Sunday night, the Orlando Storm will take the field for their inaugural game in the United Football League, and if you listen closely, you can already hear the whispers.
Correction: There will be more than just whispers when the Storm kick off against the Columbus Aviators at Inter&Co Stadium (8 p.m., ESPN). There will be undisguised, unadulterated skepticism.
And rightfully so.
The cynics are saying, HERE WE GO AGAIN.
Another spring football league. Another Orlando team. Another rich guy throwing money at a start-up everybody assumes will eventually fold.
Except this time, that rich guy is Mike Repole.
If you follow Repole’s career, you know this is basically his business model: Find something people say can’t be done, fund it anyway and dare the world to laugh. They laughed when he went up against Gatorade and Powerade with Vitaminwater. They laughed again when he did it with BodyArmor. They laughed again when he became the NIL sugar daddy for a Rick Pitino-coached St. John’s basketball program that had been left for dead but just made the Sweet 16 for the first time in decades.
And now they’re laughing again.
And that’s exactly the way Repole likes it.
“I love to prove people wrong,” he says.
Repole isn’t just a co-owner of the United Football League. He’s one of the main believers — and, more importantly, one of the main investors. In the startup world, belief is nice, but money is what keeps the lights on. Spring football leagues don’t die because of bad football; they die because they run out of money.
Repole knows that. It’s why people around the league say this version of spring football feels different. The UFL isn’t a fly-by-night operation running on promises and crossed fingers. It has television deals with ESPN and Fox. It has major investors. It has a partnership model that spreads out the risk. And in Central Florida, it has a billionaire who didn’t just buy into the Orlando Storm; he moved his family and his parents to Orlando five years ago.
Repole relocated from Queens to Orlando and has made it clear he’s not just investing in a team; he’s investing in a city. He has already committed NIL money to UCF and has tried to talk school administrators into changing the name of the school to “University of Orlando.” He talks about Orlando not only as a serial entrepreneur, but as citizen who loves living in the City Beautiful.
“I’ll always be Mike from Queens, but I chose this city to raise my daughter, and this is where my parents live,” Repole says. “When I moved to Orlando, my friends just thought this is where Mickey and Minnie Mouse lived, but this city is so much bigger and better than just Disney. I want to help build this city’s sports landscape and help it thrive.
“We have the Magic here. We have UCF here. We have Orlando City. We have a women’s soccer team, the Pride, who have won a championship. Now we have the Orlando Storm. And, who knows, maybe it’s the Storm today, and an NHL or Major League Baseball team in the future.”
I love the fact that Repole isn’t just positioning this endeavor as another spring football story; he’s turning it into an Orlando sports story.
Because if you’ve lived here long enough, you’ve seen this movie before. The Continental Football League. The USFL. The XFL. The AAF. Teams have come and gone, leagues have launched and collapsed, and every time one of them fails, the narrative is always the same:
Orlando isn’t a big-league sports town.
But history says otherwise. For the most part, Orlando fans supported those spring leagues. They supported the Renegades, the Rage and the Apollos. In just about every case, the teams drew crowds, but the leagues ran out of money or patience or both.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Orlando didn’t fail spring football. Spring football failed Orlando.
That’s an important distinction, and it’s why Repole is doing everything possible to make sure this league actually succeeds. For instance, the Storm aren’t playing in the cavernous Camping World Stadium, where 20,000 fans look like 2,000. They’re playing at Orlando City’s Inter&Co Stadium, a 25,000-seat venue that potentially will sound loud and look full.
Hopefully, it will look —and this is important — major league.
Because that’s what Orlando wants to be.
This is a city that talks openly about landing a Major League Baseball team someday. It already has the NBA, MLS and a growing college sports presence. But if Orlando truly wants to prove itself as a major league sports town, it will support a team that’s not major league.
If Orlando fans show up at Storm games this spring, it sends a message. It says this isn’t a small-time market. It says this is a city that will support pro football — especially with the NFL’s Jaguars expected to announce this week that they will play the 2027 season in Orlando while Jacksonville renovates its stadium.
Mostly, it says this is a city that billionaire entrepreneurs like Mike Repole are smart to bet on.
And make no mistake, this is a bet.
Repole made a fortune challenging giants. Vitaminwater and BodyArmor went head-to-head with Gatorade. Most people would call that crazy. Repole called it another day at the office.
Spring football might be his biggest challenge yet. Not because people don’t like football, but because every other league has eventually collapsed under the weight of reality: travel costs, payroll, television ratings, attention spans and the simple fact that the NFL owns the sport’s calendar.
But Repole has never been interested in doing things the easy way.
If history tells us anything, it’s that betting against Mike Repole just because something sounds impossible is usually a bad idea.
People said you couldn’t challenge Gatorade.
People said St. John’s basketball was finished.
And people say spring football will never work.
Mike Repole hears all of that and sees opportunity in his adopted hometown.
We’re about to find out if he’s right again.
Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on social media @BianchiWrites and listen to my new radio show “Game On” every weekday from 3 to 6 p.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and 969TheGame.com/listen