Relocation of professional sports teams , is a practice which involves a sporting franchise moving from one metropolitan area to another, although occasionally moves between municipalities in the same conurbation are also included. Professional teams in North America are generally privately owned and operate according to the wishes of an owner, making this practice much more common there than in other areas of the world where sporting teams are clubs owned by local members.
Franchise relocations in North America
Background
Unlike most professional sport systems worldwide, sports organizations in North America generally lack a system of promotion and relegation in which poorly performing teams are replaced with teams that do well in lower-level leagues. North America lacks comprehensive governing bodies whose authority extends from the amateur to the highest levels of a given sport. Unlike in other countries, where one may invest in a local lower-level club and through performance see that club rise to major league status, the only three ways a North American city can host a major league sports team are through league expansion, forming/joining a rival league or, most commonly, relocation.
A city wishing to get a team in a major professional sports league can wait for the league to expand and award new franchises. However, as of 2006 each of the major leagues has 30 or 32 franchises. Many current owners believe this is the optimal size for a major league, and with the possible exception of the NFL's desire to return to Los Angeles, North America's second largest market, none of the major leagues are believed to be imminently considering expansion, and in fact Major League Baseball actually considered contraction in 2002 to be effective for the 2007 season (of the Montreal Expos and Minnesota Twins), until the union got a contract prohibiting it. In the end, nothing happened to the Twins and the Expos relocated to Washington, D.C. to become the Washington Nationals.
In past decades, aspiring owners whose overtures had been rejected by the established leagues would respond by forming a rival league in hopes that the existing major league will eventually agree to a merger, the new league will attain major league status in its own right and/or the established league is compelled to expand. The 1960s American Football League is perhaps the most prominent example of a successful rival league, having achieved each of the three goals listed above in reverse order. However, all major sports have had a rival league achieve at least some of these goals in the past five decades. Baseball's proposed Continental League did not play a game, but only because Major League Baseball responded to the proposal by adding teams in some of the proposed CL cities. The American Basketball Association and World Hockey Association each succeeded in getting some of their franchises accepted into the established leagues, which had both unsuccessfully attempted to cause their upstart rivals to fold outright by adding more teams.
However, given present market and financial conditions a serious attempt to form a rival league in the early 21st century would likely require hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars in investment and initial losses, and even if such resources were made available the upstart league's success would be far from guaranteed, as evidenced by the failure of the WWF/NBC-backed XFL in 2001. Therefore, so long as leagues choose not to expand and/or reject a city's application, the only realistic recourse is to convince the owner(s) of an existing team to move it.
Owners usually move teams because of weak fan support or the team organization is in debt and needs an adequate population for financial support or because another city offers a bigger local market or a more financially lucrative stadium/arena deal. Governments may offer lucrative deals to team owners to attract or retain a team. For example, to attract the National Football League's Cleveland Browns in 1995, the state of Maryland agreed to build a new stadium and allow the team to use it rent-free and keep all parking, advertising and concession revenue. (This move proved so controversial that the team was renamed the Baltimore Ravens and the NFL awarded Cleveland a new franchise, which took the Browns name and official lineage.)
The relocation of sports teams is often controversial. Opponents criticize owners for leaving behind faithful fans and governments for spending millions of dollars of tax money on attracting teams. However, since sports teams in the USA are generally treated like any other business under antitrust law, there is little sports leagues can do to prevent teams from flocking to the highest bidders. Major League Baseball, unique among the major professional sports leagues, has an exemption from antitrust laws won through a Supreme Court decision but nonetheless has allowed several teams to change cities.
Newer sports leagues tend to have more-transient franchises than more-established, "major" leagues, but in the mid-1990s, several NFL and National Hockey League teams moved to other cities, and the threat of a move pushed cities with major-league teams in any sport to build new stadiums and arenas. Critics referred to the movement of teams to the highest-bidding city as "franchise free agency."
List of relocations
The following charts list movements of franchises in the modern eras of the major North American sports leagues. It does not include:
- Moves within a city, which have occurred many times in all major leagues.
- Short-distance city-suburb moves (i.e. Los Angeles to Anaheim, both of which are in the same urban agglomeration)
- Team moves that happened before the organization joined its current league.
- Moves of teams that as of 2009 no longer exist. There were many such moves in the early years of the NFL in particular.
Major League Baseball
- 1902 : Milwaukee Brewers became the St. Louis Browns.
- 1903 : Baltimore Orioles became the New York Highlanders and then the Yankees.
- 1953 : Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee; this was the first MLB relocation in 50 years.
- 1954 : St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles.
- 1955 : Philadelphia Athletics moved to Kansas City.
- 1958 : Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles; New York Giants moved to San Francisco. These were the first major league teams on the West Coast; the teams moved simultaneously to facilitate travel for other NL teams.
- 1961 : Washington Senators moved to the Twin Cities area and became the Minnesota Twins. Not wishing to alienate Washington and its powerful baseball fans, MLB granted the city a new franchise, also called the Senators.
- 1965 : The Los Angeles Angels moved to a stadium in Anaheim 30 miles southeast of Los Angeles to become the California Angels, but adapted the city's name as the Anaheim Angels in 1997 and finally in 2005 renamed the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
- 1966 : Milwaukee Braves moved to Atlanta.
- 1968 : Kansas City Athletics moved to Oakland.
- 1970 : Seattle Pilots moved to Milwaukee and became the Brewers. The MLB would grant Seattle a new franchise in 1977.
- 1972 : Second Washington Senators moved to Arlington, Texas and became the Texas Rangers.
- 2005 : Montreal Expos moved to Washington, D.C. and became the Washington Nationals. The Expos had split time between Montreal and San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2003 and 2004. This was the first MLB relocation in 33 years.
National Football League
- 1921 : Decatur Staleys moved to Chicago and were renamed Chicago Bears one year later.
- 1934 : Portsmouth (Ohio) Spartans became Detroit Lions.
- 1937 : Boston Redskins moved to Washington, D.C.
- 1946 : Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles (first top-level professional sports franchise on the West Coast).
- 1960 : Chicago Cardinals moved to St. Louis.
- 1982 : Oakland Raiders moved to Los Angeles. The NFL refused permission for the move, but the team won the right to relocate in a court case.
- 1984 : Baltimore Colts moved to Indianapolis. The team's offices were slipped out of Baltimore in the middle of the night to avoid a proposed eminent domain seizure by the state of Maryland.
- 1988 : St. Louis Cardinals moved to the Phoenix area, playing games in nearby Tempe. The team now plays in another Phoenix suburb, Glendale. The team was renamed the Arizona Cardinals in 1994.
- 1995 : Los Angeles Raiders moved back to Oakland after 12 previous seasons, the first "return" relocation of a North American professional sports team. Also the Los Angeles Rams moved to St. Louis. Since then, Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest market, has not hosted an NFL franchise.
- 1996 : Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Baltimore Ravens. The move was one of the most controversial in major professional sports history. In response to a fan revolt and legal threats, the NFL awarded a new franchise to Cleveland in 1999, which for historical purposes is considered a continuation of the original Browns franchiseFu
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