A lot has been said about revenues. The total revenue a league generates can be extimated as:
Total Fan Base * “Amount spent” per fan
“Amount Spent per fan” is a little hazy for example an company might estimate the revenue from a commerial to be $x per 1000 viewers and pay the TV company accordingly and the TV company put that into their calculation of how much to pay for the rights.
English Premeier League TV rights are around £3bn per annum compared with $10bn for the NFL. Only about half the EPL revenue comes from UK rights so it is a little below the US in revenue per head of population.
What people have talked less about is costs. The structure of the NFL is a closed shop designed ot make money for the owners. Player wage costs are kept at a relatively small proportion of revenue by virtue of a salary cap. Money does not need to be transferred to another team.
European football is a competitive environment. Teams are competitors in the same industry not a single franchise. To try to take the next step up, clubs have to sign players at higher wages. The vast majority of European football clubs lose money, so while the revenues of the biggest clubs might be reasonably close to those of an NFL team because they are losing money, or very likely to do so in future the value is a lot less.
In European football, only 10 teams recorded a profit of £1 million or more during the period from 2019 to 2021. With over 1000 professional clubs in Europe, this means that less than 1% were significantly profitable
OK that includes the period of covid and outsie of pandemic years the figures will be somehat better but where the NFL can lower the salary cap as a response of reduced revenues a European soccer team would have to do that unilaterally and that would likely lead ot relegation (and lower revenues again)
If 50 years is your metric, then only 2 Canadian teams have moved to the US in that time frame, while 2 US teams moved to Canada, making the whole thing a push. Quebec and Winnipeg also had a lot of other problems going for them besides the exchange rate.
A lot of people don’t believe this lately, but there is an actual NHL team in Vancouver.
Just going back to this post - do NFL, MLB and NBA teams play in other major competitions outside of their basic league structure? EPL teams take part in at least two other cup competitions and the top teams also take part in the European Champions League which is the real money spinner. Looking at the size of the domestic leagues alone does not tell the full picture.
They do not do so, as complete teams (nor do NHL teams, for that matter). One reason is that, unlike the EPL, where there are several levels of professional soccer teams below the top-level EPL, in North America, the lower-level professional leagues are a different sort of animal:
In hockey, baseball, and basketball, the lower-level professional leagues are developmental leagues for the top-tier leagues, and are largely (if not entirely) made up of teams that are controlled by major-league teams. Their rosters (particularly their best players) are often made up of players who are under contract to the parent major-league team, and who may get “called up” to the big team if needed.
There have been various “minor” pro football leagues in the U.S., and they tend to wind up being financially unviable, and typically fold after a few seasons (at best). There are a couple of them in existence right now (the USFL and the XFL), but they tend to have players who weren’t able to make the cut in the NFL, but hope to perform well in the minor league to catch the eye of a scout from an NFL team, and get another NFL tryout.
College football and basketball are major sports in the U.S. (college hockey and baseball are also regionally popular), and while there is no direct affiliation with the professional leagues, they do serve as developmental leagues for future pro players. This is particularly true for football, in which 99% of NFL players were college players before they “turned pro.”
Individual players from those North American major league teams (well, MLB, NBA, and NHL teams, anyway) may participate with their national teams in various tournaments, including the Olympics.
Gridiron football doesn’t lend itself to friendly games. See the Pro Bowl to understand why. There’s just too much risk of injury to play a meaningless game at full speed. And any game that wasn’t part of the NFL season would be meaningless.
In spring training some MLB teams play against college teams in exhibition games. The pro teams are just getting started in training and they are only playing their key players for 1-2 innings, trying out things and getting new players some reps. There have been some MLB vs Japan games, mostly All-Star teams from what I gather. I think that series ended in 2006.
NHL could have exhibition games against some European league teams, but I don’t see that happening for a variety of reasons.
The Pro Bowl is the NFL’s all-star game, traditionally played at the end of the season. It used to be played the week after the Super Bowl, then was moved to the week before the Super Bowl (which is usually an “off week” in the NFL’s schedule) to attract more fan interest.
