Despite fears of downsizing and moving some staff to seasonal or part-time status, the UFL appears to be ramping up with certain positions meant to attract sponsors and fans, specifically in the eight home markets.
The UFL careers page linked at the bottom of the league’s website has posted several team-specific ticketing and marketing job openings. These are listed as being based in the franchise cities, as opposed to working remotely or out of the UFL hub in Arlington. That’s an important piece of the puzzle, as to best reach potential fans or partners, you need people embedded in those cities.
Among the positions open are Ticket Sales Experience Manager for several teams; a Marketing Manager in Memphis; and a Sponsorship Senior Manager/Director in D.C. Jobs are also posted at TeamWork Online, a major sports career repository. Vince Pannozzo, the SVP of Creative and Content with the UFL, earlier this month posted a link on Twitter/X to a Director of Digital Content position. According to the posting, the focus of this position in part would be to highlight, via digital platforms, the “big personality coaches” and “celebrity entrepreneur ownership.”
While attendance and marketing get the brunt of the criticism from UFL faithful, the league could be doing much more in the sponsorship arena as well. Having U.S. Army on board as the presenting sponsor put significant money in the league’s pockets last year, but the off-season has not been kind to that relationship and it remains to be seen if the Army will be back next year.
The more blue-chip sponsors the league gets, the more legitimate they will seem to skeptics. It’s also revenue that could go directly into UFL coffers. Attracting sponsors in home cities helps get the word out at the local level and opens up opportunities for meet-and-greets with fans, giveaways, and many other creative avenues in which to sell the team in that region.
At the league level, they have a Director, Ticket Operations and Director, Creative listed on TeamWork online. The Ticket Managers for the teams would report to the Director of Ticket Operations at the league office. While it’s nice to see the UFL take seriously the need to get fans in the stands at games, it’s somewhat concerning that so many teams are lacking in these positions as season ticket sales have gone on sale and hopefully, individual game tickets to soon follow. Some of these postings were made as far back as two months ago, which does not give confidence that they will be filled in a timely manner.
Like ticket sales, marketing has been another sore spot for the league. The Director of Performance Marketing (reporting to the VP of Marketing) will, in part, “build and manage all paid media campaigns to support advertising needs of the entire league, with a focus on driving ticket sales for all eight teams.” Marketing in home cities in particular has been lackluster; competent people in these positions could change that.
VP, Partner Strategies and Solutions, is somewhat of a vague term to the outsider, but it’s another marketing and sponsorship position. The job, per the posting, “will play a key role in helping the UFL achieve its ambition of becoming one of the most innovative sports leagues in the US for commercial partners.”
This all seems hypothetical – until the jobs are filled. But some cities already have boots on the ground. A recent story about the San Antonio Brahmas in the San Antonio Express-News noted, “…the Brahmas have a year-round staff in San Antonio selling tickets and marketing the team…” With a year of action under the UFL banner behind them, we’ll see how much difference this makes in Alamodome attendance for the upcoming season.
So far, UFL leadership has been saying the right things publicly when asked about these areas of improvement for 2025. The job postings indicate the league is serious about those improvements and certainly seem to want to run on more than just a skeleton crew. Yet as we sit here, halfway through the off-season, the fruits of those improvements haven’t been realized.
No new sponsorships have been announced. Nary a unique marketing initiative has taken hold. Perhaps the league is waiting for these positions to be filled, or preferring to wait until closer to the start of the season to reach a broader audience. The ticketing, marketing, and sponsorship people will help the UFL reach that broader audience – the survival of the league depends on them doing so.
