Quote:
Originally Posted by JAYNYC
I never said it will. I said I could see Dallas / Ft. Worth making a case for supporting two NFL teams because of the area's rich football heritage before I could see the Bay Area making the same case.
|
You have to differentiate between support for the league/sport, and support for the team. A second NFL team in Dallas will never work because everyone is a Cowboys fan. Similarly, Boston could easily support a second MLB team, like they did in the past, because baseball is huge in New England. In reality, it would never work, because the baseball fans are all Red Sox fans. They would never convert to another team. Or, putting an NFL team in Milwaukee wouldn't work, because all those people are Packers fans.
The best place where putting a second/third/fourth team from a league in a metro area, that is being discussed with some chance of it actually happening in the near future is putting a second NHL team in the Toronto area (or in Hamilton, which is like having NFL teams in Washington and Baltimore). I think there's enough people in the Toronto area that are not Maple Leafs fans, but are hockey fans, that a new team could carve out a fan base.
There are two other instances that have been discussed in the sports/business world. One other one was that the Sacramento Kings came very close a few years ago to moving to Anaheim and becoming the Anaheim Royals. This would be a third NBA team in the Los Angeles area. While it may have worked, I personally think that would have been too much saturation, or the Royals' success would come at the expense of the Clippers.
The other instance is that a study commissioned by Major League Baseball to understand new markets found that the best, most underserved market without an MLB team is one that they had never even thought about
: northern New Jersey. Apparently New Jersey is a better market for an MLB team than Montreal, Charlotte, San Antonio, Austin, Portland, Las Vegas, and all these other cities that have been thrown around as expansion or relocation sites. I guess New Jersey has enough of an identity to carve out a fanbase, but I was under the impression that northern New Jersey is all Yankees fans, and I can't really see them leaving their team.