Does a city’s population tell you how many pro teams it should have?

It’s fair to speculate that the MLB and NBA will, within the next decade or so, put franchises in at least two new cities apiece. 32 is a useful number of teams for scheduling, lending itself well to divisions of four or eight, and the allure of new markets has rarely gone long without drawing in the Big Four leagues.

Of course, there are hurdles to be hurdled in each league. Adam Silver has reiterated with no aberrations that the NBA is not interested in expanding. The MLB has stadium situations to work out in Oakland and Tampa. Expansion might not be imminent, but it’s probably coming at some point, and as A’s and Rays fans know, the possibility of relocation might be imminent. In short, it’s fair (and fun) to consider which cities might be on deck for either a new or relocated MLB, NBA, NHL, or NFL team.

All of which provokes the question of what makes a city a good candidate for professional sports in the first place.

This question is, of course, subjective. But one of the more objective pieces of the answer is that larger metropolitan areas are better-equipped to support major league athletics than smaller ones.

This isn’t to knock places like Green Bay, with a metro area population around 300,000. But the Packers are an exception in professional sports, playing in the 157^th-largest metro area in the United States (all population data in this piece comes from 2015, by the way). Aside from Winnipeg, which is larger than all but 72 American metro areas, every other team in the Big Four leagues plays in one of the 52 largest American metro areas or a Canadian metro area of equivalent size. Of the 56 metro areas to meet that criteria, 48 have professional sports teams, a portion that rises to 45 of the largest 49 and 38 or the largest 40.

In other words, population is a very good indicator of how many professional sports teams a metro area should have.

Now, before I go on, let me make clear that I’m aware much of the conversation about expansion revolves around media markets, and media markets don’t perfectly correspond with metro areas. But frankly, the data on media markets is harder to find, and with cable television, local television, and newspapers all diminishing in importance, it stands to reason that the media piece of a locale’s sports-readiness is at least marginally fading.

So, how many teams should a city have? The number ranges. Montreal has four million people living in its metro area, but only has one team. The aforementioned Green Bay also has one team, but is home to 300,000 people.

To find an average, I took the population of each metro area and counted how many professional teams reside in that area.

The San Francisco-Oakland area makes this complicated, because the 49ers technically play in San Jose’s metro area and the Raiders are slowly heading to Las Vegas. For the purposes of the calculation, I assigned Las Vegas half an NFL team, San Francisco-Oakland half an NFL team, and San Jose a full NFL team (immediately giving fodder to any supporters of the media market method, but changing the total data fairly insignificantly).

What one finds, when adding this up, is that the average metro area with at least one professional sports team in the Big Four leagues has about 1.5 million people for every team. Here’s the graph:

Once I had this number, I calculated each metro area’s “expected” number of teams, which is just their population divided by 1.5 million. I then looked at the gap between that expected number and reality, both as a percentage and just a number, and averaged out each metro area’s ranking between those numbers to find which metro areas have more teams than you’d expect, and which have fewer.

Here are the top ten at each end of the spectrum.

Metro areas with more professional teams than you’d expect given their population
Note: This doesn’t mean The Barking Crow thinks the city should have fewer teams. It just means they have a high team/population ratio.

1. Denver – 2.8M people, four teams

Coming in first in outperforming their population is Denver, home to one team in each of the Big Four leagues. To be fair, Denver has grown substantially in just the last four years, making it a city where the numbers are more outdated than most, but even with more recent data, they’d still come in at or near the top of the list. They have a full two more teams than expected.

Why so many teams in Denver?

Well, it’s a big city, but it’s also one of the only big cities for miles. Sitting where the plains meet the mountains, it draws loyalty from the Mountain West and parts of the Midwest. Only the NBA has dared put another team in the Mountain West, and Salt Lake City is at least a seven-hour drive away.

Denver also sits close to Colorado Springs, with 700,000 people in its own separate metro area, which really does bolster Denver’s media market.

2. Buffalo – 1.1M people, two teams

One of the smallest metro areas to have any professional team, Buffalo has two: the Bills and the Sabres. And despite years of talk of the Bills bolting to somewhere like Toronto, they’re staying put, at least for now.

