Post #47 in the thread linked to in the OP. He left out MLB, which has one move in that time. Two if you count the Brewers switching to the NL.
I can’t see the Rams moving back to LA. St. Louis has supported them pretty darn good.
Seems like I remember reading somewhere they have sold out every home game since moving there,but not sure.
The long-time owner, Georgia Frontiere, died early this year. Her children, while not actively trying to sell, have made it clear that they are open to offers. There is apparently a clause in the lease of their stadium that if it is not in the top tier of stadiums at a certain date, they can break the lease.
It’s a, “What have you done for me lately?” mentality among sports owners these days, and unless the fans and cities develop a “Well, then, so long, go ahead and move to Bumfuck, Egypt,” mentality, that won’t change.
The CFL serves as a minor league of sorts; it keeps football players in circulation if they don’t make the NFL draft.
That said, it all comes back to ownership. If there’s a sufficiently rich and interested owner, a team will move to Toronto. If there isn’t, they won’t. Generally speaking the league waits for the owner to come along.
If the Vikings don’t get a new stadium they will sprout wheels provided Wilf can find another city with enough suckers in it to pony up several hundred million.
L.A. is the obvious option, but I think the NFL wants to put two expansion teams into the league soon with at least one of them there. The other owners get elephantine checks when expansion teams come into the league whereas they get shit from relocation.
Again, L.A. is “the obvious option,” but only if they’ll build an expensive new stadium and let the team use it for free. Good luck getting Los Angelenos to go for that. They let the Raiders go. They let the Rams go. And they haven’t suffered a whit as a result. There are more teams eager to relocate to L.A. than there are L.A. taxpayers eager to subsidize them.
If Red McCombs is going to move the Vikings, it’ll be to a city eager to shower him with money and perks. Los Angeles isn’t that city. And right now, I’m not sure there IS a city that’s rich and desperate enough to give an owner the kind of sweetheart deal he craves.
I know last year (Oct 7, 2007) , the Arizona Cardinals played the Rams in St. Louis. The game was blacked out in St. Louis. The Rams had a terrible year last year and the Cards are not a draw. Still, this game wasn’t a sellout. Not sure about the rest of the Rams’ games last year.
Red McCombs can’t move the Vikings anywhere, he sold the Vikings to Zygi Wilf in 2005.
Zygi says he’s committed to keeping the Vikings in Minnesota, only time or a new stadium, will tell.
Duh- I KNEW that. McCombs was stuck in my head because he’s so prominent in Austin (The Univ of Texas business school is named after him).
Carry on.
Attendance isn’t as big a deal to an NFL team as it is to teams in other sports. It’s possible - and not just in theory, but within a range of actually possible conditions - to run an NFL team profitably without selling any tickets at all.
The critical difference between the NFL and other major North American sports is that the NFL
- Has no local TV deals, and
- Has a really ENORMOUS national TV deal, in part because of #1 and in part because that’s what the NFL is; a TV show.
As a result, small markets like Jacksonville are on the same level, in terms of TV revenue, as big markets like Chicago. It doesn’t make any difference if nobody wants to watch the Jaguars on TV - well, it does make a difference, but only 1/32nd of the difference it would make if the Jaguars had to reply on local TV dollars. That’s a huge hairy deal; in other sports it’s often local and cable TV deals, as much as the ticket sales, that make the difference in market size matter.
This is, basically, why there’s no NFL team in LA, while all the other sports have two teams in greater Los Angeles. If you’re making most of your money from national TV money, the support of the local market isn’t that important. In baseball, where most of your money comes from ticket sales and local TV coverage, it’s everything - if the Dodgers and Angels vanished tomorrow, shit, I’D start a team in LA if no one else wanted to. I don’t have $500 million but the conversation would go something like this:
ME: I want to borrow five hundred million dollars.
BANK OF AMERICA GUY: Who the hell are you? How did you get into my office?
ME: Gimme $500,000,000.
BANK OF AMERICA GUY: Why the hell should I do that?
ME: There’s no baseball team in LA and I somehow acquired the exclusive rights to start one. Here is a signed letter from Bud Selig and the franchise award documents.
BANK OF AMERICA GUY: Do you want fifties or hundreds? We can sign the papers later.
The reason LA will never go without baseball, hockey or basketball is that there’s like 18 million people there, so even an incompetently run team (e.g. the Clippers) has an essentially limitless pool of spectators and TV viewers.
But in football, there are essentially no local viewers, and you can only sell so many tickets when you play just eight regular season games; the potential difference between a very small market and a big one is not that great. So in football, the viability of the local market is heavily dependent on how sweetheart a stadium deal you can get. This is important in all sports, but in football it’s triply important, because there is, realistically, NO amount of spectator support that will outweigh a sweetheart deal. In baseball, it’s probably worth building your own new stadium in a big enough market; it’s great if you can get it for free, but if you have to foot most of the bill yourself it might be wrth it, like the San Francisco Giants did. But in football, it’s almost certainly never worth it; a team would unquestionably be better off moving into a city-built stadium in a small market than building their own stadium in a big one. - in fact, that is precisely what happened with the Los Angeles - St. Louis Rams.
Of course, if all NFL teams were to move out of the big markets and to places like Fresno, Saskatoon and Butte, completely abandoning all large markets, national TV revenues would drop - and indeed, in the case of the Rams, the move was opposed by the NFL and the Rams had to pay the other owners some dough to do it. But there’s no realistic chance of that happening.
Rick’s explanation of football economics is spot on.
There ARE NFL teams that are more desperate for revenue than others, but it’s not generally because of location or market size. Since NFL television revenues are shared evenly, the Green Bay Packers are on a pretty equal footing with the New York Giants.
But there’s a vast gap between old owners and new owners. Look at it this way: the Rooney family has owned the Steelers outright for decades. Dan Snyder paid a huge amount of money for the Redskins, and is still paying for them. Hence, Snyder is likely to try to squeeze every cent he can get out of every possible source, because he needs the dough to pay back the bank. The Rooneys can be more laid back and less mercenary, because their revenues are practically pure profit.
Remember when Sports Illustrated called the Clippers the worst franchise in American sports, ever? The article said that Sterling had discovered the dirty little secret of the NBA: you don’t have to win to make money. Someone will come to see the visiting team, and with your portions of the television contract, you can make it.