Major North American professional sports leagues

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A satellite composite image of North America. Clickable map
A satellite composite image of North America. Clickable map

Major professional sports league, or simply major league, is the term used in North America to refer to the highest professional division in any team sport. The term "major league" was probably first used in reference to the top flight of professional American baseball.[citation needed] The designation of major league is as opposed to minor league, which are lower division and/or developmental leagues below the major league in the national sport-tier hierarchy; and amateur leagues, in which the athletes receive no salary. The designation as to whether a league is a major or minor league is made by the national or international governing body for that sport, not by the popular perception of that sport (e.g., TV ratings or number of articles in the daily newspaper). In any country or region, the top major leagues generally will have the best athletes, the largest-capacity stadiums, the largest and most active fan bases, the most lucrative television contracts, and, therefore, the largest revenues and player salaries. In North America, the top major leagues are generally accepted to be: the NFL, MLB, the NBA, and the NHL. Lower on the totem pole, but at the top level of their respective sports, are Major League Soccer (MLS), the National Lacrosse League and Major League Lacrosse; in Mexico, the Primera Division of the FMF holds dominant sway over that country's sporting landscape.

Note that in North America, the term "major league" is usually limited to team sports, even though individual-driven spectator sports such as golf, tennis and auto racing) are also very popular.

Contents

[edit] Top four: NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL

Thus, the most commonly accepted list of the top four major leagues in North America is:

Since the four major leagues listed above are those listed as the top four major leagues, the sports they play (baseball, basketball, American football and ice hockey) are often referred to as the top four "major professional sports" or even just the top four "major sports" in North America ("the Big 4"). As of 2005, thirteen American metropolitan areas have at least one team in each of the top four major leagues; these cities are sometimes said to have a Grand Slam.

The top four major leagues each have revenues that can be many times greater than the payrolls of less popular major leagues in North America. The best players can become cultural icons to tens of millions of Americans plus millions of Canadians because the leagues enjoy a dominant place in U.S. popular culture combined with a significant place in Canadian popular culture.

In terms of overall league revenue, the NFL, MLB and the NBA (in that order) rank as the three of the four most lucrative sports leagues in the world, the fourth being the Premier League of English soccer. Based on June 2006 exchange rates the NHL ranks as the world's fifth most lucrative league, slightly behind the Premier League. However, the Premier League has only 20 clubs — depending on exchange rates and what is defined as revenue, the Premier League's average per team revenues are very close to, and could be ranked ahead of, the NBA's.

[edit] More major leagues: MLS and the NLL/MLL

Major League Soccer is probably the next biggest major league in North America after ice hockey (team sports) in terms of popularity, attendance, facilities, and media coverage.[citation needed] While soccer is a giant of sports participation in the US, it hasn't achieved the same level of success as a spectator sport, except for perhaps the league's inaugural season in 1996, which posted impressive attendance numbers. MLS has, however, experienced tremendous growth, stabilization, and a recent expansion over the past couple of years, as well as a huge amount of publicity and coverage with the landmark signing of David Beckham in 2007 for $50 million in direct salary plus $200 million in other income over five years, new stadia, and new national TV deals, including ESPN, HDNet, FSC, and Univision.

Major League Lacrosse and the National Lacrosse League are other major leagues in North America, though a little further down from the MLS on the totem pole. MLL is outdoor, starting in the year 2000 it is much younger, and plays in many college football and MLS stadiums, while the NLL is indoor, older, and plays in many NBA, NHL, and smaller arenas. Which is more successful is debatable, though each have some level of success.

[edit] Traits of the top North American major leagues

[edit] Franchise stability

All of the top four major leagues exhibit the stability of most of their franchises. No team from any of the top four major leagues has collapsed outright in decades. Although all of the top four major leagues have had at least one franchise relocate to another city in the last decade, relocation of teams is generally uncommon compared to the less successful major leagues in North American history. It should be noted that all four of the top major leagues have had frequent franchise collapses and relocations in their early histories, but these events became much less frequent by the time these major leagues reached their "top four" status.

