This is Part 1 of a multi-part story that explains the nature of stadium drama in the United States of America from a pro-sports but liberal perspective. I do not know how many parts this will have, as I am publishing each piece as I go.
Today’s essential question: How do teams manage to acquire new and more expensive stadiums for their teams in the United States, especially given that this does not happen in the same way in Europe?
First, some background. I live in San Diego, and as such am a fan of the local teams. At the top level, San Diego has the Padres (MLB) and the Chargers (NFL). At lower levels (or lower sports) we find the Gulls (American Hockey League) and Sockers (Major Arena Soccer League), as well as lower division clubs in (outdoor) soccer. As an alumnus of San Diego State University, I also support their teams. I am familiar with the stadium situation in Southern California, as well as the impacts of stadiums in general throughout the US.
We have active stadium drama here. The Chargers made an attempt to move to Los Angeles last season, but were beaten by Stan Kroenke’s greater wealth as he moved his former St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles.
Today we’re going to look into what causes such stadium drama. Why does the United States have it, in a way many other countries don’t? (Indeed, it’s only an issue at all in the western hemisphere, and is very rare at all outside the United States and perhaps Canada.)
Sports in the United States uses what is known as the franchise model. This means that a league has central control of what teams are in the league, there are a set number of teams, and all of these teams have a chance at the league championship prior to the start of the season. In fact, a big reason the NFL survives so many problems is that it is the single most competitive professional sports league in the world. No other league has had so many teams get so close to the championship in a short run of time. There are many reasons for this, but this is not the article for that.
There are 32 teams in the National Football League, all American teams. There are 30 teams each in Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association, 29 of which are in the USA in each. There are also 30 teams in the National Hockey League, but only 23 of those are located in the US. There are 20 teams (currently, though expansion plans have been set) in Major League Soccer; 17 of these teams are considered US clubs by CONCACAF, the region’s soccer governing body.
Despite all the sports, I’m going to focus down and look at how a single sport affects stadiums. I will briefly mention the differences in how each other sport affects stadium drama, but we will focus on the big one, the National Football League.
In baseball, it’s a lot easier to sell people on a new stadium. They play 81 home games per year, meaning more than 1 day out of every 5 will use the stadium just on that. People can get behind this. Basketball and hockey arenas are cheaper — they have their own dramas, to be sure, but they are not the behemoths of football stadiums. And if a city can have teams playing both sports, in the same location, even if one of them is a minor league team, they are now looking at 82 guaranteed game dates (plus a high likelihood of more given the huge percentage of playoff teams.) Soccer… except for the Seattle Sounders, soccer in the US tends not to draw big crowds, and they often, though not always, fit themselves in as extra tenants to other sports. We will talk about soccer in a much different context much more in a bit.
Minor league stadiums, since I mentioned it, can be built much more cheaply and demands tend to be less. The Gulls seem willing to stick around in the aging Valley View Casino Center despite the backup goaltenders having to sit in the corner tunnels rather than on the bench.
Onto football. A football stadium is guaranteed a whopping 10 game dates, 2 of which are meaningless games for everyone except the players desperate to make the team and season ticket holders feel themselves gouged for having to buy them. If a team wins its division, it gets an 11th game date, and if it wins its way to hosting the conference championship, a 12th (or 11th if it did so as the conference’s #5 seed).
This feels hard to sell to cities. And it is. It is very hard, on the face of things, to justify millions, if not over a billion dollars, for a stadium that will be used 10 times a year. (A new Chargers stadium will almost certainly also host SDSU football as well, so add another 8 game dates, for 6 home games and the Poinsettia and Holiday Bowls. So a new football stadium for San Diego specifically is 18 game dates. That’s not much better.)
First argument that should be taken care of is that yes, the stadium will have the opportunity to host other events. But all of these events are short-term boosters at best that shouldn’t really play a factor from an economic perspective.
What’s the real argument? Owner: “Build us a stadium, or we’re moving to <other city>.” Los Angeles is the most frequent threat, though it’s less effective now that the Rams have already done it. But Kroenke seems willing to accept a 2nd tenant. This one is still there. But there are many other big cities that don’t have NFL teams in the United States: Las Vegas, San Antonio, Portland, and now St. Louis (since it’s lost its team), are a few examples, and the NFL has also shown a willingness to blab about international options such as Toronto, Mexico City, and London, but these ones are probably inadvisable.
Why does this work? Why does this work here and not somewhere else? Because these big cities exist. The markets exist. They may not be perfect, but there are more markets than there are teams. This is a phenomenon very exclusive to the United States.
