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Relocation of professional sports teams occurs when a team owner moves a team, generally from one metropolitan area to another, but occasionally between municipalities in the same conurbation. The practice is most common in North America, where a league franchise system is used and the teams are overwhelmingly privately owned. Owners who move a team generally do so seeking better profits, facilities, fan support, or a combination of these.
Unlike most professional sport systems worldwide, North America does not have comprehensive governing bodies whose authority extends from the amateur to the highest levels of a given sport. North American sports generally do not operate a system of promotion and relegation in which poorly performing teams are replaced with teams that do well in lower-level leagues, forming a franchise and minor league system instead.
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, such expansions are infrequent, and generally limited to a narrow window in time. Many current owners believe 32 is the optimal size for a major league due to playoff structure and ease of scheduling.[ citation needed ] As of 2024, each of the major leagues has between 30 and 33 franchises. The National Hockey League (NHL) has expanded to 33 teams in total, with the Vegas Golden Knights having become the league's 31st team in 2017, the Seattle Kraken having become the 32nd team in 2021, and the Utah Hockey Club having become the 33rd team in 2024. [1] [2]
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 would eventually agree to a merger; the new league would attain major league status in its own right; or the established league was compelled to expand. The 1960s American Football League (AFL) is perhaps the most recent 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 last half of the 20th century. 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 new league's proposed cities. The American Basketball Association (ABA) and World Hockey Association (WHA) 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, the upstart leagues owed their success in large part to the reluctance of owners in the established leagues to devote the majority of their revenues to player salaries and also to sports leagues' former reliance primarily on gate receipts for revenue.[ citation needed ] Under those conditions, an ambitious rival could often afford to lure away the sport's top players with promises of better pay, in hopes of giving the new league immediate respect and credibility from fans. Today, however, established leagues derive a large portion of their revenue from lucrative television contracts that would not be offered to an untested rival. Also, the activism of players' unions has resulted in the established leagues paying a majority of their revenues to players, thus the average salary in each of the big four leagues is now well in excess of $1 million per season.[ citation needed ]
Under present market and financial conditions, any 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,[ citation needed ] 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 and the UFL from 2009 to 2012.[ citation needed ] The current major leagues have established lucrative relationships with all of the major media outlets in the United States, who subsidize the league's operations because their established fame ensures strong ratings; the networks are far less willing to provide such coverage to an unproven upstart league, often requiring the upstart league to pay the network for those leagues to be covered.
Therefore, as long as leagues choose not to expand or reject a city's application, the only realistic recourse is to convince the owners of an existing team to move it (or convince a prospective owner to purchase a team with the intent of moving it). Owners usually[ citation needed ] move teams because of weak fan support or because 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 NFL's Cleveland Browns in 1995, the state of Maryland agreed to build a new stadium in Baltimore and allow the team to use it rent-free and keep all parking, advertising and concession revenue. (This move proved so unpopular in Cleveland that the move was treated as the Baltimore Ravens being awarded an expansion franchise, and the Browns name and their official lineage would remain in Cleveland for a "reactivated" team that rejoined the NFL three years later.) A little more than a decade earlier, the Baltimore Colts left for Indianapolis (NFL owners voted to give Colts owner Robert Irsay permission to move his franchise to the city of his choosing after no satisfactory stadium would be built).
Moving 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 United States 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 (for instance, the Los Angeles Rams filed suit when the other NFL owners initially blocked their move to St. Louis, which caused the NFL to back down and allow the move to proceed). Major League Baseball, unique among the major professional sports leagues, has an exemption from antitrust laws won by a Supreme Court decision but nonetheless has allowed several teams to change cities. Also recently, courts denied the attempted move of the team then known as the Phoenix Coyotes by siding with the NHL, which claimed that it had final authority over franchise moves.
