A lot of larger metro areas have two teams playing one sport. We can all think of obvious examples. Sometimes the teams serve different geographies (Dodgers vs Angels), sometimes there seems to be a white collar/blue collar divide (Yankees and Mets?), and sometimes geography and demographics overlap a lot to produce very different fan bases in the same area (Raiders and 49ers, for instance).
Surely the sports marketing firms have incredibly detailed statistics on these things. Is any data or summary of sports fan demographics by team–age, gender, ethnicity, income, etc., publicly available online?
I think that’s a little more “macro” than he was looking for - he seemed to be asking what happens in areas “served” by two teams, like Chicago with the Cubs vs. White Sox.
One rivalry I can’t get my head around is Dundee FC vs Dundee Utd FC. They both play in a small city and whilst they have their own stadiums, they are actually on the same road and only a little over the length of a soccer pitch apart in distance. As far as I know there is no demographic split in their fan base between Dundee FC and Dundee Utd FC (compare to Rangers and Celtic in Glasgow whose sets of supporters are deeply divided by sectarianism and politics).
The baseball map RealityChuck links is pretty cool, and makes me think that geography rules over all. My working theory is now that, here in San Francisco, the Oakland fans I see in the city are from the East Bay or grew up with the A’s and the Raiders, and kept that affiliation despite moving into San Francisco proper.
In the VFL the city of Melbourne had five clubs Carlton, Collingwood, Fitzroy, Richmond and Hawthorn which are based in essentially adjoining suburbs. Fitzroy has been relocated to Brisbane, but the others remain in the AFL.
A couple of kms away there were four more clubs based in the essentially adjoining suburbs of North Melbourne, Melbourne, South Melbourne and St Kilda. Souths have been relocated to Sydney, but the other three remain in the AFL. There isn’t much demographic distiction between the clubs now.
[QUOTE=RealityChuck]
This gives a rough idea for baseball.
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The problem with both those maps is that they don’t account for overlapping fan bases. For example, in the case of the Giants/49ers and A’s/Raiders, once you get out of San Francisco and the East Bay and into the rest of Northern California, you’ll often find that the fan bases for the SF and Oakland teams coexist (sometimes uneasily) among each other.
That map is too generous to the White Sox. In fact they dominate only in a narrow belt of the South Side of the city, the southwestern suburbs, and extreme northwestern Indiana. It would barely be visible if they showed it accurately.
Ditto the Marlins. Northwest Florida is almost totally Braves country. Nobody here cares about the Marlins or the Rays - although that’s what shown on TV for some reason.
ETA: Also, to the extent anybody here cares about the NFL, I would say (at least for Tallahassee) that the Bucs have the edge, although I would assume it starts to lean Saints to the west and Jags to the east of here.
Why on earth would someone change sport team affiliation simply because he moved?
Anyway… Down here in San Jose*, you see a good mix of Oakland and SF fandoms, leaning generally more toward SF. I don’t know how people pick, as I picked the 49ers as a child living in Oregon.
*: San Jose is bigger than San Francisco and Oakland, but is still somehow the redheaded stepchild of the Bay Area.
A little hijack but, on the NFL map, does anyone know what that bit of orange in southeast Ohio is? I assume it’s the Chicago Bears or maybe the Broncos but uhm…what?
Unless it’s supposed to maybe be 50/50 Browns/Bengals?
I have zero confidence in the accuracy if those maps.
As to the Ohio question, There’s no exclusively Bengals territory in Ohio. The Browns are very popular all over the state, even in areas you would think should be Bengals strongholds.
When I lived in Northern California (the San Jose and Sacramento areas) during the 1970s, the comparative popularity of the SF and Oakland teams was often tied to how well they were doing at the time. For example, while both the SF 49ers and the Oakland Raiders received equal coverage in the Sacramento media during that time, the Raiders were by far the more popular team because they were an exciting team that always made the post-season while the 49ers flat out sucked.