The Pro Bowl has always been problematic, as @Telemark notes, because the risk of injury from playing football at full speed/intensity is considerable. As a result, the NFL implemented some rules to reduce some of the risk, but finally realized that the odds of a star player getting seriously injured playing a meaningless exhibition game was just too high (and a lot of the top stars would just opt out of playing in it), so they finally got rid of the game itself this year, replacing it with a flag football game, plus some other “skills competitions” (the league won’t walk away from putting on a TV event that will get at least some fans to watch).
In addition, there used to be the “Chicago College All-Star Game,” an exhibition game which was played in the summer, just after NFL training camps started: the game would pit the NFL’s reigning champions (i.e., the team which won the NFL Championship, or Super Bowl, the previous season) against an all-star team of former college football players (seniors from the previous college football season). That game, too, became unpopular among NFL teams, due to the risk of having their newly-drafted rookies getting hurt, as well as having those rookies miss important time in training camp due to preparing for the All-Star Game, and so, it was finally cancelled after the 1976 game.
There is the WBC(World Baseball Classic) that’s to be held every 4 years and is like the World Cup. And there have been years where MLB teams have had season Openers in Japan, and recent years there has been a series (or had one planned) in London. And there are to be games played this year and in '24 and '26 too.
The MLB Japan series did end in 2006, but the series did resume in 2014 and 2018 with Samurai Japan vs MLB.
Though, those are games featuring two MLB teams playing against each other; it’s not an MLB team playing against a Japanese or English team.
They’re regular-season games, which happen to be played abroad (and, thus, similar to the NFL playing games in London or Mexico City or Toronto). @Fiendish_Astronaut seemed to be asking about North American pro teams playing against other, non-North American teams, in some sort of tournament or match, outside of their normal league schedules.
I was somewhat surprised, but the Champions League generated “only” $2.8 billion in revenue last year, which would put it 8th on the list, behind La Liga and the Bundesliga.
I was about to point that out. And that is split between the various teams spread across many different European leagues. I’d guess at most the EPL teams got $1B of that. Which still puts English soccer below the NBA.
But it also explains out why a handful of English teams are valued very highly, perhaps near or even above the value of an NBA team. Those handful of teams that qualify for European competition regularly, particularly the Champions League, have much higher revenue than a team that doesn’t, even though they play in the same domestic league.
The closest thing I know of is the Red Army hockey team from Moscow touring the minor league International Hockey League during the 1993-94 season. They played each IHL team once but the game results counted in the IHL standings. So it wasn’t a tournament thing like the FA Cup, it was more of promotional thing even if the games counted. I think they did that 2 years in a row but with a different Russian team.
There are a handful of “exhibition games,” which are essentially games for fun/money that doesn’t count for anything.
One of the pillars of the “major league” system created by professional baseball in the late 18th century is the concept of the closed league. Member clubs are basically not allowed to pursue competitions or prizes outside of the league system. The league controls every team’s schedule.
All of the major American leagues follow this system, allowing only the occasional exception, but never allowing that exception to count for anything.
To understand the American system you have to grasp the concept that the team is not the operating entity; it’s the league. The individual teams are all subsidiaries (of a kind) of the league.
Yes, teams exist as the league allows them to. They’re a piece of the league, different interdependent cogs in a clock.
I still remember when the NBA forced the Clippers to be sold to a new owner. I mean, the previous owner Sterling was banned for life after his racism came out in a huge scandal. Each team is part of the whole and affects the whole.
I don’t know if anything like that would ever happen on a European football team, for example.
You said “@Fiendish_Astronaut seemed to be asking about North American pro teams playing against other, non-North American teams, in some sort of tournament or match, outside of their normal league schedules.”
I meant to include this quote in my reply. The teams in the IHL were pro teams. Either way, I said the IHL was a minor league and that it was a only a sort of halfway answer.