Buffalo, part of the Rust Belt, is one of the few metro areas whose population has shrunk every decade since the 70’s, which means back when the Bills and Sabres originated, their location made a lot more sense.

3. Cleveland – 2.1M people, three teams

As with Buffalo, Cleveland has caught the brutal end of economic shifts the last fifty years, watching its population drop by 200,000 people since 1970. Which makes the Indians’ attendance woes look a lot more understandable, and the Cavaliers’ championship with LeBron James look a lot more important in keeping them around.

4. New Orleans – 1.3M people, two teams

As with Denver, New Orleans has the benefit of a big neighbor. Baton Rouge’s metro area has over 800,000 people. Presumably also helping the Saints and Pelicans (especially the Saints) is the ferocity of Louisiana’s unique identity among American states.

5. Pittsburgh – 2.4M people, three teams

Another Rust Belt city lands near the top, though Pittsburgh’s population drop has dramatically slowed in the last nine years, and there’s reason to hope the city itself might at least hold the line from 2010 in the 2020 census.

It’s interesting that the Pirates draw the “small-market” label so often while I perceive the Steelers to have a large following. Do the Steelers really have a large following? Would the Pirates have a larger following if the MLB had a salary cap? A topic beyond this blog post.

6. Minneapolis-St. Paul – 3.5M people, four teams

We’re out of the Rust Belt now (spoiler: we soon return), but still in the northern half of the U.S., which brings up an important point about this list: it would look different if we didn’t include the NHL.

Though, to be fair, the NHL makes up for under-representation of other leagues in Canada (while looking at it this way), and it was actually gone from Minnesota for a while in recent memory. Also, it supplies Raleigh with its only pro sports team, Nashville with its only Big Four team, and Tampa with its only pro sports team that isn’t either terrible or playing in a terrible stadium. So the NHL isn’t exactly a northern league.

Back to the Twin Cities specifically, they, like Denver, probably benefit from a bit of geographic isolation. They’re the largest metro area between Chicago and Seattle on I-94.

7. Green Bay – 0.3M people, one team

There it is.

As the Saints do in Louisiana, the Packers represent the state of Wisconsin at-large, rather than just Green Bay. And while the state of Wisconsin may not be Louisiana in terms of how peculiar it is in the American landscape, the Packers’ Wisconsonian identity is still meaningful, and—I’d imagine—helps their staying power. Which reinforces that media markets are important, but also could mean something about a team’s role in the culture of its place, especially when a state is more contiguous culturally than, say, Florida. And, as both franchises have shown (as have the Steelers), winning helps.

8. Milwaukee – 1.6M people, one team

Wisconsin’s biggest city has two professional teams of its own, which is about one more than you’d expect. And both are currently doing better than might be expected, both on the field/court and in the stands: the Brewers have been in the top half of the MLB in attendance each of the last two years and the Bucks have drawn good crowds relative to the capacity of the Bradley Center.

9. Tampa Bay Area – 3.0M people, three teams

Will the Rays get a new stadium? We’ll see. Without the Rays, Tampa’s about exactly where you’d expect it to be in terms of how many teams it has, and exactly where you wouldn’t expect it to be in that one of those plays in the NHL.

10. Detroit – 4.3M people, four teams

Told you we’d be back.

While the city of Detroit has watched its population free-fall since 1950, the metro area has hung in there in terms of size, even if it hasn’t grown since 1970. As with Denver, New Orleans, and the teams of Minnesota and Wisconsin, there’s no reason to expect these teams to go anywhere.

Metro areas with fewer teams than you’d expect given their population
Expansion candidates? Some of them, yes.

1. Inland Empire (Riverside-San Bernardino-Palm Springs-etc., CA) – 4.5M people, zero teams

Bet you didn’t know the Inland Empire had enough people to support about three professional teams. Because I didn’t, and I know a little bit about metro areas.

