Update, 4/13/20: On Monday, April 13, the XFL officially declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, as first reported by Eriq Gardner of the Hollywood Reporter. According to TMZ Sports, the XFL estimates it lost “tens of millions of dollars” in revenue due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Original: 

And just like that, the D.C. Defenders are gone as quickly as they came.

On Friday morning, just months after the start of the XFL’s premiere season, the nascent alternate football league suspended operations, laying off nearly all employees with no plans to return. The news was first reported by ESPN.

The league had already cancelled the remainder  of its first season last month amid the coronavirus pandemic, but planned to resume play in 2021.

According to ESPN, XFL CEO Jeffrey Pollack stopped short of explicitly stating the league was going out of business, but based on elegiac reactions on Twitter from employees and fans, the announcement rang like a death knell. When DCist attempted to reach out to D.C. Defenders president Eric Moses over email, the message was met with an error: that inbox doesn’t exist anymore. Even the Defender’s general contact email replied with a failure to deliver. The team, and all XFL franchises, appear to have been wiped from existence.

According to Mark Perry, founder of XFL News Hub, a source told him this afternoon that the lay off announcement came in a brief phone call from Pollack that lasted about ten minutes. All XFL employees, sans a few “key personnel” who will continue working at the Connecticut headquarters, are now unemployed.

“It sounds like they just cut everybody loose because they don’t know [what’s coming],” says Perry, who is based in Maryland. “They didn’t say we’re closed for business, they’re just laying off employees and suspending operations, because it would be silly for them to pay everybody and then realize in 2021 if you still can’t congregate in big crowds, that they won’t have a season.”

The XFL’s premiere season had only just started at the beginning of this year, with the D.C. Defenders kicking off at Audi Field on February 8.

The potentially short and now-disrupted life-span of the XFL follows a history of failed attempts for alternate football leagues. The XFL launched originally in 2001 (without a D.C. team) as a professional-wrestling-meets-football mashup, but folded after its over-the-top theatrics drew more mocking in the media than true fans. And in late 2019, the Arena Football League, home of the Washington Valor, went bankrupt after years of legal and financial hardship.

What the D.C. Defenders hoped to bring to the area’s alternate football scene—fan-focused programming, affordable tickets, and fast-paced games—may only now be a blip in D.C. sports history. Had the coronavirus not shut down the city, the Defenders would have been entering week 10, the final week of regular-season play, this week.

This story has been corrected to refer to the XFL as an alternate football league.