Ok a debatable phrase but as far back as I can remember Major League Baseball, NFL, NBA and NHL were considered the “four major leagues” in the USA, or at the very least “four major pro team leagues”.
Baseball, while supplanted by the NFL and maybe even the NBA in popularity, was always a no brainer.
The NHL while the second oldest league only had 6 teams from 1940s to 1967, was it considered a “major” sport all that time or was it not until the 70s when it fully expanded?
The NFL the third oldest for decades seemed to be considered inferior to the college game until maybe the late 50s and thanks to TV perhaps became considered one of the “top” leagues in the 1960s. I compare the early years of the NFL to lacrosse today. Lacrosse is considered a “college” game while the pros play in low paying, shifting leagues.
Then there’s the NBA the youngest league. While the 50s gave us George Mikan and Bob Cousy I wonder when the NBA was considered a “major” sport and am guessing the 60s with Wilt, the Celtics and Lakers.
From what I have read, from at least the 1930s to the 1950s, baseball, horse racing and boxing were the “three major sports” here.
Soccer is a clear “fifth” major pro team sport here and the way the league is structured will never break into the “major” group, though indoor soccer had a shot in the 1980s as well as the NASL in the late 70s.
Are there any sports on the horizon that will be part of the “major” category? Any you think are unfairly excluded?
There have been professional baseball teams since 1869 with the Cincinnati Red Stockings considered the first. Major League Baseball dates its origins to the 1876 establishment of the National League and the founding of the American League in 1901. The first World Series between the two major leagues was in 1903 which isthe year MLB gives as its official founding.
I’m not sure when the NHL made it to major status in this context, but I suspect it was probably after the 1967 expansion. It is remarkably difficult to find out when this term actually came into play, but maybe I’m wrong; even prior to the 1967 expansion the NHL was at worst the fourth largest professional team sports league in North America; what we now call the Original Six (despite the term, they aren’t the NHL’s original teams) were all in place by 1926, though Detroit wasn’t originally called the Red Wings. Obviously the term is post-WWII, though, since there wasn’t an NBA prior to 1947.
The gap between the big four and the rest is enormous:
NFL - ~$14 billion
MLB - ~$10 billion
NBA - ~ $8 billion
NHL - ~ $5 billion
Major League Soccer - Maybe $1 billion
The likelihood of MLS catching up to hockey is very slim. The obvious problem isn’t the relative population of the sports, but the fact that the NHL is unquestionably the best hockey league in the world, and MLS isn’t remotely close to being the best soccer league in the world. Fans know the difference between the elite and the also-ran.
I’d say cable tv and the 1980 Olympics definitely helped the NHL become the 4th major sport in the USA. The NHL has always been an ugly stepchild, never really dominating in TV ratings and mostly covered on cable networks. The NBA has benefited from college basketball as well as one big star being able to dominate.
I don’t really see any sport taking any of the places of the big 4. MLS will always be a poor substitute for the European leagues which we can now see in the USA. I’d go watch it, especially now that’s it not way off in the burbs of Chicago. I’ve enjoyed the games I’ve seen elsewhere, but it’s more of a nice ace to spend a summer night and I find the phony European stuff in MLS maddening.
With the fourth probably being college football. Even though the NFL didn’t really take off until the 1950s, the college game was tremendously popular (far more so than the pro game) for the first half of the 20th century.
That’s because the NHL’s popularity was (and still is to a significant degree) regional. For example, in Canada, the NHL was huge even before its expansion in 1967. In the US, the league’s popularity was mainly limited to the northeast and the Great Lakes region (i.e., anywhere the temperature rarely got above 32 degrees F from November to April). Once you got into warmer climes, however, interest in the sport dropped sharply. Even now, the NHL’s a tough sell in places like Phoenix and Atlanta (which had and lost two franchises).
When I was a kid in the early 80s, hockey definitely seemed like an afterthought behind baseball, football, and basketball. Part of that might be that Cleveland had major league teams in the other three but not hockey, but part might be that hockey requires a more specialized arena: You can’t just play it on any old field or gym.