The major leagues in North America are different from most leagues outside North America in that there is no promotion and relegation system. The same teams compete in the leagues each year. The worst teams are not relegated each year to a second tier league, to be replaced by the best teams from the second tier league. One could even argue the worst teams are rewarded for their futility, as the worst teams receive a higher position in the following year's draft for new players, which in football and basketball, usually consists of players who have played the sport in college. A notable result of the "closed shop" aspect of the major leagues is that the franchises have average book values that are considerably more than those of the clubs of the Premier League (which as noted above has comparable average team revenues to the major North American leagues but also a relegation system).

The most recent team from one of the top four major leagues to fold outright were the original Baltimore Bullets in 1955, while the last team to cease operations were the Cleveland Barons (formerly the California Golden Seals), which were merged into the Minnesota North Stars (now the Dallas Stars) organization in 1978, two years after moving to Ohio from California. The last NHL team to fold outright were the New York Americans in 1942. (The NBA and NHL did however, merge with rival leagues in the 1970s. During these mergers only four franchises in each rival league, the American Basketball Association and World Hockey Association, survived: the remaining ABA and WHA franchises went out of business.) The last NFL team to fold were the Dallas Texans in 1952 and no MLB team has folded since 1899, when four National League teams ceased to exist.

The top four major leagues all expanded within the last decade and currently have either 30 or, in the case of the NFL, 32 teams. The newest major league team is the Charlotte Bobcats, who joined the NBA in 2004. The newest NFL team is the Houston Texans, who became the NFL's 32nd team in 2002 after the NFL was unable to find a viable ownership group and stadium plan in Los Angeles. The newest NHL teams are the Columbus Blue Jackets and Minnesota Wild, who began play in 2000, while the newest MLB teams are the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who joined the NL and AL respectively in 1998.

Recent expansion franchises have commanded huge entry fees, which are generally held to represent the price the new team must pay to gain its share of the existing teams' often guaranteed revenue streams. The Houston Texans paid an unprecedented $700 million to join the NFL. By comparison, the Charlotte Bobcats paid $300 million to join the NBA. The Diamondbacks and Devil Rays paid $130 million each to join MLB while the Blue Jackets and Wild paid $80 million each to join the NHL.

Many sports analysts and owners believe that 30 is the optimal number of teams for a major league, which is only two below the maximum number any league has ever had. Thus, future expansion is by no means certain, especially by the NFL which is now over the 30-team threshold. The NFL is still anxious to return to Los Angeles (see below) but many believe that NFL officials would privately prefer to re-locate an existing team in order to avoid altering its current eight four-team division alignment. Even if expansion franchises could continue to command huge fees, as more teams join the leagues the owners' share of the fees is constantly reduced. Even if large markets remain without a team, a point could still be reached where one-time expansion revenues are offset by chronic stresses such as a drain on the talent pool (which could have a noticeable impact on the quality of play and thus start turning off fans) and saturation of the national television market (if the leagues are unable to negotiate higher fees from the television networks, then additional teams will simply cause the existing television revenue to be split into smaller shares).

[edit] Franchise locations

See also: List of U.S. and Canadian cities by number of major professional sports franchises

Major leagues tend to have franchises only in the largest cities and most heavily-populated market areas, although this is not always true. Most teams are in metro areas having populations over two million — all metropolitan areas of this size or larger have at least one team. This typically means at least one franchise (and often two) per league in each of the New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles areas. There are two major exceptions: The NFL has not had a franchise in L.A. since 1995 and the Green Bay Packers survive in professional sports' smallest metropolitan area (less than 300,000) thanks to a unique community ownership, and their proximity to the larger Milwaukee area, not to mention the loyalty of their fanbase. The Packers are the last remaining link to the NFL's small-town Midwest roots — many such teams existed in the NFL before 1934; since then only the Packers remain.

The Utah Jazz are located in the smallest television market of any U.S. team (the Green Bay Packers' television market includes the much larger city of Milwaukee 120 miles / 200 km to its south). They relocated during a turbulent period in NBA history and have enjoyed strong support from a very large geographical area devoid of other major sport teams. Utah is also the least populous state with a team.

Professional sport leagues as we know them today evolved during the decades between the Civil War and World War II, when the railroad was the main means of intercity transportation. As a result, virtually all major league teams were concentrated in the northeastern quarter of the United States, within roughly the radius of a day-long train ride. No MLB teams existed south or west of St. Louis, the NFL was confined to the Great Lakes and the Northeast, and the NBA (which didn't exist before 1946) spanned from the Quad Cities to Boston. The NHL remained confined to six cities in the Northeast, Great Lakes and eastern Canada, though during its earliest years it contested the Stanley Cup at season's end with teams from western Canada and the Pacific Northwest. College, minor league and amateur teams existed from coast to coast in all four sports, but rarely played outside of their home region for regular season games.

