The Birmingham Stallions will have old and new rivals in the United Football League, which announced its eight franchises on Monday.

The USFL and XFL have merged into a single spring-football league, with the UFL name revealed on Sunday.

In Monday’s followup, the UFL announced it had retained four franchises from the USFL and four franchises from the XFL. The league will have two conferences – the USFL Conference and the XFL Conference – with teams assigned by their former leagues.

That puts Birmingham in the USFL Conference with the Houston Roughnecks, Memphis Showboats and Michigan Panthers.

The Roughnecks were an XFL franchise, but the USFL also had a team in Houston – the Gamblers – which was the two leagues’ only overlapping city. The United Football League announced the Gamblers franchise had been included in the merged league but also had been rebranded with the XFL nickname.

The XFL Conference includes the Arlington Renegades, D.C. Defenders, San Antonio Brahmas and St. Louis Battlehawks.

The UFL announced on Sunday that the league would kick off on March 30 with a game matching last season’s USFL champions, the Stallions, against last season’s XFL champions, the Renegades.

The location for the game has not been announced, and the league has not released its schedule. Each team will play a 10-game regular-season slate – twice against each of its conference rivals and once against each interconference opponent.

The Stallions’ 2023 season-ticket holders can renew through their account manager, and new season-tickets deposits for the 2024 season at Protective Stadium are on sale.

Skip Holtz will return for his third season as Birmingham’s coach, and former Alabama State wide receiver and coach Reggie Barlow will be back to lead the D.C. Defenders.

Two teams will have new head coaches. With Gamblers coach Curtis Johnson remaining in place to lead the UFL’s Houston franchise, former Roughnecks coach Wade Phillips will be in charge of the Brahmas in 2024. John DeFilippo moves from the New Orleans Breakers to take the reins for the Showboats.

The United Football League announced players will report for training camp on Feb. 24 in Arlington, Texas, which indicates the merged league is following the XFL format. The XFL had its teams based in the Arlington area for training and practice but played its games as true home-and-away contests in the represented cities.

For its first season in 2022, the USFL based its eight teams and played its entire regular-season schedule in Birmingham. In 2023, the USFL remained at eight teams but moved them into four hubs, with the Stallions and Breakers staying in Birmingham and two teams apiece based in Canton, Ohio; Detroit and Memphis.

Like the Breakers, neither Canton-based team – the New Jersey Generals and Pittsburgh Maulers – advanced to the new league from the USFL, which also lost the Detroit-based Philadelphia Stars. In addition to the Houston franchise, the XFL teams left out were the Orlando Guardians, Seattle Sea Dragons and Vegas Vipers.

The most recent iteration of the USFL began in 2022 with eight teams, based on the USFL of the 1980s. The original XFL appeared for one season in 2001, and the name returned in 2020. But that season was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic, leading to another XFL revival in 2023.

UFL games will be televised by ABC, ESPN, FOX and FOX Sports 1.

Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter at @AMarkG1.