Right. As @hogarth pointed out American fans have favorites at every level. And in multiple sports… What teams do you support may end up with 3-6 teams based on how many sports you follow. For me, I’m a fan of: Atlanta United, New York Mets, Atlanta Falcons, Atlanta Hawks, Rutgers Football & basketball.
US fans changing teams seems almost inmoral from a South American perspective, here we use to say:
You can change your political party
You can change your wife/husband
You can change your sexual orientation (on edit, this sounds pretty homophobic, should be ammended to “recognize your real orientation”? relics of an uglier era I guess)
You CANNOT change what team you root for.
I think the difference in Europe is that you don’t have a favorite team per league, but per sport. In Germany, the three top league sports are football (the biggest by a WIDE margin), handball and (ice-)hockey, so my favorite clubs are Borussia Mönchengladbach (football), VFL Gummersbach (handball) and Iserlohn Roosters (hockey). But they are my favorite teams in the respective division they play at the time, and in the leagues they don’t play I have no favorites.
ETA: also, my loyalty to Gummersbach and Iserlohn is much weaker than to Borussia, because football is much more important than handball or hockey.
Exactly. When I hear someone say that they were a fan of club X, but changed it to club Y because of whatever, I just roll my eyes and cannot take such a person as a serious fan. It’s unthinkable.
ETA: the loyalty to a club is also stronger than to a religion. I’ve changed my religion in my life, but I will always be a fan of Borussia Mönchengladbach.
Yeah I forgot to add “You can change your religion” to the list 
The football ‘product’ in Europe and many other parts of the world is cultural and extremely passion driven, and this is precisely what makes it marketable in other parts of the world - those big games really would mean nothing without the fans, the intense rivalries, the cultural identities.
The problem seems to me that the mega billionaire owners are trying to make money selling a product whose existence depends upon such cultural markers, and from a distance the games seem exciting.
For those potential markets in other nations with a completely different set of values in sport, all you have are fans who are simply choosing a club much like they might select items in a supermarket, the disappointments and defeats - the lows and the highs just do not register in the same way.
Some of these club identities transcend the sport in fundamental ways, they can be nationalistic, regional, they express differences that may have been suppressed in wars or reflect religious divides - they can reflect huge political differences.
I do think that concentrating wealth into fewer clubs damages the whole of the game, every club should have a right to dream and also to suffer the pain - but the current set up encourages certain clubs to try insulate themselves of one half of the experience - they are chasing jam today - but jam every single day does not taste so sweet as when it is hard to come by.
Good and succinct post, casdave! To get back on the religious angle, the team you root for and the sport you love is kind of an ersatz religion for many fans (not for me, btw.). I was surprised (and a bit shocked) to learn here at this board that in the US, you regularly get asked by your colleagues or even strangers which church you go to. I’ve never been asked that question my whole life, but I’ve been asked hundreds of times what football club I root for. It’s one of the most frequent questions to start small talk and getting to know a person.
Some may stop going but they don’t switch clubs, that is pretty much unthinkable.
The idea that the NL’s founding franchises were “the most powerful” teams in existence at the time is…dubious.
One could also claim that all preceding or later-formed professional baseball leagues (the National Association, American Association, Players’ League, Union Association, Federal League, Mexican League etc.) were “exclusive” or “closed” organizations on a par with the ill-fated Euro Super League, since they didn’t have a regular exchange of teams with minor leagues.
Given the economic and other factors cited earlier in relation to the NL but affecting other professional baseball leagues as well, it seems like a major stretch.
This is true of sports fandom anywhere, though. There is no point to it without that; objectively, being a fan of any team for any reason must only be an act of passion.
I’m sorry but the point is still being missed, which is likely my fault. There were no powerful franchises at all in 1876 (in any sport, really); the point was to CREATE that, to create a single closed loop league to amass riches and elite players, in part by excluding non-members. Everything about North American pro sport organization is descended from that.
It was not necessarily the case that it had to be that way. After all, Negro League baseball was largely a capitalistic free-for-all for most of its existence, in many ways more similar to European football that it was to MLB.
Because they turned into farm teams for the MLB. Give them independence and maybe they become big again. Or maybe TV has killed that possibility.
Probably some of both.
TV killed that possibility decades ago. In 1949 there were 59 minor leagues. The Pacific Coast League was trying to position itself as a third major league. In 1961-62 the AA Southern Association and even the AAA American Association collapsed.
Wikipedia lists eight independent professional baseball leagues and 30 that started and died since 1993. including eight that lasted one season or less.
Philip Rivers was a significantly better QB than Eli.
