Cities that can afford a team

I'm calling shenanigans...........

Buffalo - Niagara Falls can't support any pro teams according to this...........even though they already support an NFL and an NHL team. Yet somehow the market couldn't support an MLS team, but Syracuse can????? I grew up in the Cuse...........We support Cuse Basketball and LAX, that's it.

 

It's not an analysis of whether you can support your existing teams, it whether a new team can be added. Basically it's asking "how much disposable income does your city currently (still) have, and how does that compare to what a new team in X league would drain?" Notice, for example, that the "available income" column for Buffalo is negative - in other words, it already has more sports team than one would expect for a metro of its economic clout.

That said, it's a 5-year-old article; many of the numbers for the big cities have already changed. My hometown STL, for example, has lost its NFL team, so instead of having personal available income in the -$40m range, it should be down to around a -$7m range.

 

Good news for Metro-Detroit. In 2010 total personal income was 170 mil, in 2015 it has gone up to 201 mil. I don't know if this is enough to put a yes in the Detroit box, because the sports franchise numbers go up too.

 

Considering Detroit was listed at -$23m, the rise in TPI from 170 to 201 only barely gets them out of the hole... The table above seems to think that adding an MLS team amounts to about $15 API, and the other leagues much more, so by that (overly simplistic) economic argument, even adding an MLS team would still be "too much" for the city.

 

...okay, I was scrolling up to the top of the page to go continue browsing BigSoccer, but a "2.7" in the number-of-teams column caught my eye and made me go WTF. That's for Milwaukee, and it corresponds to an "0.3" for Green Bay, so I guess that's gotta be the Packers, but why in the world is it split like that? The article says it's just assigned like that, but why do that for Green Bay and not any other small-town teams?

 

That's not the answer for the question I was asking. I said in my previous post

My point is that the 70-30 split used seems entirely arbitrary, so the question is not what the split is, but why it was assigned as such in the first place, and why other small-city teams didn't see similar splits with their nearby larger metros.

 

Or medium sized markets like Detroit could be split with small neighboring markets like Ann Arbor. I don't get why a city like Pontiac or Rochester Hills is considered metro-Detroit and Ann Arbor isn't.

 

Definitely agree about the age of the article, as I said in my first post here, but not entirely pointless, since even with the Rams leaving, STL is still "in the hole" in terms of API unless TPI has gone up enough in those years as well.

 

Interestingly enough, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Salt Lake City & Indianapolis don't enough disposable individual income to afford teams in any of the 5 national professional sports while Rochester, Honolulu & Louisville have the income to support all the the national sports except for MLB. And, Harrisburg, Boise & Fort Wayne have enough disposable individual income to afford a Major League Soccer team.

I assume Garber will be thrilled to hear this.

 

Toledo, Ohio?? I mean I'm flattered but I think USL would suffice here.

 

To afford an additional team in any sport, not that they can't necessarily afford the ones they have.

While not all of the assumptions the author makes are completely valid, the basic premise is sound: that each team takes resources to support. There are markets that can support some (two to four) top level pro teams, but not more. Each team uses up some of the population's disposable income and business sponsorship dollars.

Another premise the list incorrectly incorporates is that MLS is basically static. The league was not, and still is not, content with current circumstances. It wants to be bigger, to get more support (and spend more money). A city which could support a 2011 MLS team may not be one that can support a team in 2017, let alone in 2030. As such, the list works better if one assumes that the league wants to be in cities that can support a team in the NBA, NFL, or NHL, because that's the sort of weight the league wants to have when built out. When examining it that way, the analysis makes more sense.

Frankly, the best thing about the list and its article is how it illustrates the problem of Major League Baseball--there really aren't many markets that can properly support a team for 81 games a year. The only markets it sees as definitely viable for a new or relocating MLB team are really big cities which already have a team or two.

 

Well, for one, as The Franchise pointed out, tallguy doesn't seem to be interpreting the article correctly. The table is talking about potentially adding teams to the market, not necessarily about how well they've supported their existing franchises.

That said, particularly in STL's case, it provides some insight into the existing sports landscape of the city. The Rams leaving DID give a bunch of disposable income back to STL. But the article posted here pointed out that STL, as a city, was so far "in the hole" in terms of disposable income with the three teams it had that, even with the Rams gone, the city's still "overspent" for its sports $$.

 

The study clearly states that a number of cities that are presumed to be frontrunners for a new MLS team don't have the disposable individual income to support a team. What could be more clear than that?

 

and some of them have a history of supporting 3 or 4 franchises for 50 plus years.

 

I have a hard time taking these kinds of studies seriously. There are obvious flaws in their methodology.

 

Greenville!