The long gestating rumors that Vince McMahon, CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), had been working on a new project were confirmed when he announced that he would be bringing the XFL football league back after a 19-year hiatus in 2020.

The XFL– which, contrary to popular belief, is neither an initialism nor does it stand for “eXtreme Football League” – was founded in 2000, played its first game on Feb. 3, 2001, played its last on April 21 then officially folded on May 10 of the same year.

The league was intended to fill the gap in NBC’s schedule after they lost the rights to the American Football Conference of the National Football League (NFL) and to satiate McMahon’s ego after a deal to buy the Toronto Argonauts – and subsequently the whole of the Canadian Football League (CFL) – fell through. 

Considering it lasted less than three months, the eight-team XFL left a significant legacy – primarily that of a punchline. The league was often being mocked for its edgy aesthetic, piggybacking off the success of McMahon’s WWE, which was, at that time, in the “Attitude Era” and known for running story lines featuring violence and sexual content. While the latter translated in the form of bikini-clad cheerleaders doing raunchier routines than those of their NFL counterparts, the former was baked into the ethos of the game.

The NFL, known then and now as the “No Fun League,” has a strict and byzantine set of rules and regulations that is often impenetrable to anybody not named Mike Periera – just ask Dez Bryant to clarify what a “football move” actually is – and so to differentiate itself, the XFL stripped back the rules to make for a more streamlined game which had the corollary of making the game much more intense and significantly more violent.

One of the XFL’s biggest changes was to scrap the standard game opening procedure of a coin toss followed by a kick off with an opening scramble, in which the ball was placed on the 50-yard line in the center of the field and both teams would run twenty yards to get it. On paper, it makes sense, as it removes an element of chance but in reality, setting it up so two athletes had to run towards each other, head-to-head, as fast as they possibly could was incredibly dangerous and resulted in several injuries, including that of free safety Hassan Shamsid-Deen, who separated his shoulder and missed the entire season during the opening of the Orlando Rage’s very first game.

Other rules, such as allowing bump and run coverage before the quarterback had released the ball and replacing point after touchdown (PAT) kicks with modified two-point conversion plays, were made to make the game more dramatic and exciting, but with both the NFL and CFL finding it difficult to get full rosters of talented players, the XFL was primarily made up of third and fourth-string talents. This, combined with the WWE aesthetic, left many thinking the games were predetermined and, as NBC sports broadcasting legend Bob Costas would put it, looking like a “[combination of] mediocre high school football and a tawdry strip club.”

Ever since, the league has been used to highlight McMahon’s hubris and further the idea that outside of his professional wrestling/sports entertainment niche, he’s actually a poor businessman.

Having inherited what was then the WWWF from his father, Vincent J. McMahon, Vincent K. McMahon has done everything he can to make his wrestling company as little like a wrestling company as possible. WrestleMania, the annual WWE extravaganza, was initially promoted on MTV and featured appearances from Mr. T, Muhammad Ali, Cyndi Lauper and many other celebrities. 

This spirit is best encapsulated by the line McMahon reportedly used when speaking to Ted Turner, who had just bought World Championship Wrestling (WCW) in 1988. Ted told him that he had entered the wrestling business, to which Vince replied “That’s great, Ted. I’m in the entertainment business.”

But Vince’s forays into the entertainment business outside of wrestling have yet to pan out. The World Bodybuilding Federation (WBF) lasted only three years in the early 90s; the WWE Music Group record label only releases compilations of wrestling themes; WWE Studios make direct-to-video movies with wrestlers and, notably, stopped working with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson after he started to receive mainstream attention and the WWE Network, a streaming service designed to rival Netflix and Hulu, has repeatedly underperformed, famously tanking the WWE stock by 50% in 2014 when it was revealed to have less than 700,000 subscribers in the run up to that year’s WrestleMania.

All of those are small failures in comparison to the mass public humiliation of the XFL, so why bring it back? And why bring it back twenty years later?

Speaking to ESPN, McMahon said that he “wanted to do this since the day we stopped the other one,” but, tellingly, when talking about what is different this time, he specified that the new XFL will be solely funded by him: “[This] would allow me to look in the mirror and say, ‘You were the one who screwed this up,’ or ‘You made this thing a success.’”

But what is different this time is reflected in the new logo. The original, a stark red XFL in front of a big black X, has been reimagined with a red, white and blue color theme, suggesting a new all-American aesthetic – an idea backed up by McMahon’s opening statement from the announcement on Thursday: “We’re going to give the game of football back to fans.”

In 2017, the NFL went through an historic period of unpopularity. According to Nielsen, the league’s ratings have declined almost 20% in the space of two seasons and everyone is looking for an excuse. While it is clear that the quality of games in the league has been dropping for quite some time, many affiliated with the league have turned a blind eye to the problems with the game and are using ex-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick as a scapegoat for why viewers are turning away.

In the 2016 NFL season, Kaepernick refused to stand for the American national anthem and explained that he was not going “to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.”

It took for Kaepernick to be released from the 49ers, becoming an unsigned free agent, for this to take off with other players in the league, but as it did, it caused heated debates across the country eventually leading to US President Donald Trump saying that players should be fired for kneeling as their protests are “a total disrespect to our heritage.”

This is crucial for the XFL. Also when speaking to ESPN, McMahon said, “People don’t want social or political issues coming into play when they’re trying to be entertained. We want someone who wants to take a knee to do that version of that on their personal time.”

While this may seem simple enough, McMahon – a committed Trump supporter whose wife, Linda McMahon, is the head of President Trump’s Small Business Administration – doubled down on the implied sentiments, saying, “Here are the rules, as long as you are playing football for us, you follow these rules” and, when asked about who would be eligible for the XFL, “If you have any sort of criminal record or commit a crime you aren’t playing in this league.”

With the promise of faster, less complicated games and a top down ban on player expression, the XFL is poised to be the football game for Trump’s America in all the ways that the NFL is not.