To be fair, this is something that I’d guess a lot of people would lump in with Los Angeles, regionally (I didn’t know it was its own, though it sure has a cool name). But they’re their own thing, evidently, and it’s fair to wonder whether they’d ever get a team. Maybe the Chargers would move out there if the Rams kept being the more popular NFL team in L.A.?

2. Austin – 2.0M people, zero teams

Again, no teams here, though there are a few billboards up about the new MLS team, which comes in so far from now that I will start assuming they’re never coming unless those billboards begin to include specific dates (also, I often forget that the MLS season doesn’t run on the same calendar as European Soccer, and even had to google it just now to be sure it didn’t).

Could Austin support professional sports?

I’m not qualified to say, even as a resident. My perception is that Austin is home to more people who aren’t “from there” than is the norm. My perception also is that Austin’s urban/suburban ratio is high, and I’m not sure how that translates when it comes to attendance/general team support. On the one hand: young people. On the other hand: suburban dads sure love sports. Still, Austin pops up now and then on lists of cities to which the MLB might expand.

3. Hampton Roads (Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA) – 1.7M people, zero teams

Another sneaky-big metro area with a cool name. Again, not a lot of buzz about expansion here, though it would make a lot of sense geographically for the MLB, and wouldn’t be a bad fit for the NBA either. What location to use in the team’s name is another question in a metro area with three cities reasonably close together in size (Virginia Beach is the biggest by a fair margin, but doesn’t exactly dwarf the other two). If it were an MLB team, it would probably be a terrible name like “Virginia Beach Tropical Storms also representing Norfolk and Newport News.” If it were an NBA team, it would probably be something cool, like just “Hampton Roads” with no mascot/nickname.

4. Providence – 1.6M people, zero teams

Could Providence support professional sports? I honestly have no idea. I have little knowledge regarding Providence. Turns out the Providence Steam Roller won the 1928 NFL championship, though, and the Providence Steamrollers existed at one point in what became the NBA. If nothing else, Providence has demonstrated a commitment to naming its professional sports teams after steamrollers, which I think we can all support.

5. Montreal – 4.0M people, one team

I wonder if the Montreal Rays would still call themselves the Rays, like how the Utah Jazz call themselves the Jazz. Either way, my perception is that Montreal is a leader in the market for a new or relocated MLB team.

6. Louisville – 1.3M people, zero teams

Being so close to Cincinnati, it makes sense that Louisville doesn’t have pro sports.

But it’s also in a state that loves college basketball, Cincinnati doesn’t have an NBA team, and while the Pacers are close by, I think it’s fair to say Louisville and Indianapolis are culturally incompatible to the point where Louisvillains should not be expected to align themselves with the Pacers as a “hometown team.”

7. Richmond – 1.3M people, zero teams

To answer the earlier question about what location a Hampton Roads team would use, it’s probably Virginia, because Richmond is very close to Hampton Roads, meaning the media markets likely aren’t dissimilar. It’s also fairly close to D.C., though (less than a two-hour drive), so it probably isn’t getting sports anytime soon.

8. Hartford – 1.2M people, zero teams

Hartford, Connecticut is not part of the New York metro area. Officially. But it’s understandable why the Whalers have not been replaced. The MLB would likely not want to drop a team between the Red Sox and Yankees, but it isn’t outlandish to imagine the NBA considering Hartford if the city were interested.

9. New York City – 20.2M people, nine teams

I went to ten on these lists because I wanted to show how big New York is. The data says it should have 13.65 teams. There are already three NHL teams in its metro area. It’s unlikely it’ll get more, but the NHL making its own, New York-only division, isn’t impossible to imagine. It also isn’t impossible to imagine the Knicks deteriorating to the point where they begin an internal civil war that ends with them split into seven teams—one each for Manhattan-minus-Harlem, Harlem, the Bronx, Queens, Staten Island, Yonkers, and Shanghai.

10. San Diego – 3.3M people, one team

What were the Chargers thinking? Was the stadium situation really that bad? Who would willfully leave San Diego?

Still, we must support the efforts of the Universe to put the Coachella Chargers in Palm Springs beginning with the 2026 season. Sorry, surviving Chargers fans.