And it’s kinda a tough sport to play as a kid in a non hockey culture. Even if you never played tackle football, varieties of flag football and touch football are easily done as organized or semi organized kid activities
But even then it was specifically only in Toronto and Montreal. Those teams had some national following of course, but people in Vancouver certainly weren’t contributing much to the NHL’s revenue stream until they got a team in 1970.
HOCKEY was huge in Canada; the NHL, specifically, was mostly huge in Quebec and Ontario, and to some extent the Maritimes. It was after hockey began expanding (by which I also include the WHA) that it became a more significant business enterprise beyond the “original six” cities.
Prior to 1967, the CFL was as big a business enterprise as the NHL was in Canada. Today the entire CFL makes less money in a year than any two Canadian NHL teams, or either the Leafs of Canadiens by themselves. The CFL is barely hanging on and was killed bythe encroachment of legitimate major leagues - the NHL spreading across Canada in the 1970s, and the arrival of major league baseball and NBA basketball in Toronto has nearly finished off the Toronto Argonauts.
In most of the US, for most of the year, that’s true. But, kids in much of Canada are able to (and traditionally do) play on backyard rinks and frozen ponds through the winter months, which may help explain why hockey is part of Canadian culture in a way that it simply isn’t for most Americans.
Me and my friends would play spontaneous games of baseball, football, basketball, or soccer when we had enough people and time. There no way to spontaneously play hockey. Maybe street hockey, but even that requires hockey sticks for everyone.
What also hurt the CFL was when big TV money started coming in for the NFL, something that can never happen in Canada because of the size of the market. So, with a few notable exceptions the best players increasingly went there because the money was better.
I would guess if things really went South the NFL could step in and save the league because other than the XFL now it’s the closest thing the NFL has to a minor league.
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And, in practice, players don’t generally come to (or come back to) the NFL after a stint in the CFL. Part of that is that an NFL team can’t generally send a player to the CFL for “seasoning,” while still retaining rights to him.
So, American players who play in the CFL tend to be ones who choose to go up there of their own volition. They tend in one of two groups:
A young guy who didn’t catch on with an NFL team out of college (might have gone to training camp with an NFL team, and got cut), and who goes up to Canada to get some more experience, with hopes of parlaying that into another shot with an NFL team. One sees a few of these guys coming back to the US and making an NFL roster, but they still usually seem to just be fringe players, though a very small number, like Cameron Wake, have been successful in the NFL.
A guy who played a bit in the NFL, probably as a backup, and went up to Canada for a chance to keep playing football. These are guys like Henry Burris, who was (barely) a backup quarterback in the NFL, but who won three Grey Cups in a long CFL career.
I don’t think the NBA became a major sport until the 1980s. I remember my HS graduation in 1979. There was an NBA finals game that evening, but it was not shown live on TV. It was shown on tape delay starting at 10:30 PM central time.
Then after a monumental NCAA final with Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, they both entered the NBA the following season. The NBA rode the Celtics-Lakers to popularity. Cable TV probably helped too.
NHL was regional for a long while. Fall of the Iron Curtain helped bring a lot more players to the NHL from Russia and other eastern Euro countries. And also more people from US, Sweden and Finland.
It certainly wasn’t what it later became, but anyone in 1979, asked what he big four major sports leagues were, would have known precisely which four you were talking about. By 1980 that was pretty well established, espoecially since the ABA had been merged into the NBA and the WHA into the NHL, this solidifying the attention of those sports into one league.
I think it probably “really took off” when Kareem Abdul-Jabaar joined the league in the early 1970s, especially with Wilt Chamberlain in the league as well.
The NHL had a network presence (I remember seeing it first on CBS, then NBC) until 1975 or so. When it did return on cable, it was on SportsChannel America, which half the country didn’t get at the time.
I think the main problem with the question is, how is “major” defined? I would probably choose the date that all four were considered major as the time of the first NHL expansion, which was, what, 1967?