But being from a big city is irrelevant. What’s important is that the team have a large fanbase, which all of those teams do.
Of course, it’s impossible to disentangle cause and effect, here: You can’t say that those teams are successful because they’re popular, because it’s just as likely that they’re popular because they’re successful.
The Patriots were a perpetual sad sack team from their creation (in the AFL) until 2001/2 when they won their first Superbowl. The were the main football team in most, but not all, of New England, but they were the 4th most popular team behind the Sox, Celtics, and Bruins. Now they’re the most popular team by far because they are successful, not the other way around.
Another theory: some officials take “don’t make a call that will decide the game” (also known as the “don’t call any penalties in overtime in a Stanley Cup Final game” policy) a little too seriously, and the obvious cases tend to feature the best players. Case in point: a blatant four-step by Patrick Ewing to make the game-winning layup in an NBA finals game - you can’t be that sure that it would have been called had it not been Ewing.
^ This is the truth. Successful teams get big fanbases, not the other way around.
I grew up a Seahawks fan and aside from one Super Bowl appearance in 2005 they weren’t a big deal. In 2013 they won the championship and they’ve been good ever since (at least enough to get to the divisional playoff every year) and it’s Seahawks fever around Seattle. But it started with success, not the other way around.
Bandwagons and fair weather fans are pretty obvious, no conspiracy needed.
It was so obvious that the announcers talked about it openly that the home plate umpires favored certain veteran pitchers. If a certain pitcher could consistently hit a spot on the low outside corner, he would get the strike called even if it missed the plate. A rookie would not get the benefit of the doubt. Of course, this didn’t necessarily favor a particular team.
Bill James claimed the final strike in Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series was 2 feet off the plate. Even if he exaggerated a tad, I assume it was obviously a ball.
More speculatively, my wife is an avid Jays fan and she swears the umpires systematically favor American teams over the Jays. I remain agnostic on this.
I don’t think the NFL is rigged but I understand why some fans do. When you see terrible calls that change the outcome of a game, it makes you wonder. The officials gifting the Patriots a victory in the divisional playoff game against Oakland is probably the most notorious example. And the NFL destroying all the evidence collected in the Spygate investigation indicates that is was probably more serious than the league would admit. Then there was also a regular season game in New Orleans back in 2013 when a bogus PF was called after a QB hit and fumble, effectively giving the NFC West title - and homefield advantage - to Seattle.
In Cricket until the mid 1980’s Umpires were always chosen by the home team in Internationals. And Umpires were always expected to be somewhat pro-home team. Although there were some clear cases of bias* most times Umpires were fairly balanced. But the controversay never went away totally until the late 1990’s when neutral umpires were mandated.
*Basically every Aussie umpire ever. Of course as a cosmic joke, Australia decided to welcome the coming of neutral umpires by becomiung unbeatable for about 10 years.
I don’t subscribe to the conspiracy theory either …but there are a LOT of people that believe the NHL “slants the ice” in favour of the big American markets to bolster interest in the league as well as to secure big US television contracts, especially for the Stanley Cup play-offs.
ETA: and then there were these idiots!
Look at 2003. The San Antonio Spurs face the New Jersey Nets, and ratings are disastrously low. Surely the league decided that Spurs would be keep from reaching the Finals again, right?
Nope. 2005, the Spurs face the Detroit Pistons, and ratings are bad. Not quite as bad, but noticeably low. That’s the last straw, right? The Spurs cannot be allowed to reach the Finals again!
Nope. 2007, the Spurs face the Cleveland Cavaliers. Ratings are again terrible.
This alleged conspiracy sure does suck at its stated purpose.
An individual corrupt official is different from instructions from a league authority. Boxing has been mentioned, and there are cases where refs have been instructed to call certain actions certain ways, such as breaking boxers from a clinch quickly, but that’s a sport where the rules aren’t well established and largely under the control of local sports authorities and not the title sanctioning bodies. I don’t know the details of what happened with FIFA, but when we look at the NFL, MLB, etc, these are leagues controlled by team owners and I don’t see a conspiracy to favor or disfavor a particular team covertly as being realistic.
As someone who has reffed a handful of (small) college football games and has friends who have worked large college and NFL:
No.
In fact, during the game, it’s often difficult to remember which team is which during play - you’re concentrating more on what’s happening than on who’s involved.
It’s not unusual, though, for coordinators or supervisors to request officials pay particular attention to the actions of a particular player, coach, or team, if things have been showing up on film consistently. There is no instruction to affect the outcome of a contest, though.
This has always been my feeling. NBA doesn’t rig or nudge at the team level, but definitely does so at the individual player level. Their incentive is to groom star players for exciting performances and fan draw. The Bulls don’t draw tickets and advertisers, Jordan/Pippen do. NBA doesn’t want to suppress star performances with rigorous play calling, but will bias calls onto the non-marquee players to absorb the fouls and set the tone. I’m sure there is backroom guidance to the refs to “ease up on Player X, let him play”.
One could of course posit a situation where league bigwigs would prefer large market teams to win, or would want rivalries set up, and would pay officials to throw games so that this sort of thing happened, but would not of course TELL the disadvantaged teams they were doing this.
The problem with this theory is of course that there is no evidence whatsoever it’s happening, in any sport I follow, anyway. Surely no one thinks the NBA is thrilled that Cleveland or Golden State are dominant teams, while the New York Knicks are a disgrace? Is the NHL happy the Pittsburgh Penguins, a small market, are repeat champions, while Toronto, the biggest hockey market on earth, hasn’t won a Stanley Cup in fifty years?
Furthermore, we’re in the age of sports measurement. If officials were truly favoring a team, someone would have statistically proven it by now.
Except that maybe the Spurs won ***despite ***such officiating, or good enough that they couldn’t be kept out except by truly blatant favoritism which refs wouldn’t dare.
To borrow a political analogy, this is like someone who says, “Minorities don’t suffer from discrimination - look at the black people who graduate from Harvard, become billionaires, etc.” Yes, there are examples of success, but there would have been more yet without that discrimination.
Also, how does one explain the 2002 Western Conference Finals Game 6?
If Game 6 was fixed, a simple explanation would be that the refs took it upon themselves to fix it, while using intermediaries to place large bets on the Lakers. That is vastly more likely than the league conspiring to do so.
A simpler explanation, however, is simply that the refs did a poor job.
What results would you expect to see if the league was competent at fixing games? How is that different from what you see now?
The NBA could instruct referees to make a dozen critical calls a game in favor of the Knicks, and they’d still be a crummy, losing team. 
I don’t buy the idea of a wide-ranging conspiracy to favor certain teams or players in any of the major North American sports for the simple reason (as previously noted) that so many people would have to be in on it that it’d be impossible to keep the conspiracy under wraps. Not as many as would be required to cover up a 9/11 conspiracy or hide the Cure for Cancer, but way too many to keep it quiet.
People blab.
Do you think they give leeway only to star players? Seems like you have to run the length of the court with the ball to get a traveling call, I don’t watch a ton of basketball but I haven’t noticed any discrimination in that kind of call. I guess I have seen cases where they go the other way and key in on a player with a reputation for fouling though.
Do a Google search for “lol concacaf’ed .”
And know my pain.