As travel and settlement patterns changed, so did the geography of professional sports. With the arguable exception of the western hockey teams which competed for the Stanley Cup in the early 20th century, there were no major league teams in the far west until after World War II. The first west coast major-league franchise was the NFL's Los Angeles Rams, who moved from Cleveland in 1946. The same year, the All-America Football Conference began play, with teams in Los Angeles and San Francisco (not to mention the Miami Seahawks, who became the only southern-based major league franchise, although Louisville, Kentucky had previously had shortlived baseball and football teams). Baseball would not extend west until 1958 in the controversial move of both New York-based National League franchises. The NBA would follow in 1960 with the move of the Minneapolis Lakers to Los Angeles, while the NHL would not have a west coast presence until it doubled in size in 1967. With the exception of the Los Angeles Kings, the NHL's initial franchises in the Southern and Western United States were ultimately unsuccessful - teams in Oakland, Atlanta, Kansas City and Denver all re-located. From 1982 until 1991, the Kings were the only U.S.-based NHL franchise south of St. Louis and/or west of Bloomington, Minnesota.

Since then, as newer, fast-growing Sunbelt areas such as Phoenix and Dallas became prominent, the major sports leagues expanded or franchises relocated (usually quite controversially) to service these communities. Most major areas are well-represented, with all but seven continental U.S. metropolitan agglomerations over one million people hosting at least one major sports franchise. As of 2006, the largest metropolitan area without a major professional sports franchise is California's Inland Empire. However, since this area is adjacent to the Los Angeles metro area and serves as a local market for those teams, no major league franchise is likely to move there without purporting to represent L.A. The most populous independent metropolitan area outside of a major franchise's local market is the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, nearly 200 miles from the nearest major sports teams in Washington, D.C. It previously hosted a successful franchise in the American Basketball Association. Virginia is also the most populous state without a team within its borders.

Another large metropolitan area without any major league franchises is Las Vegas, which is expected to surpass the Hampton Roads area in metropolitan population before the 2010 Census to become the largest metropolis without a franchise. Despite the area's explosive growth, all four leagues are wary of placing a team there due to the city's legal gambling industry, which includes sports betting. In the U.S. especially, as contrasted with Europe, for a professional sports organization to have any association, real or perceived, with gambling interests has been taboo ever since the 1919 World Series scandal and all four leagues forbid its personnel to have any type of contact or association with anything related to gambling of any kind. Additionally, the city's abundance of entertainment options might make it difficult for a Las Vegas-based team to attract a large audience. The NBA hosted its 2007 All-Star Weekend in Las Vegas, at which point both the league and the city expressed interest in locating a team there. However, NBA Commissioner David Stern says the city will need a new arena larger and more modern than the Thomas & Mack Center before it will even host another All-Star Weekend.[1] While the event was initially regarded as successful and incident-free, media reports of criminal incidents (including two shootings related to the event) that began to surface after the conclusion of the weekend may hurt the city's chances of gaining an NBA or any major league team.[2]

When the WHA and NHL merged, the NHL inherited teams in Canadian metro areas that were under one million in population at the time, these being Edmonton, Winnipeg and Quebec City. The NHL later added teams in Calgary (via relocation from Atlanta) and Ottawa (via expansion). The distinctive place hockey holds in Canadian culture allowed these franchises to compete with teams in larger cities for some time. However, the teams in Winnipeg and Quebec City were eventually moved to the U.S. The three remaining "small market" Canadian teams have survived largely because their markets are growing rapidly — all three metro areas in question are now over one million in population and are thus comparable in size to some of the smaller American metro areas with teams in other leagues such as Salt Lake City, Jacksonville and Memphis.

