I mean, as it is, this is true anyway. If you’re a football fan in Montana you are rather a long way from any NFL team. A fan in Mobile is not within a reasonable driving distance of any MLB or NHL team and it’s a solid couple of hours to the NBA and NFL in New Orleans. Fans in Little Rock are in exactly the same boat with the 2-hour-away city being Memphis. Albuquerque, which is not a small town, is not withindriving distance of any major pro sports team; Phoenix is six hours away. Albuquerque could in theory have a team sneak into the upper league in a pro/rel system but their fate will be much the same as teams like, I dunno, Bournemouth, drifting from the top of AAA to the bottom of MLB and back again.
Team allegiance in North American sports is very regional, because the distance is so vast. Even if you don’t count Canada, a major league team covers an average of 20-30 times the area that a top tier European soccer club does, and far more people; if you include Canada the numbers go up.
It makes a huge difference to many, many people. A hockey fan two hours from her favorite team is much less likely to see X number of games that a fan of similar interest levels who’s a 15-minute subway ride away. To the team, a fan who shows up 20 times a year is hugely different from one who shows up twice a year.
I mean, I’m a huge Blue Jays fan, and my proximity to them over the years has been obviously and clearly proportional to how often I went. When I lived 2.5 hours away I saw two games a year. When I lived in Toronto, I saw 20. Travel had a big impact on fan behaviour and a team’s drawing potential.
Perhaps, but down South here I know Braves fans from Mississippi and South Carolina who are much farther away than Mobile to New Orleans. Big time Atlanta United fans who attended their first games 3 years after the team started. There are a lot of fans who just don’t attend their home team’s games but are content to watch them on TV. They feel connected to them because they represent their region.
When I lived in South Jersey, it was almost 2 hours (inc traffic) to see the Yankees or Mets, but there were tons of fans of both teams there.
I’m a Falcons fan, but I may have seen them live all of 2 times in the 18 years I’ve lived in Atlanta.
Team allegiance is regional in U.S. sports because the existing cartels allow no entries from anywhere other than from where they’ve decided to expand the cartel.
And big countries can manage pro/rel, too. Below a certain level, you just have multiple, geographically more concise divisions/leagues. The size argument has never held water.
We are the way we are because a century ago wealthy individuals decided that professional sports were going to be profit-driven enterprises and they weren’t going to adopt more community-friendly structures because those threatened their profits.
This does not explain why, say, college football fandom is so regional. The size of the US has resulted in regional loyalties and teams arise which are representatives for that region. People who live in South Georgia can root for Georgia Southern, but you’ll find those people tend to go to bat for UGA (heck even in Atlanta where Georgia Tech resides, UGA is the biggest rooting interest). Middle Tennessee fans can root for Vanderbilt, but they’ll tend to be University of Tennessee fans.
And US fans generally hold their nose up at ‘minor leagues’. They’d rather root for the big team in their region than the smaller team in their backyard - once again see college football/basketball allegiances.
I tend to prefer our leagues to European soccer ones, to be honest. Especially in terms of competitive parity.
It also hurts minor leagues that there are multiple major sports in the US, whereas in most European countries you have one, and the others (cricket, rugby, basketball or hockey depending) are clearly one a lower level.
You pays your money and you takes your choice. Realistically, parity is impossible without ring-fencing, and probably impossible without some sort of Europe-wide commitment. Look at it from the owners’ perspective - a meaningful salary cap, which takes away the big clubs’ financial advantage and leaves them just a few bad decisions away from mid-table mediocrity, if not outright relegation, is all risk with no gain. Plus, if one league tried a salary cap the next thing it would see would be its big-money stars heading over the border to the league that still offers the big Euros - which would then gain fans, income and prestige as the “biggest league in the world”.
For the big clubs it’s long since ceased to be about attracting supporters in their home regions, or even their home countries. It’s all about building a global brand - about selling merchandise and TV rights in Shanghai and Bangkok and Mumbai and Lagos and Los Angeles. To do that, you need silverware, you need glamour games against other big-brand teams and you need a team with international stars. (These days, fans, particularly overseas fans, are increasingly likely to follow stars rather than teams). All this takes money, maybe more than even the super-clubs can afford as they bid against each other for ever-more-expensive star players. But they can’t stop because stopping means surrendering in the global brand wars and becoming just another European football team. Hence the desperate search for more revenue and the way the Spanish sides, especially, seem to be prune-juicing themselves right into the financial emergency room.
