In 2018, WWE owner Vince McMahon decided to take a shot at the NFL by announcing the return of the XFL, a failed venture from 2001 that only lasted one season.

At the time, fans were skeptical about the announcement, but one football fan in particular, Jacksonville Jaguars owner Tony Khan, looked at the idea objectively, noting that while the NFL didn't need a number two to compete with it, WWE did, which helped to influence the start of AEW, as he noted on Leap Academy.

“In 2018, the McMahon family announced they were going to relaunch the XFL. That probably also had an effect on my thinking because that sounded like a terrible idea to me. The amount of money they were going to put into it, when the NFL is such a dominant competitor and the NFL is so strong, and I was proven right because the XFL did go bankrupt, I thought, ‘That's not going to work,'” Khan explained via Fightful.

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“You know what would work? A second wrestling league. There are way more wrestlers out there to start a second wrestling league. If I built a challenger wrestler league, the roster of that league would be so much better, comparatively, than the roster of the XFL. It wouldn't even be close. As a viewer of the sport, as somebody who loves football and wrestling, wrestling needs a second league a lot more than football does. I think we were proven true of that.”

While the XFL has produced a few quality NFL players, including Cowboys returner KaVontae Turpin, Khan's assertion remains largely correct, with the talent split between WWE and AEW almost non-existent. If anything, some might actually argue that AEW has built a better roster than WWE because of their desire to showcase the best in-ring wrestling in the world, as opposed to Paul “Triple H” Levesque's more character-focused approach.

Fast forward to 2025, and WWE, AEW, and the XFL are all going strong, even if McMahon is no longer involved with any of the ventures. While few expect to see XFL stars in the NFL, WWE has repeatedly poached AEW stars over the past few years, so in the end, Khan's assertion was right.