During the 71-round XFL draft, general managers in the eight-team league filled their rosters with a combined 568 football players with varying levels of previous experience.
The XFL’s player pool is down to at least 567 after defensive end Corey Vereen, who starred at the University of Tennessee and has NFL and AAF experience, announced he will not be playing in the league because the salary is too low.
Quarterbacks are paid differently, but all other XFL players will make a base salary of $27,040 for the season with bonuses tacked on top of that for wins and being on an active game-day roster. According to ESPN, a player who is active for all 10 games and is on a team that goes 5-5 would earn $55,000 for the season.
Vereen, who was taken in the eighth round during phase three of the 2020 XFL draft by the Los Angeles Wildcats, is making more money as a software developer than he would have playing in the XFL.
The 24-year-old announced his decision to withdraw from the NFL via his agency. “The salary schedule did not come close to matching what was talked about rampantly throughout the XFL combine workouts and was discussed online by many different sources,” Logan Brown Sports said in a statement. “We wish the upstart league the best and would be open to the idea of playing when salaries reach an appropriate minimum.”
According to Vereen, other players are considering making a similar decision and dropping out of the XFL before the league kicks off its three-week training camp in January.
“How are you going to sit here and get all these people together and try to get the best talent for your league and pay them $27,000?” Vereen said. “I love the game. But I’m not going to be taken advantage of at the end of the day. I have an engineering degree. I’m a software developer. My current job makes more than that. I’m not doing that, unfortunately. It looked like a great opportunity.”
The XFL is set to begin play on February 8.
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