To illustrate this point, let’s compare the National Football League to arguably the biggest sports league, by overall world audience: the Barclay’s Premier League.
First, since I mentioned there are 32 NFL teams, all of which are in the US, I will mention there are 20 BPL teams, 19 of which are in England (1 team in Wales). It’s a little more complicated than that, though.
First, what are the teams in the smallest cities and what might their move options be?
The team located in the smallest market by urban area[1] in the NFL is the New Orleans Saints. New Orleans had an urban area population of 899,700 in 2010. It ranks 49th in the country, meaning there are about 16 places that would potentially have larger markets, though a few of these can be thrown out for being in a practical sense the established territory of another team or region. The cities I mentioned above, though, all lack professional American football of any kind, and could potentially be interested in receiving a team. In fact, there are 13 urban areas over 1 million people with no official team (though some may be close enough to another area such that they also consider themselves fans of that area’s team).
The team located in the smallest urban area in the BPL is Norwich City. It has a rather low urban area population of 213,333, 38th in the UK, though a bit higher than that looking solely at England, or at England and Wales. London has a whopping 6 clubs, and 3 of the next 4 largest English areas have 2 each, but West Yorkshire has none. At 1.77+ million people, that seems like a legitimate move threat for a team demanding a stadium. Nottingham, Sheffield, and Bristol are all English areas without a BPL team and over half a million people as well (though less than the urban area of New Orleans). But move threats just doesn’t happen really.
West Yorkshire has zero teams in the Barclay’s Premier League in the 2015-16 season. But Leeds United and Huddersfield AFC are a winning season away from fixing that, no moving required! (Not that that is particularly likely this year, they are in 13th and 17th place out of 24 respectively at the time of writing.) This is how Europe, and most of the world, is different. With the club model, teams can move up and down the various leagues as they continue to win or lose. The worst 3 teams from this BPL season will be sent to the English Football Championship (yes, that’s the 2nd level), and the best 3 teams from that league will join the BPL. So no, a dissatisfied team can’t just move — there are teams there saturating the market, they’re just… bad.
In fact, there are not just 19 English clubs playing professional soccer, there are 89 professional teams. 19 in the Premier League, then 23, 24, and 23 teams in the levels below. (A Welsh team fills out the numbers to keep the leagues even in the levels with odd numbers.) Within 3 years theoretically, any of these teams could be in any of these levels (or even out of the professional ranks entirely).
England has 53.01 million people in it. That means there is a professional soccer team for, on average, just under 600,000 people, or if we look only at the Premier League, just under 2.8 million people per team. By contrast, the United States has 318.9 million people in it. That means there is a professional football team for, on average, just under 10 million people. Obviously a representative sports-fan fraction of 10 million supporters is still overkill. Thus, the United States has to have lots of effectively neutral ground where there are no clear support patterns. In order to have the same saturation as England’s Premier League, the NFL would need to have a ridiculous 114 teams! To have the same concentration as all of the English soccer system, American football would need 535 teams! To be fair, college and high school football are alternatives in many places that allow for other options for football, especially looking at power conferences in college. But it’s really not the same as the pros.
Part of this disparity is also reflected in stadium sizes. In England, Bournemouth is barely into five digits in terms of capacity (11,700), and only Manchester United, Arsenal, Manchester City, and Newcastle boast stadiums with over 50,000 seats (the first two are over 60,000). The smallest NFL stadium is Oakland’s O.Co Coliseum at 56,057 seats, and Oakland is a team threatening to move over poor stadium conditions. The next smallest is Chicago’s Soldier Field at 61,500.
This is how the move threat works. There is theoretically room for over 100 teams. There are 32. They have to go somewhere. While many of those theoretical 114 aren’t really valid, as area matters too, and spreading a team’s area over a 12-hour drive isn’t practical, many of them are. Teams can pick and choose their place. Give us our stadium, or we’ll find a city who will, and then you don’t have a team. There are plenty of cities out there, we’ll be fine. You won’t.
Next in this series: Why do I care if there’s a team in my city? I’m a fan, sure, but… Or: Why do I care if there’s a team in my city? I don't care about football! (Both will be discussed in the same story.)
[1]I admit to (potentially incorrectly) labeling the Green Bay Packers for Milwaukee, thus enabling Green Bay to not be the smallest, because fans from Milwaukee do travel to the games, and the Packers market is definitely a regional and national appeal. The Packers are also publicly owned and are a definitive outlier in many ways, and not really applicable to the stadium drama because of it, thus it feels wrong to include them.