It looks like Dwyane “The Rock” Johnson is coming back to the sports world in a unique way. Johnson and his business partner, Dany Garcia, partnered with Gerry Cardinale‘s RedBird Capital to purchase the XFL for $15 million this week.
“The acquisition of the XFL with my talented partners, Dany Garcia and Gerry Cardinale, is an investment for me that’s rooted deeply in two things – my passion for the game and my desire to always take care of the fans,” Johnson stated in a press release. “With pride and gratitude for all that I’ve built with my own two hands, I plan to apply these callouses to the XFL, and look forward to creating something special for the players, fans, and everyone involved for the love of football.”
The XFL is a professional football league consisting of eight teams divided equally between an East and West division. The league was founded in 2018 and began play in 2020. With this investment, they plan to start a new season in 2021.
“We’re planning for it,” said Garcia, the first female owner of a major American sports league. “We’re doing all the steps that need to happen for the execution of that. But we’re also being mindful to what has actually been successful. It has been really interesting to see that [in sports], when you create a bubble, your players are safe. When you don’t, it’s chaos. We are a league, because of the number of teams we have, that actually can create a bubble environment. Those discussions are active.”
This is a major turn around for the organization as they recently filed for bankruptcy due to the coronavirus pandemic. After its first season in 2001, the league relaunched in 2020 and experienced success initially but operations came to a halt after five weeks.
Both Garcia and Johnson will have a hands on rolls when it comes to the management of the team. A new management team is in consideration after most of them were laid off on April 10.
Since the threat of bankruptcy the organization lost some players who signed over to the NFL. Those who remain still have a spot in the league as they rebuild the whole organization. “There are a lot of excellent people in that team,” Garcia said. “While it’s not 100% just turning the lights on, there is still a tremendous amount of infrastructure and relationships that you can actually call people back, pull people back. We saw the work that they were doing for this year, and there was some excellent, excellent work. There is a team there.”