USFL officials say first weekend of new season went smoothly, working out kinks to improve fan experience

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WBRC) - Thousands of fans filed into Protective Stadium over the weekend to watch our Birmingham Stallions as the USFL returned for it’s second season.

We don’t have exact attendance numbers yet, but USFL officials said the crowd was a similar size to last year’s opening weekend, which was about 17,000 fans.

“Obviously, you’re not going to be your best in week one,” USFL President Daryl Johnston said. “But, it was a good start. I was happy with the way everything went.”

Johnston said night one of the second season was a good start, but they’re working to make improvements to make getting to your seat, easier.

“I did hear one thing we had a challenge with was getting in on time,” Johnston said. “The one thing you don’t want to do is miss kickoff. I think one of the biggest things is understanding the entry points for our fans coming in. There’s cashless entry points, cashless locations, then there’s places that will accept cash. For us maybe, doing a better job of getting that out to our fan base.”

“The most important thing to us is the quality of football,” Johnston said. “I thought that was good. We had some situations with our communications. The equipment we are using for the quarterbacks to be able to talk to the coaches on the sideline and for the booth to be able to have contact with the sideline, but we got better Sunday afternoon than we were Saturday night.”

President Daryl Johnston said they didn’t hear many complaints about lines for concessions or restrooms, but did hear of parking problems.

“We were erring on the side of having too much staff, as opposed to not enough,” he said. “Parking is always a little bit challenging down here and when we have bigger crowds, it’s going to be a little bit harder, so those first couple of games we would ask for some patience. Also, to get there a little bit early.”

“The North East corner always seems to bog down a little bit,” he said.

While he doesn’t have exact attendance numbers, he said they were able to sell tickets on the home and visitors side.

“It looked good in person,” he said. “Obviously, we have some seat kills out, and we have some people who like to watch from the endzone area, but until we start to get full house on the sides, then we can start thinking about opening up the endzones for people that love that vantage point. On the press box side, the home side, it was really really full. Even the visitors side, on that sideline, was filled in close to the home side.”

Johnston said fans at home also had a good view, with 4% more viewers than last year’s season opener.

“We were almost a million viewers more than our competition during the course of the weekend, across our four games, compared to across their four games,” Johnston said.

Johnston said attendance was better for Birmingham’s Saturday night game than Sunday night’s New Orleans Breakers game, but he said that is to be expected, adding there were more fans on Sunday than they originally anticipated.

Get news alerts in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store or subscribe to our email newsletter here.