Although Calgary and Edmonton remain the two smallest television markets of any of the major leagues as of 2006, any "small market" disadvantage in the two Albertan cities has been largely off-set in recent years by the fact that the oil-driven Albertan economy is one of the fastest growing in the world, and not uncoincidentally Alberta also has an unusually large proportion of high-income earners. High resource prices have contributed to a rapid appreciation of the Canadian dollar against its U.S. counterpart, mitigating the financial problems brought on by unfavourable exchange rates which plagued many Canadian franchises in the 1990s. Alberta's GDP per capita is the highest of any Canadian province or U.S. state even after exchange rates are taken into account. Alberta's total GDP is over C$200 billion as of 2005 and expected to exceed US$200 billion in 2006, surpassing Indiana which, perhaps not coincidentally, also has two teams. Alberta's economy is well over twice the size of Utah's (less than $90 billion as of 2006), thus it is not difficult to explain how Alberta can support two major league teams if Indiana can also support two and Utah can support one.

The first Major League Baseball team in Canada was the Montreal Expos, who began play in 1969 and were one of the most unprofitable franchises in the sport. They became the Washington Nationals in 2005. The Toronto Blue Jays, who began play in 1977, have done much better.

The Toronto Huskies were a charter member of what is now known as the NBA, but they only lasted from 1946 to 1947. The NBA returned to Toronto in 1995 when the Raptors joined the league. The same year, the Vancouver Grizzlies began play: they moved to Memphis in 2001.

The NHL has operated on both sides of the Canadian-American border since 1924, and there were strong American-based clubs even before the NHL was founded in 1917. The first US-based club to compete for the Stanley Cup was the Portland Rosebuds of the Pacific Coast Hockey League, who lost the 1916 series to the Montreal Canadiens (then of the National Hockey Association.) The next year, the PCHA's Seattle Metropolitans took the Cup away from the Canadiens. The Boston Bruins are the oldest United States based franchise in the NHL, having played in the league since 1924.

The NFL has never attempted to enter the Canadian market, leaving Canada to the Canadian Football League, which plays under significantly different rules than those used in the United States. The CFL was formed in the 1950s from the merger of two competing leagues, one based in the west and the other in the east. The CFL briefly expanded south of the border in the mid-1990s: the venture was unsuccessful, although the Baltimore Stallions (aka "CFL Colts") did draw respectable crowds and win a Grey Cup before becoming the third (and current) incarnation of the Montreal Alouettes in the wake of the Cleveland Browns' decision to move to Baltimore. The CFL and NFL forged a working relationship less than a year later, with the NFL providing an interest-free loan to the CFL in exchange for the right to sign CFL players entering the option year of theit contracts. Recently, there has been speculation that an NFL franchise would be located in Toronto, to balance out a new team in Los Angeles. No other U.S. metro area with more than half of Toronto's population lacks an NFL team.

[edit] Ownership restrictions

All four major leagues have strict rules regarding who may own a team, and also place some restrictions on what other sort of activities the owners may engage in. To prevent the perception of being in a conflict of interest, the major leagues generally do not allow anyone to own a stake in more than one franchise, a rule adopted after several high-profile controversies involving ownership of multiple baseball teams in the 1890s. Notably, Major League Soccer has been unable to adopt this sort of league structure — it operates as a single entity league and for the sake of stability has been forced to allow soccer enthusiatsts such as Lamar Hunt to own multiple teams at least for now (see below). However, there was one recent exception to this rule in the major leagues — after being blocked in their bid to eliminate or "contract" two franchises in 2001, Major League Baseball purchased the Montreal Expos from its owners. Although MLB eventually relocated the team to Washington, D.C., the franchise (now known as the Nationals) remained owned by the other 29 MLB clubs. In May 2006, the team was sold to a local group lead by Theodore N. Lerner.

All of the top four major leagues grant some sort of territorial exclusivity to their owners, precluding the addition of another team in the same area unless the current team's owners consent, which is generally obtained in exchange for compensation and/or residual rights regarding the new franchise. For example, to obtain the consent of Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos to place an MLB team in Washington (which is about 35 miles from Oriole Park at Camden Yards), a deal was struck under the terms of which television and radio broadcast rights to Nationals games are handled by the Orioles franchise, who formed a new network (the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network) to produce and distribute the games for both franchises on local affiliates and cable/satellite systems.

