It looks like the XFL saga is officially over for Vince McMahon. According to ESPN, Vince McMahon said he won’t attempt to buy his former property for “pennies on the dollar.”
Since filing bankruptcy on April 13 due to the coronavirus pandemic, citing the unforeseeable McMahon laid off most of the league’s staff. As we reported previously, it came as a surprise to many as McMahon had stated the players and other employees would be paid for the entire season. Instead, they were cut lose without much of a warning and the filing followed three days later.
Rumors of buy back
Over the last week, rumors have circulated that McMahon intended to buy back the XFL now that the debts have been cleared. While these were based on claims made by the court’s committee of unsecured creditors following McMahon putting the league up for sale, often where there’s smoke there’s fire.
In fact, in recent court filings, McMahon said he had no intention of doing that, calling the claims “inflammatory” and “unsubstantiated.” The problem here is he also said he’d been thinking of doing just that, but these reports changed his mind.
In other words, he decided against doing so when the public learned of this possibility. He’s taken a lot of heat publicly, rightly or wrongly, for his business practices and this could’ve been a PR nightmare.
According to ESPN, in a deposition that was footnoted in Tuesday’s filing, he said, “I don’t know why that’s out there, making me out to be the bad guy, [that] I’m going to buy the XFL back for pennies on the dollar, basically. That helped me move into the direction of, ‘I’m not going to be a bidder, not going to have anything to do with it.’ I do hope that someone will pay a lot of money for it, and I do hope that it will survive.”
His attorneys noted that he had put at least $200 million of his own money into the league. In fact, he sold some of his WWE shares to help pay for this according to reports.
They also painted the committee as the “bad guys” for chasing away a potential “significant bidder for the debtor’s assets.”
The league may appear again
The XFl hired the Houlihan Lokey brokerage firm to handle the sale, and the firm has said 20 potential buyers have singed a non-disclosure agreement so they could have access to confidential company data. An additional six are expected to join that group There is a belief that there is a market for the league, which isn’t surprising after how well the league performed before being shut down.
If everything works out, we could see the XFL back in action in 2021. The league is a needed asset as not just an alternative to the NFL, but a place where players that slipped through the cracks due to injury or the numbers game can showcase their skills to give themselves a second chance.
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