I’m talking NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA.
Obviously Green Bay comes to mind - it has just over 100,000 people. I don’t want to include cities like “Arlington” or “Irving” because they are suburbs of the larger Dallas - I’m hoping for one I hadn’t considered that is perhaps even smaller than Green Bay.
Green Bay is the winner, bless their chilled souls.
Well, Green Bay is only 100,000 but once you add in GB’s suburbs, and the rest of Brown county you have about 225,000 people. This includes De Pere, Ashwaubenon, Allouez, Howard, and lesser population centers like Shirley, Dykesville, and Suamico to name but a few. I don’t know if that will affect your comparison criteria or not.
I think the next closest would be Buffalo (290,000), Tampa (300,000), and Anaheim (330,000). That’s excluding any teams that don’t use the city name in their title (e.g. Foxborough is around 5,000) since those generally are in some larger metro. area too. Of course, that could rule out Tampa since it’s really Tampa Bay.
On preview, it looks like even with Qadgop’s qualifications, Green Bay still wins (and I’d imagine Buffalo has some surrounding areas of its own).
I thought it would, Qadgop - lemme tell you it’s been quite an education looking up City populations for places I assumed would have less than 225k people, like Nashville (545,000) and Sacramento (407,000).
Just off the end of that list would also be, surprisingly, St. Louis, home to teams in three of the four major sports. It had just a shade under 350,000 population in the last census, and it’s been steadily hemorrhaging people to the suburbs for the last fifty years. (Consider that in 1950 the population of St. Louis city was over 850,000!) The whole metro area is somewhere over 2.5 million, though.
In addition to 407,000 residents in the city of Sacramento, the county has 1,250,000 residents, and the whole metropolitan area close to 2,000,000.
Portland, home of the 1976-77 world champion Portland Trailblazers weighs in at approx 530,000. The whole metro area is around 1.9 million.
Yeah, I think we really have to consider the “metro area” population for a real comparison.
QtM, NLF football team co-owner.
In terms of metropolitan areas, the next smallest after Green Bay would be Ottawa at just over a million, then Jacksonville (1.10 million) and Buffalo (1.17 million).
St Petersburg (250,000) has the Devil Rays, but if we’re counting metro areas, Tampa Bay would be down the list somewhere at over 2 million people.
No way. Both Edmonton and Calgary have metro areas under 1 million (I think around 700-800 thousand each, with Calgary being slightly larger).
Just did some checking - man, our population is growing! Edmonton Metro area is 944 thousand, Calgary is 953 thousand. Still smaller than Ottawa and Jacksonville.
One thing that I think really shows how diehard the fans in GB are is the fact that they have one of the smallest populations to support a Pro fanchise yet the line for season tickets is like 20 years long.
Hell, according to their homepage, the season tickets have been sold out since 1960. Try to find me another team that can say that!
Salt Lake is only about 180,000 in the city itself. Counting the Metro area, it’s around 900,000.
The Browns. Most die hard fans in the world, probably. The NFL puts out a “fanatical fans” list every year where they factor in winning rate, area population, stadium capacity, average income, weather, and all sorts of stuff to figure out which teams have the most fanatical fans (I guess being poor, from a small area, attending on days that freeze your balls off, and going to see a losing team is ideal) and the Browns have been on top for… I dunno, 20 years? Maybe since it started - aside from 1996-1999, of course.
Okay, so wer’ve got Edmonton, Green Bay, Salt Lake City, and Calgary on the list with metro populations under 1 million. So what’s the smallest city with more than one major league sports team? Buffalo?
If you want to include the CFL on that list, which I don’t know if you do or not, then Regina, home of the Saskatchewan Rough Riders would definitely be on there. I think they only have somewhere in the league of 200k people. I may be wrong though.
Slight hijack:
What would be the largest US city without a pro team in four major sports? Looks like Austin TX to me.
End of hijack
LL
The largest officially recognized metropolitan area with no team in the four major pro sports is Las Vegas, NV, followed closely by Norfolk, VA. Austin’s metropolitan population would rank it third or fourth as of 2000.