,213 with temporary seating, open since 2008, home to Real Salt Lake and the Utah Royals.

Salt Lake City is the 28th TV market with 1.31 million people and no NFL team. The Jazz and the Utah Mammoth are indoors all spring. Utah, BYU and Utah State football don't play again until fall.

Repole has named this market twice, once as "Salt Lake" on the Pat McAfee Show in April and again as "Utah" to ESPN in June. He seems to like it.

The trademark file is blank. Neither league entity has ever filed a Utah or Salt Lake City name, which sounds like a problem and isn't. The league owns STALLIONS on its own, with no city attached to it, and Birmingham just stopped using it. Utah Stallions is available off the shelf. Same goes for GENERALS, MAULERS and a half dozen others sitting in the drawer.

Tier 2: Right Building, Wrong Year

3. Queens

Queens has the best case here for every season except the one the league is actually filling.

Etihad Park is a soccer stadium, it'll hold 25,000, it's a $780 million build at Willets Point, and it topped out in March. New York is the first TV market with 20.1 million people in the metro. Repole grew up in Queens. The league already owns NEW JERSEY GENERALS, registered and live, which works fine in that market.

Every arrow points the same direction until you look at the calendar. New York City FC has set the first match for July 17, 2027. The 2026 UFL season ran from March 27 to the June 13 championship. Run 2027 on the same schedule and the season is over about five weeks before the doors open.

That's not a knock on the market. It's a scheduling accident, and it has an obvious fix. The league is going to 10 teams in 2028. Oklahoma City has one of those two slots and the other has never been named. Etihad Park will have been open eight months by the time that season starts.

So Queens isn't really competing for 2027 at all. It's competing for 2028, and on the 2028 board it's the front-runner.

Tier 3: The League Already Made a Deal Here

4. Boise

Boise is the one market where the UFL didn't just kick tires. It negotiated terms, picked a stadium and shook hands.

Public records obtained by BoiseDev show the league and Boise State had a verbal agreement for a 2026 team at Albertsons Stadium. The term sheet went out May 1, 2025: five home games a year, two seasons with an option on a third, projected attendance around 10,000. Repole bought into the league that July. By October the UFL had announced Columbus, Louisville and Orlando instead, all three in soccer stadiums, and Boise State said the talks were paused. Eight months later Repole put Boise back on his list himself.

The stadium is the fight. Albertsons seats around 37,000, and 10,000 people in it is exactly the picture Repole has spent a year complaining about. The soccer alternative, the Stadium at Expo Idaho, opened in April 2026 with 7,247 seats and no funding behind the 15,000 it was designed to reach. A building twice too big or one half too small.

Everything else about Boise works. The metro is 845,900 and has grown almost 37 percent since 2010, against about 10 percent nationally. There's no NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB or MLS team anywhere in Idaho. The catch is reach: it's the 98th TV market, the smallest here by a lot, and it flies nonstop to only two UFL markets, Dallas and Salt Lake City. Salt Lake is 340 miles up the road and on this same list, which is the argument for taking both or neither.

Boise has a name waiting too, and it's the same one. The city had a pro football team called the Stallions in the Indoor Professional Football League, the Idaho Stallions in 1999 and the Boise Stallions by 2001. Nobody has ever filed a trademark on either version, and the league owns the Stallions name outright with no city attached. Boise Stallions is sitting there for whoever wants it.

Fourth, then. The league can pick the phone back up tomorrow. It just has to get past the stadium it closed Birmingham over.

Tier 4: Market's Ready, Building Isn't

5. Raleigh

First Horizon Stadium at WakeMed Soccer Park is a soccer stadium, which is the good news. It lists 9,200 seats and its record crowd is 10,346, which is the bad news. That's about 6,000 short of where Repole wants to be.

The market itself is better than the building. Raleigh-Durham is the 22nd TV market, ahead of both Salt Lake City and Austin, with 1.6 million people. The Hurricanes are the only major league team in the state's capital.

North Carolina FC had a 20,000-seat stadium drawn up for Raleigh's Downtown South district. That design is now listed as outdated and construction never started. Carter-Finley seats 56,919, which just restates the Birmingham problem in a different state.

Neither league entity has ever filed a Raleigh or Carolina trademark.

6. New Mexico

Isotopes Park comes closest of anything in this tier. It holds 13,279 with 11,154 fixed seats, and New Mexico United of the USL Championship plays there in front of a crowd that shows up.

It's also a baseball park, and Triple-A ball runs from late March into September. That's the entire UFL calendar in one building.

Albuquerque-Santa Fe is the 48th TV market with 925,279 people, and there is no NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB or MLS team anywhere in New Mexico. The Lobos are the only competition and they play in the fall.

New Mexico United's own stadium is waiting on an RFP at the state fairgrounds, with a 2023 lawsuit over a different site still sitting in the Court of Appeals. Owner Peter Trevisani has talked about a first game in 2028 or 2029. No New Mexico trademark exists.

7. New England

This is where Repole's list argues with Repole's rule.

Gillette Stadium seats 64,628 and curtains down to about 20,000 for New England Revolution matches. The Kraft Group owns the stadium, the Revolution and the Patriots. Putting a UFL team there means putting a UFL team in an NFL stadium, in the biggest one available, in a market where the Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics and Bruins are all working the same spring calendar.

That's the exact arrangement he's spent ten months calling unworkable.

The building that would fix it isn't close. The Kraft Group's 25,000-seat project in Everett hasn't broken ground. It still needs a Massachusetts environmental review, city permits and the demolition of an old power plant on the site. Revolution president Brian Bilello said in June it opens in summer 2029 or 2030.