Some major leagues, such as the NFL have even stronger ownership restrictions. The NFL currently forbids large ownership groups or publicly-traded corporations from purchasing NFL teams. This policy allows the league office to deal with individual owners instead of boards of directors, although the Packers' ownership group was grandfathered into the current policy. The NFL also forbids its majority owners from owning any sports teams (except for soccer teams and Arena Football League teams) in other NFL cities, and prohibits owners from investing in casinos or being otherwise involved in gambling operations. (NFL owners may freely own soccer teams without league restrictions because Lamar Hunt won a court challenge stemming from his investment in the old North American Soccer League. When he died in December 2006, he owned 2 teams in Major League Soccer, based in Dallas and Columbus, and he had only sold a third team, in Kansas City, less than four months before.)

Regarding territorial rights, the main concern for many team owners has become television revenue although the possibility of reduced ticket sales remains a concern for some teams. Because the National Football League shares all of its television revenue equally, and most of its teams sell out their stadiums with little difficulty, some NFL owners are seen as being less reluctant to share their territories. For example, the return of the NFL to Baltimore in 1996 attracted no serious opposition from the Washington Redskins organization.

[edit] Weathering challenges from rival leagues

All of the majors have bested at least one rival league formed with the intention of being just as "big" as the established league, often by signing away star players and by locating franchises in cities that were already part of the existing league. In many cases, the major leagues have absorbed the most successful franchises from its failing rival, or merged outright with it.

[edit] Player development

Generally, all of the top major leagues possess highly evolved and sophisticated player development systems that they utilize to develop and train personnel.

  • The vast majority of MLB players are developed through the minor league baseball system. Prospective players traditionally were drafted or (before the first MLB draft in 1965) signed to a contract with a MLB team directly after high school and then assigned to the appropriate minor league level for development. With the growth of college baseball in the past few decades, more and more players opt to play at the collegiate level and delay entry into the MLB draft. Individual teams' large scouting staffs have given way to smaller staffs and subscriptions to commercial player scouting services. Entering the majors directly from high school or college is almost unknown; most of the few that have were quickly reassigned to the minors. MLB clubs have also recruited many players from the Japanese leagues.
  • College and high school basketball produce most of the NBA's talent, though minimum age rules have ended the NBA's practice of drafting players directly from high school beginning in 2006. The NBA D-League supplies the NBA to an extent, though NBA teams more frequently recruit talent from European and Latin American professional leagues. The D-League was recently implemented in 2001 by the NBA to help with control of player development and market reach, which a minor league system provides.
  • Semi-pro football and minor leagues such as the Continental Football League once flourished up to the 1950s, but today the source for almost all NFL players is college football. The NFL does maintain its own six-team minor league, NFL Europa, which also serves the dual purpose of introducing the game of American football in European markets. NFL teams also recruit a number of players from indoor leagues, and occasionally signs players from the Canadian Football League.
  • Each NHL team has an affiliate in North America's top-tier minor hockey league, the American Hockey League, and in lower leagues such as the Central Hockey League or ECHL. For decades, the traditional route to the NHL has been through junior hockey and the Canadian Hockey League (CHL), generally regarded as the world's premier competition for 15- through 20-year-olds. In recent decades, NHL teams have drafted and/or signed prospects from top European amateur and professional organizations, and a growing number of NHL hopefuls are forgoing the quasi-professional CHL in favor of NCAA Division I college hockey. Additionally, the US now has two Junior A hockey leagues that provide many NHL players (some via NCAA hockey) in the USHL and NAHL. Regardless of which route hockey players take to sign an NHL contract, almost all are initially assigned to an affiliate in their NHL team's minor league system for development.

[edit] Television exposure

All of the top four major leagues have had television contracts with at least one of the original "big three" U.S. broadcast television networks (CBS, NBC, and ABC) since those networks' early years, indicative of the sports' widespread appeal since their inception, continuing today additionally with FOX. Regular season games, as well as important contests such as championship and all-star games are often televised in prime time. In the last generation, fast-growing cable and satellite networks have taken a larger chunk of the major sports' pie. Three of the four major sports now have entire sports networks dedicated just to each of them. NBA TV launched in 1999, with NFL Network and NHL Network following.

Major League Baseball had announced plans for their own network, but then dropped them to attempt to start a national sports network with FOX. Those plans were dropped as well, after MLB and FOX failed to acquire a late season package of NFL games that went to NFL Network.

