Looking for a factual answer, so please don’t move it to the Games thread.
Pro team players today come from all over the country, and for some from all over the world. Back when, say, the NBA or NFL were in their infancy, were the teams made up of local ball players, or were they recruited from other areas even way back then?
The NBA had Territorial Picks in the draft up until 1966. They got to pick a player from their local area.
Not US sports, but the Celtic (Glasgow) team that won the 1967 European Cup known as the “Lisbon Lions” (because the final took place in Lisbon) were all born within 10 miles of Celtic’s stadium, except for one player who was born 30 miles away.
When the Major Indoor Soccer League was formed in the 1970s one of the rules was that teams had to have at least 10 Americans on their 14-player roster. Some of the franchises, notably Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and St. Louis, were stocked primarily (but not completely) with local players.
When the WHA started in 1972, the Minnesota Fighting Saints had 11 local or American born players. At the time American players (and Europeans) were rare in the more established NHL.
Looking through the roster of the 1974-75 Quebec Nordiques of the WHA only two players (Hoganson and Jordan) were not born in the province of Quebec
The NSWRL had residential rules for many decades, every player had to live in the district of his club, which was essentially a few suburbs within the confines of Sydney.
It depends on your definition of pro and local (and whether you restrict it to US sports teams). In the English soccer (football) system you’re going to find semi-pro teams at lower levels who play for beer money and all live in the same town; but these teams compete in nationwide tournaments that could in theory see them facing off against the top teams in the land, stocked with millionaire non-English players.
In the early, disorganized days of professional baseball, I suspect teams consisted mostly of locals (because there was no money or incentive to find and pay players from far and yon); but no cite.
In the early days of the NFL, Red Grange (whose high school years were spent in Illinois) played mostly for the Chicago Bears, but he also played for the New York “Yankees” (not the baseball team).
So…depends?
I was primarily thinking of the US professional sports leagues. My wife posited the question to me after commenting on how one of the teams’ squads playing an NBA game the other night seemed to have nearly all players from other countries. Not their entire roster, but the five that were on the floor at the time. I remember a time when you rarely saw any foreign players in the NBA, but it seems like they’ve always selected players from around the country. Pro baseball may be one of the few that had teams comprised mostly of locals, but that’s just a guess.
I was looking thru some baseball players in the 1870s. It doesn’t really seem to be the case, if a player’s birthplace in any indication of his being local. I was a little surprised by this and perhaps further research would show this to be so. The vast majority of players were from the northeast and Midwest which is where the teams were.
Back in the day (up until the early 60s), low level minor league baseball teams were primarily local players. This was back when we didn’t have AAA, AA and A leagues, but A B C D leagues. If local guys made good, they’d move up and be not so local.
They were almost certainly semi-pro in the early years at best. That is they had other jobs to support them, and the leagues themselves represented much smaller geographic areas.
Certainly in the very early days of the NFL (and the other pro football teams and leagues which were around in the early part of the 20th century), teams were primarily made up of local players, and were often sponsored by local businesses. There were pro, and semi-pro, teams playing all over the country, and there were a number of leagues back then. What makes the NFL noteworthy is that it’s the one that survived, and thrived.
The Packers started out in 1919, and were sponsored by a meat-packing company where the founder, Curly Lambeau, worked. It’s hard to find good information on the players on their rosters in the early years, but Lambeau himself was from Green Bay, and it looks like many of the players on that first roster were from the area. In their first two seasons (before they joined what would become the NFL, for 1921), they played teams from other towns in Wisconsin and Upper Michigan, many of which were also likely made up of players from those towns.
Similarly, the Bears started out as the Decatur Staleys (sponsored by the Staley Starch Company), and the Cardinals started out as a neighborhood club team in Chicago.
What’s important to remember is that there was very little money in the league in those years – the players all undoubtedly were working at other full-time jobs, and playing football was a (not terribly lucrative) side thing for nearly all of them. In those early years, there were a small number of players who made big splashes when they were recruited to play pro football, and saw bidding wars to sign them, like Ernie Nevers, Johnny “Blood” McNally, and Red Grange, and who got (comparatively) big contracts, but they were the exceptions to the rule.
Atletico Bilbao only signs Basque players.
I agree that a lot depends on your definition of “pro.”
The NFL evolved out of Midwestern industrial football leagues. In those leagues, players were (originally) workers in a local business who played football on the side for a team sponsored by the business.
There was money paid to some star players, so if you want to call those “professional” teams… well, most of the players were locals. But successful teams often had ringers- top notch athletes willing to travel and happy to play for any team willing to pay.
Sports have never been wholly pure or honest.
They were before bloggers started bothering Murray Chass!
This. Every sizeable town had at least a semipro team, and the pay wasn’t enough to draw outsiders. Class D minor leagues were regional, and higher leagues drew from a wider area.
This ended as MLB teams developed farm systems starting in the 1940s.
To elaborate: the Chicago Bears today are a wholly professional football team with a roster of highly paid mercenaries from Florida State, Alabama, UCLA, Notre Dame, Clemson, Texas A & M, Ohio State, Nebraska, you name it.
But a little more than a century ago, the Bears were an industrial league team. They were started by employees of the Staley corn processing plant in Decatur, Illinois. The Staley team eventually became SO good and SO dominant, they joined the newly formed NFL in 1920. In fact, the Decatur Staleys (the future Chicago Bears) were the first team to win the NFL championship.
As I said, the earliest rosters of the Staley team consisted of local factory workers. But as the team got better and more competitive, management started paying football stars from surrounding areas to play for them. Eventually, management hired George Halas to coach the football team, and abandoned any pretense that the Staleys were just local boys playing for pride and fun.
Was there one exact, magical moment when the Staleys stopped being a team of locals and became a team of hired guns from all over the country? Probably not. It happened gradually.
Some interesting stuff, folks. Thanks.
Factual information can still be obtained in the Game Room. Allocation of threads to some forums, including the Game Room and Cafe Society, is by subject matter, not whether they are factual or not. (Threads might stay in GQ if they were primarily about some other subject, such as the physics involved in throwing a curve ball, or the odds of particular hands in poker.)
Since this is about sports teams, let’s move it over to the Game Room.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I grew up in Ottawa, Canada, in the 1970s and at that time I think that that was the case. Ottawa’s professional football team at the time was the Ottawa Roughriders and one of their star players, Russ Jackson, was also the vice-principal of a local high school.
According to the Wikipedia article on Jackson: “Many consider him one of the best Canadian-born players to play in the CFL, while most consider him to be the best Canadian to play the quarterback position.”
One afternoon a friend of mine and I were watching the Sir John A MacDonald high school football team practicing. Just a few yards away their vice-principal, Russ Jackson, was watching the practice as an interested bystander.