A Whole New X Game: Inside the XGL Winter League

In 2026, X Games went league mode, inspired in part by Formula 1, now tying the whole calendar into one season-long chase.

XGL Summer delivered. Massively, I’d say. Come January, the winter edition takes over with points up for grabs from Aspen to Finland. Once again, athletes are chasing their own glory while four regional clubs have skin in the game after backing them at the draft. 

The big question left for January is whether fans really bought into the league idea, and if they’ll show up again in the same kind of numbers. With that in mind, here’s everything you need to know about XGL Winter 2027 and how the new setup works.

XGL Winter 2027 schedule, teams and format

June 26 marked the start of the inaugural XGL Summer season, and with it, a new format. Instead of treating each stop as a standalone event, what’s now called XGL, the X Games League, had athletes competing across a full season, picking up points round by round. Sacramento drew a field of nearly 100, 40 of them representing four city-based teams across Skateboard and BMX. Moto X, at least in the last edition, remained a standalone competition.

Another new addition to the card was Scooter Park Best Trick in New Orleans, where Jack Ward dramatically took the win with a backflip double front scooter flip.

After a strong showing on the summer sports calendar, XGL turns to snow next as the inaugural winter season gets rolling January 29th, with three stops on the schedule.

• Aspen, Colorado. January 29th to 31st
• Calgary, Alberta. February 19th to 21st
• Ruka, Finland (Championship Event). April 9th to 11th

On September 16th, X Games held its first winter draft at Cosm Los Angeles, where four clubs picked 40 names from a pool of more than 180 skiers and snowboarders. XC Golden State opened proceedings by taking Eileen Gu at No. 1, before Mark McMorris went second overall.

Come winter, it’s Ski and Snowboard taking over, each contested across four disciplines in Aspen, Calgary and Ruka:

1. SuperPipe, where riders link tricks through a large halfpipe
2. Big Air, built around one major jump and the best trick they can put down
3. Slopestyle, a full course of rails, jumps and features
4. Knuckle Huck, rewarding creativity and technical tricks off the jump knuckle

The X Games League Winter system, explained

In XGL Winter, athletes are still chasing individual event wins, but every result also counts toward the season-long club championship. As explained earlier, each side fields 10 athletes, though, according to X Games, they could also face undrafted riders invited as free agents.

What I haven’t been able to find is an official breakdown of the points scale. Going by the summer setup, though, you’d expect something along these lines:

Organizers have yet to release the official points system for XGL winter but you can imagine it will be similar to the summer structure. Here’s the structure that was used for XGL Summer:

• 1st place — 100 points
• 2nd place — 80 points
• 3rd place — 60 points
• 4th place — 40 points
• 5th place — 30 points
• 6th place — 20 points
• 7th place and below — 0 points

Keep in mind these are the points that an individual scores for their team. One important rule is that should two or more athletes from one club score in a single event, only the best finish goes toward the team total.

This is not official, and we’ll have to wait for the official guidelines from XGL.

Can you bet on the XGL Winter? 

Yes, back in January, X Games named Stake as XGL’s exclusive online casino and sportsbook partner. The operator was all over the Summer edition, both in terms of betting markets and, through affiliated platform Kick, going head-to-head with sports streaming services such as YouTube and Roku.

I do expect several other sports betting sites to post XGL Winter odds. ALT Sports Data holds the official X Games betting-data rights, and its operator network includes DraftKings, bet365, BetMGM, Caesars, FanDuel, Fanatics and Hard Rock Bet, meaning all of them could be in the running. Nothing has been confirmed at this point.

The XGL Winter favorites

On paper, XC New York and XC Golden State look like the two teams to beat. Mark McMorris and Mia Brookes won the men’s and women’s Snowboard Slopestyle titles last time out. Alongside them, New York also has Finley Melville Ives, Red Gerard and Kirsty Muir, all recent X Games winners.

Here are three other XGL Winter athletes to watch: 

• Eileen Gu: XC Golden State picked her first overall after she left the 2026 Olympics with halfpipe gold plus silvers in both slopestyle and big air, about as strong a case as you can make for one athlete covering three scoring events.
• Cocomo Murase: Arguably the most explosive Big Air rider in the women’s field. At Aspen 2026, Murase became the first female rider to land a backside triple cork 1620 in competition.
• Alex Hall: He brings similar versatility on skis, coming off a Knuckle Huck win and Slopestyle podium while remaining capable of entering several different disciplines.

Will the new XGL format work?

If XGL Summer is anything to go by, the new format has every chance of working. American TV reach hit 18.3 million, up 78.5% from 2025, while 7.5 million viewers came back for more than one stop. I’m not giving the league setup all the credit here. X Games CEO Jeremy Bloom also pointed to distribution, promotion, athlete lineups, and favorable broadcast windows.

The final stop, New Orleans, ended up the highest-rated of the season. That tells you interest grew into the championship rather than flattening out after the opener, a pretty good sign that fans bought into the league idea.