Virgin territory for pro sports

Who wants a franchise so terribly mismanaged that it not only left Montreal, but also didn't want to pay rent for a brand-new ballpark - built specifically for that franchise - in another city?

Pass. And again, I couldn't care less about Major League Baseball.

 

Do you think we'll see contraction at any point?

For instance, the Rust Belt. How long do you think a city like Cleveland (which is bleeding population big time) can hold onto all three major franchises? I mean, if LeBron doesn't land in Cleveland and the Browns don't get a sweet deal from the NFL, it would be a one team town right now.

I'm sure you could more or less say the same things about the teams in Pittsburgh and Detroit. If the population is no longer there to support these franchises, why prop them up?

 

No.

The huge value in sports ownership comes from franchise value appreciation. That value appreciation can only exist if a potential buyer has an extremely (i.e. close to 100.0000 %) high likelihood of belief the franchise is going to continue to exist.

The last time a pro sports franchise went out of business in North American pro sports (NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL) was 1978, when Cleveland was contracted out of the NHL (technically, merged with the Minnesota North Stars). Before that, it was 1952, when the NFL Dallas Texans went under. There hasn't been a MLB franchise go out of business since 1900.

Any league which starts contracting franchises, the bubble of franchise appreciation bursts. Not only would the team involved go out of business, but all other franchises in the league would instantly take catastrophic drops in franchise market value (up to and probably more than 50% of value). The owners would instantly lose hundreds of millions of dollars in franchise value (billions, leaguewide). Plus, the market for potential expansion instantly disappears for a long, long time.

No established professional major sports league will ever contract franchises. If and when they do, it means the league itself is not long for the world (see the ABA and WHA).

 

I love how I'm more than 40 miles from the Louisville city limits and yet I'm still in one of the country's bigger MMAs. And to be in a metro area, I hardly ever go to it (unless I'm covering the Cards). Did drive through this summer to get to Holiday World, though.

Louisville really wants an NBA franchise and we'll have a great new arena for it in a few years in a redeveloped part of downtown (don't worry, Freedom Hall isn't going anywhere ... yet).

Minor-league baseball has always drawn well in Louisville - one year in the 80s or 90s, the Redbirds outdrew some MLB teams - and the new arena is supposed to mean a jump from af2 to the AFL.

 

And if you're doing demographics of an area, wouldn't you include Springfield-Western MA over the Heroin-antic? Springfield has a larger population base and is probably closer to the Hartbeat than Willi.

 

El Paso doesn't make this list?

 

Isn't El Paso all city, no suburb or something?

 

Isn't sand and scrub a big ol' suburb?

 

i thought this was a pre-15 milano thread.

 

Solid.

 

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2006 Anchorage had 278,700 residents. The state of Alaska had 670,053.

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/02/02020.html

You'd have to add 1.5 million people minimum to the Anchorage area, in my opinion, to get the NHL to even consider it for a franchise, even with all the oil money in Alaska.

 

To be fair, there were 25 cities in the U.S. with a population of more than 250,000. Now it's 71.