Comparing the sizes of television contracts, the NFL is by far the largest (reportedly $2.2 billion US for the 2012 season), with the NBA and MLB second and third ($500 million and $479 million respectively). The NHL is in a distant fourth place ($120 million), a disparity those who wish to exclude the NHL from the top four major leagues often point to. Since 1952 it has been broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Hockey Night in Canada. The 2006 Stanley Cup Finals attracted 2.63 million viewer on the CBC.

The NHL began airing games on NBC starting in January 2006 and the NHL Network, currently only available in Canada, will soon be available to U.S. cable and satellite subscribers. In addition, the NHL broadcasts games nationally on Versus, generally on Monday and Tuesday nights. Many regular season games are also broadcast on regional sports networks (such as FSN), which can vary on contract worth by region or team.

[edit] High player salaries

The average annual salary for players in the four major leagues is about $2.9 million in 2004, although player salaries can range from $300,000 for backup players to $20 million for superstars.

  • NBA players have the highest average player salaries of the four leagues at $4.9 million; however, their teams also have the smallest rosters.
  • The NFL has the highest average team payroll and a salary cap that will exceed $100 million for the first time under the new collective bargaining agreement with the NFL's players union. However, NFL payrolls distributed among rosters that are far larger than the other three leagues, making their players among the lowest paid on the average at $1.3 million (although this average is likely to increase under the new CBA).
  • Following the settlement of the 2004-05 NHL lockout, NHL players were also due to be paid about $1.3 million on average, although this too is set to increase because the lockout did not have the adverse effect on league revenues that was expected. Before the lockout, NHL player salaries were approaching MLB averages.
  • MLB is in the middle at about $2.5 million per player. MLB is now alone among the major leagues in that it lacks any form of a salary cap and has enacted only modest forms of revenue sharing and luxury taxes, and compared to the other leagues there is a far greater disparity between MLB payrolls. The New York Yankees had the highest payroll of any American sports team in 2006 when they paid $194 million in players' salaries - nearly twice the NFL salary cap and nearly thirteen times the payroll of the Florida Marlins who spent about $15 million (significantly less than the mandatory minimum team payrolls in the NFL and NHL).

[edit] Dominance of the respective sport

One other trait that each of the top four major leagues share is that they are the premier competitions of their respective sport on the world stage.

There are thriving professional ice hockey, baseball, and basketball leagues around the world which are in a position to challenge their North American counterparts for dominance on and off the playing surface. Major League Baseball is increasingly luring away the stars from the Japanese leagues, the European hockey leagues have become a major source of star talent for National Hockey League clubs and the National Basketball Association frequently recruits talent from professional leagues in Europe and Latin America.

[edit] Baseball, basketball, and hockey

The perceived lack of competition from the rest of the world has contributed to the long-standing but controversial practice of the American media dubbing the champions of MLB, the NBA and the NFL the world champions (although only the MLB title is officially billed as a world title). The early Stanley Cup champions from both the NHL and the early leagues the NHL eventually displaced were also called world champions in the early decades of professional hockey by Americans and Canadians alike. However, that practice fell out of favor in the latter half of the 20th century. The International Ice Hockey Federation has proposed a world championship playoff between the Stanley Cup winners and the champions of the European Hockey League (see below).

If the popularity of baseball and basketball keeps growing in various countries outside of the United States, some think that the NBA and MLB may begin to place franchises in foreign markets (other than Canada, where each league already has a franchise in Toronto). The popularity of baseball in Southeast Asia and Central America is growing, along with the talent of prospective players from the regions. Meanwhile, the popularity of basketball has grown to be the second highest in the world (following football (soccer)).[citation needed]

However, one major detractor against foreign expansion by MLB or the NBA is that the sports in question enjoy much of their popularity in relatively poor countries that would probably be unable to financially support a sports franchise using the American model. The only clear exception to this would be the popularity of baseball in Japan, but well-established baseball leagues already exist in that country.