The sweaty nightmare of both the big-club owners and the UEFA officials is that a mega-rich Asian consortium will establish the soccer equivalent of the IPL, or a coterie of billionaires will drop enough money into the US or Brazilian leagues to make them financially competitive with Europe. Then Europe might stop being the centre of the football universe and none of them want that.
The obvious counterplay is to get in first - to set up the de facto World League and grab a big enough share of global fandom and global revenue that no-one can ever get big enough to challenge you. Hence ESL - and why I don’t expect the idea of a European Super League to go away any time soon.
The National League may not be the best example for your purposes.
The NL, far from being a super-alliance of rich and powerful teams, struggled mightily during its early years. Four years after its formation, six of the original eight teams had folded. Franchises from places like Troy (N.Y.), Louisville and Providence came and went. It took quite awhile before teams were on a solid financial footing.
Billionaires paying millionaires to play, it was not.
You seem to be suggesting that a natural response to seeing your team relegated is to switch allegience to the nearest high-level team. That is completely alien to UK football fans, you just continue following at the lower level.
And of course with promotion/relegation there’d be nothing stopping any team from getting to the top level.
This is a cultural difference between Euro Sports and US major league sport.
In the EU and certainly in UK, you generally support your nearest team of your family background no matter what - if that team is relegated, you support them, if you change teams you will be derided as a ‘glory chaser’.
Certain large clubs seem to attract the ‘glory chasers’ and everyone else takes the piss out of them for that, so Manchester United fans are especially known for this, and it gives rise to much humour and joking
What happens to relegated teams is that fans may stay away, but they will not transfer allegiance and in some teams even that does not happen, support is maintained at pretty much the same level, attendance remains the same despite relegation - as happens especially to Leeds United and Newcastle United, Sunderland and several others.
For those teams that have never made it big, the fans do not transfer their allegiance, they stick with their small club and hope and wish - and that really is part of the passion of football - the idea that somehow you can meet a big team in a cup competition and take them down.
Winning when all is against you, in the UK that really does feed into our national mentality in a much wider sense.
It’s when you take into account that this is so much more than supporting a sports team, that it is about our national identity that you begin to understand the visceral reaction.
The point about the latter is that the architects of ESL and some globally wealthy owners are so divorced from the football supporters that they are taken aback, yet it is something so obvious to every football fan in Europe
So if your “family background” team is in EFL League 2 (say), you would be totally indifferent to who wins in the Premier League? That seems odd to a North American (who would be more likely to have favourites at each level of play).
For most European football fans, yes. For instance, I’ve been a supporter of Borussia Mönchengladbach since I was 8 years old (or even longer, as long as I remember actually), and in those 45 years, the club played two seasons in the second Bundesliga, and in these seasons I was much more focused on the second Bundesliga and Mönchengladbach’s effort there than on the first Bundesliga. I couldn’t have cared less who won the Bundesliga then as long as the Borussia made it back to the first division.
Sure, I still watched the first Bundesliga, but my focus was on the second Bundesliga where my club played. And I didn’t care much who won the championship in these years.
Our history of for-profit sports leagues sucked the life out of community -based leagues decades ago. To the point where we can see that most American fans are completely baffled by the entire concept.
We should have about a thousand Altoonas making up a national fifth tier and competing before small crowds every Saturday night.
Well, of course. But the concept is what matters here; it was the creation of a closed league meant to be exclusively made up of the most powerful franchises that would play the highest level baseball. And it certainly did work, right? In fact, it’s the model all the major pro sports league in the USA/Canada is based on.
That’s obviously not true when it comes to American football, though, is it? College and high school football is a local obsession - it’s often more locally popular than the NFL, and is watched in conjunction with it. Many, many fans will enthusiastically root for their high school on Friday, local college on Saturday, and the Cowboys on Sunday. I can also assure you that local hockey teams are often extremely successful in Canada.
Where local teams have been allowed to wither on the vine is baseball. Minor league and sub-minor league baseball was for a very long time a huge, huge deal in the USA but has been on a long, shallow downslope for decades.
As much as I love baseball, I see this as being just part of life. MLB is a badly run organization that has succeeded in spite of itself, and if in the long run the current professional setup falls apart, well, that’s just life; the market will decide.
I am of the belief that the ideal professional arrangement would be a mix of the North American and European systems.
If it were completely alien, attendance wouldn’t drop when teams dropped to the Championship, but indeed it does:
So obviously a considerable amount of fans stop caring as much. And this is especially true if those teams stay in the 2nd division (or go even further down), as one can see retention if fans at a better level if they feel the drop is only for one season.