Newer sports leagues tend to have more transient franchises than more established, "major" leagues, but in the mid-1990s, several NFL and NHL 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 using taxpayer money. The trend continued in the 2000s, when three National Basketball Association (NBA) teams moved in a seven-year span after there were no moves at all in the 16 years before it. Critics referred to the movement of teams to the highest-bidding city as "franchise free agency."
The following charts list movements of franchises in the modern eras of the major North American sports leagues. It does not include:
The history of the NFL fully incorporates that of the fourth American Football League, which began operation in 1960 with eight teams and became by far the most successful rival to the NFL. In 1966, the two leagues agreed to a merger that took full effect in 1970. All teams from the 1960–1969 AFL were brought intact to the NFL, and the current NFL recognizes all AFL records and statistics as its own.
Unlike in the MLB and NBA, the NHL did not temporarily move teams due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, the league temporarily abolished conferences and re-aligned divisions for the 2020-21 season, consolidating all seven Canadian teams to the North Division due to travel restrictions at the Canada–United States Border.
Only one NHL team that moved has kept its name: the Calgary Flames.
The Edmonton Oilers nearly moved to Houston in 1998, but the team remained in the city after a limited partnership raised enough money to purchase the franchise before the deadline. [9] [10] The then-Phoenix Coyotes were placed into bankruptcy with the intent to circumvent the league's relocation rules, but this was blocked by a judge. Other threats to leave came from two of the 1967 expansion teams, the Pittsburgh Penguins (on multiple occasions) and St. Louis Blues (in 1983), but ultimately stayed in their existing markets.
While none of the CFL's core Canadian franchises have moved from one market to another, the league's short-lived expansion into the United States did include one team move.
The league also attempted to move the Las Vegas Posse after their single season of 1994. Prior to the 1995 season, multiple ownership groups unsuccessfully tried to buy the team for a move to Jackson, Mississippi. Following that, plans were made to move the team to Miami, Florida as the Manatees, but plans fell through when the league chose to end the U.S. expansion before the Manatees' scheduled launch in 1996.
The CFL's expansion into the U.S. both began and ended with events that were not technically team moves, but were also not truly new teams being formed. The staff of the Ottawa Rough Riders moved from Ottawa to Shreveport, Louisiana, to become the Shreveport Pirates in 1993, but the CFL forced the team itself to be left in Ottawa, where a new owner kept the franchise alive. In 1996, the owners of the Baltimore Stallions folded the team upon the announcement that the Cleveland Browns would be moving to Baltimore (but see Cleveland Browns relocation controversy). Despite high attendance and success on the field, management felt that they would be unable to directly compete with an NFL team in the same city. The Stallions' ownership group took over the then-dormant Montreal Alouettes franchise. While the players were released from their contracts with the Stallions, many were subsequently signed to the Alouettes. The CFL and the Alouettes do not consider the Stallions' records, including the 1995 Grey Cup victory, as part of the team's legacy. The Alouettes are instead considered a continuation of the previous teams of that name.
Few esports leagues follow the city-based model of older North American professional sports leagues. Still, teams in the Call of Duty League and the now-defunct Overwatch League have moved:
The American Football League (AFL) was a major professional American football league that operated for ten seasons from 1960 until 1970, when it merged with the older National Football League (NFL), and became the American Football Conference. The upstart AFL operated in direct competition with the more established NFL throughout its existence. It was more successful than earlier rivals to the NFL with the same name, the 1926, 1936 and 1940 leagues, and the later All-America Football Conference.
The Las Vegas Posse were a Canadian Football League (CFL) team, that played at the Sam Boyd Silver Bowl in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, in the league's 1994 season as part of the CFL's botched American expansion. Lasting only one season, the Posse were one of the least successful teams in CFL history, both on the field and off.
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[Hornets president and CEO Fred] Whitfield also announced that, in collaboration with the NBA and the Pelicans, all the statistical information, records and history of Charlotte NBA basketball will be restored to the franchise. That means the Hornets will now own and have access to all the historical elements from the recent Bobcats era (2004–14) as well as the original Hornets teams that played in Charlotte....