Due to the popularity of hockey in some of the most prosperous parts of Europe, many believe that the major league with the best chance of success outside North America would be the NHL. This has led to the possibility of European NHL franchises being discussed in the past, although NHL officials have repeatedly said they have no current plans to create a European division. The most that has come out of this has been the "Super Series" tour in the 1970s and 80s where the Soviet club teams played NHL teams in exhibition games[1]. During the first and most famous of these tours Red Army Moscow played the Montreal Canadiens in what the media called an unofficial world championship. At the time the Soviet League had comparable talent to the NHL, since then however NHL teams have enticed away most the elite players from the former Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Professional leagues in Sweden, Finland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland also have a high level of talent, but the higher salaries and elite level of play offered in the NHL has also lured away many of the best players. Significantly, ice hockey is either popular in countries with a relatively low average income (e.g. Russia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Belarus, Kazakhstan) or a very small population (e.g. Switzerland, Finland). In the largest and most populous nations of Europe, such as France and the UK, hockey is not a major sport. Germany is a partial exception; although hockey is clearly not the most popular sport in Germany.

As mentioned above, the IIHF has proposed that instead of a direct NHL presence in Europe a world championship playoff between the Stanley Cup winners and the champions of the European Hockey League should be held each year. [2] The NHL's position on this proposal is not entirely clear, but many believe that the players union would be unlikely to support it.

Recently talks about NBA franchises being located in Europe have intensified. For logistical reasons it would be necessary to have a minimum of two and probably four or more teams in Europe, so that visiting North American teams could have a "European Swing." Possible cities for such expansion include London, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Cologne, Berlin, Rome and Moscow. Although current NBA commissioner David Stern and former NBA star Michael Jordan are among those who have endorsed the concept of NBA teams in Europe, increasing cooperation between the NBA and ULEB, the body that organizes the Euroleague, may make a permanent NBA presence in Europe less likely, at least for the foreseeable future. In 2005, the two bodies agreed to organize a summer competition known as the NBA Europe Live Tour featuring four NBA teams and four Euroleague clubs, with the first competition taking place in 2006. [3]

A major obstacle for anyone trying to establish either an NBA or NHL presence in Europe is that with soccer being in the dominant position that it enjoys on that continent, building state of the art indoor arenas suitable for ice hockey and/or basketball has not become a priority in European cities until very recently. No arena likely to meet the standards of either league existed anywhere in Europe until the Manchester Evening News Arena opened in 1995, followed by Cologne's Kölnarena in 1998. Two more NBA/NHL-caliber arenas opened in 2004—the Olympic Indoor Hall in Athens and Sazka Arena in Prague—and another such arena, Belgrade Arena opened in 2005. A new arena is scheduled to open in London by 2007, and plans are in the works for NBA/NHL-caliber venues in Berlin, Moscow and Madrid.

[edit] Gridiron football

The NFL has the least international exposure of the top four major leagues, American football being the least international of the top four major league sports, yet it is the most popular professional league in the United States. In the 1950s and 1960s, selected NFL teams would travel north to Canada to play a CFL team in pre-season "American Bowl" games. The NFL has also attempted to promote its game worldwide by scheduling selected pre-season games since 1976 in Mexico, Europe, Australia, and Japan [4] and through NFL Europa, although the latter has largely failed outside Germany. Starting in 2005, the NFL has begun holding one regular season game in Mexico City. The 2005 matchup between the San Francisco 49ers and Arizona Cardinals drew a crowd of over 103,000 to Azteca Stadium, making it the largest attendance at an NFL regular season game [5]. (A 1994 crowd of over 112,000 at Azteca Stadium is the largest to attend a pre-season game.) Additional overseas games were added for 2007: a pre-season game in Beijing and a regular-season game at the New Wembley Stadium in London, [6] and becoming the NFL's first venture in the UK since the collapse of two NFL Europa teams based there.

The NFL has a working agreement with the Canadian Football League (CFL), which is second in popularity only to the NHL in that country. There has also been speculation that a franchise would be located in Toronto, to balance out returning a team to Los Angeles (the only metro area in the U.S. larger than Toronto, or even larger than half Toronto's size that lacks an NFL team). Despite this, the prospect of foreign NFL franchises in the relative near future is unlikely due to gridiron football's lack of popularity outside of Canada and the US.

[edit] See also

  • List of sports attendance figures - a summary of total and average attendances for the major North American sports and many other sports leagues from around the world.

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.pahrumpvalleytimes.com/2007/Feb-21-Wed-2007/sports/12698448.html
  2. ^ http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2007/Feb-20-Tue-2007/news/12693500.html
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