Boston is the ninth TV market with 5.03 million people, and honestly that's the entire case for New England. It's a good one. But the venue answer is Gillette until the end of the decade.

The trademark file didn't help either. BOSTON BREAKERS was filed three times. Two died in 2024, and the last one was abandoned on July 13, 2026, seventeen days before the league announced it needed two markets.

Tier 5: Not Close on Size

8. Greenville

GE Vernova Park opened in Mauldin on June 4, 2026 with 4,006 fixed seats. A $29 million project pushes gameday capacity to 6,300 during 2027. The original 2024 plan called for 10,000 and got scaled back.

That's less than half of what Repole is looking for, in the 36th TV market with 1.01 million people.

Furman's Paladin Stadium seats 16,000 and Sirrine Stadium holds 15,000, both of which land in the range. Neither is a soccer stadium, and a soccer stadium is the specific thing he's been asking for. No South Carolina trademark exists.

9. Charleston

Patriots Point seats 3,900 after a 2020 renovation, and the Charleston Battery haven't announced anything bigger.

Charleston is the 85th TV market with 889,263 people. Johnson Hagood Stadium at The Citadel holds 11,500 and is the only building in the metro anywhere near the range.

Repole named Greenville and Charleston back to back in the same breath. They're 213 miles apart on I-26. That reads like one South Carolina slot, not two.

The Nine at a Glance

Two markets clear every column. The league needs exactly two.

What the League Already Owns in These Cities

The trademark record tells a different story than the interviews do.

Two entities file the league's names: XFL Properties on the old XFL side, USFL Enterprises on the old USFL side. Both work out of a Greenwich, Connecticut address that belongs to RedBird Capital Partners, one of the UFL's co-owners, with outside counsel in Indianapolis. Repole's group runs the business side from White Plains, New York, and not a single trademark filing carries that address.

So the filings follow the two legacy IP holders, not Repole's shop. That's why his spoken list and the paper trail don't match.

Six of the nine have never had a single trademark filed for them.

Austin Is the Only One With a Live Mark

The league has filed seven Austin names over the years. AUSTIN GENERALS twice in 2019. Then AUSTIN GAMBLERS, AUSTIN RENEGADES, AUSTIN STALLIONS, AUSTIN OUTLAWS and AUSTIN WRANGLERS all on the same day in June 2021, plus a second Wranglers filing in 2023.

Six of the seven are dead. The Generals lapsed in 2022. Renegades was dropped on purpose last September. Gamblers, Stallions and Outlaws all died on the same day, October 1, 2025, when the league let their deadlines pass without showing the names were in use.

AUSTIN WRANGLERS is the survivor. The trademark office approved it on May 5, 2026 and is holding the name, but that approval comes with a clock. Within six months the league has to show it's actually using the name on something real, or ask for more time. That deadline lands around November 5. Miss it and the name lapses the way the other six did.

For what it's worth, BIRMINGHAM STALLIONS got the same approval two weeks after Austin's. The league cut Birmingham on July 30.

The Paper Trail Points at Two Cities Repole Didn't Name

The most recent activity from either entity came on May 13, 2026, when USFL Enterprises filed four names: LOS ANGELES EXPRESS, plus EXPRESS, OUTLAWS and BULLS with no city attached.

Los Angeles isn't on the list of nine. Repole hasn't brought it up in either interview. That cuts both ways, though. USFL Enterprises refiles its 1980s catalog on a schedule, and it ran OAKLAND INVADERS, PHILADELPHIA STARS, TAMPA BAY BANDITS and NEW JERSEY GENERALS through the same process in May 2025. Three of the four May filings cover names that lapsed recently. Still, BMO Stadium is a soccer stadium and it seats 22,000.

Michigan is the louder one. MICHIGAN PANTHERS isn't just approved and waiting like Austin's name. It's fully registered, finished in November 2025, six weeks after the league shut the team down. The league could put it back on a helmet tomorrow. That's a stronger hold than it has in any of the nine markets above.

The timing there is worth watching. On July 13 Repole said he'd bring the Panthers back if Detroit City FC's new stadium gets built. Two days later the club broke ground on a 15,000-seat building, targeting 2028.

Neither city can host in 2027. But the league has been quietly holding paper on both while Repole talks about somewhere else.

One Name Travels

STALLIONS registered on its own last November with no city attached to it. BIRMINGHAM STALLIONS is a separate filing, and on that one the league claims no rights to the word "Birmingham" by itself. The city was never the asset. The league does this across the board: GENERALS, MAULERS and BREAKERS are all registered without cities, and BANDITS, GAMBLERS, SHOWBOATS, GUNSLINGERS, INVADERS, BULLS, EXPRESS and OUTLAWS are working through the same process.

Which means the league doesn't need a city filing to move a team. It needs one to name a team. As of July 31 there isn't a single city filing for Utah, Raleigh, New Mexico, the Carolinas or Boise, and there never has been one.

What Happens Next

No date has been set for naming the two markets. For reference, the league announced Columbus, Louisville and Orlando on October 7, 2025, about six months before that season started.

Repole did leave Birmingham a door: "We've been transparent with local mayors and city leadership that we'd love to return as soon as the right stadium solution becomes available."

Oklahoma City is locked in for 2028 at the MAPS 4 Multipurpose Stadium, which seats over 10,000 with room to grow. The league wants 10 teams by 2028 and 12 by 2030, and has said 2029 is possible if the interest holds up.

Which means the two open slots for 2027 aren't the last word. There's a 2028 slot next to Oklahoma City that nobody has claimed, and Queens should have a finished 25,000-seat stadium by then.

Austin and Utah are the ones that fit right now. Queens is the one that fits next.