If you want competitive football, its probably not worth watching the top leagues in most EU nations - the winners of the national leagues tend to be concentrated into a small number of teams, La Ligue is probably the worst in that sense, however it is closely followed by the Bundesliga.
https://howtheyplay.com/team-sports/The-Most-Competitive-Football-Leagues-in-Europe
Its not just who wins, its also who comes close, so it would be good to see a chart of the top 3 clubs in each league for each year - but you can see this effect in the Champions League where you see the same teams from the same nations over again.
The idea that a European League will refresh competition across the top Euro clubs is a mirage - all that would do is to create another layer of two or three club dominance, it would take a little time to settle down, but you’d find the same suspects with their cash sat there all the time and likely fewer of them.
The Premier League has distilled into the top few teams and there is less diversity among the teams up there, in the years since it was created there have been just 7 different winners, in the previous 28 years there were 10 - so the number of winners is steadily narrowing, that’s partly the effect of the Premier League but also the effect of the cash from the Champions League.
In Scotland the situation is even more stark, just two teams have been exchanging the title for the last 20 years, and in the same time the standard of play has declined markedly, with fewer Scottish players being picked up by clubs elsewhere in the EU. This can be laid squarely at the concentration of wealth in those two clubs, whose finances are precarious, and for Rangers are absolutely dire.
It seems an oxymoron, but the more money a club seems to get, the more fragile their balance sheet, the more money they need to maintain their position, the more they need to spend on players, the worse their finances become - it really is a circle of greed and addiction to money.
This leads to the situation in Spain, La Liga is just not worth watching, two club at the top for decades, the Spanish League is merely a rubber stamp for Real and Barca to qualify for Champions league where they can make the cash, so its no surprise that the architects of the Euro Premier League have come from there.
The money chase has become the object, the titles are just a means to that end.
If the EPL had been implemented it would only be a matter of time before the costs would again outstrip income and some football greed architect would be proposing a World Premier League to try concentrate the cash into even fewer clubs - and that would come at the cost of severely damaging the World Cup - unless there was a creation of permanent National teams in a perpetual World Nations League.
To me the problem of the EPL is the problem that faces all the top flight teams, too much money chasing too few players, outgoings exceeding income - its been going on for years, we need salary caps, we need a wider spread of wealth and very little has been done about the direction of movement.
I don’t know how long the current set up can continue - more money will not solve club finance, and it won’t improve competition, the evidence is there, you get more unpredictability and more competition in lower tier football, its a far more interesting and challenging ride for the fans - surely that is what football is all about.
I know people who follow the Championship primarily because of the competitiveness of the league and the annual churn which is a big factor in it. That’s not very easy to do here in the states, though.
The PCL was killed more by jet engines than TV. The arrival of safe, reliable airline travel is what made the transfer of MLB teams to the West Coast a possibility; in the days of teams travelling by train, continental baseball wasn’t a realistic possibility, since baseball teams play more or less every day. Once the Dodgers and Giants arrived in California, the PCL was doomed in its old form.
So was Dan Marino 
This is IMO the most screwed up thing in sports. Minor league baseball teams aren’t actually competing for pennants, they’re just training grounds for the majors. If Pawtucket is in the playoffs and Boston thinks they need to call up their three best players just in case someone gets injured, Pawtucket is just SOL. Pawtucket fans can’t hope to improve by making smart front office moves, because their front office is run by and for the benefit of Boston.
Minor league baseball does OK financially marketing itself as cheap, wholesome family entertainment. People go to the games, try to catch a t-shirt and have a good time. But nobody is dumb enough to actually CARE about those teams in the way that people care about college or even high school teams.
If major league teams couldn’t own minor league teams, minor league baseball still wouldn’t be “big”. Like the fourth division in European soccer, nobody outside their immediate area is going to care about those teams and their basic business model is likely going to have to rely on grooming players to sell to bigger teams. But at least the people in those towns would have a real team to root for, and the team would be selling those players on its own terms, with the potential of improving the team by dealing wisely.
To paraphrase Bill James, minor league baseball should be a small war, and the farm system has turned it into basic training. If I were King of Sports, this is absolutely the first thing I would change.
And, though rare, those lower level teams have the opportunity to rise through the ranks and play the big boys.
The most important domestic cup tournament in the UK is the FA cup. Open to all teams and sure enough in 1988 the mighty Liverpool were beaten inthe final by Wimbledon F.C. who were in the fourth tier of the league only a decade before and non-league (i.e.only semi-pro) the year before that. It happens, and the possibility of it happening is important to fans.