Recently (two months ago), a group texter from Los Angeles asked, “Is Philly America’s best sports city?”
The answer is yes. That much is clear. Nobody matches Philadelphia when it comes to being engaged with their professional sports teams in an endearing manner. They care, and they aren’t douchey about it, they’re just riotous when they win and also when they lose. Something to aspire to, but also something we’ll never be able to reach. Philly is one of a kind.
Still, let’s rank the whole list, since there are thirteen places with all four Big Four sports in their metro areas:
1. Philadelphia
As stated, Philly is the best.
2. Chicago
This might be hometown bias, but I also get a lot of mileage out of piling onto Bears fans, so I think it’s more justified than I’m afraid it is.
What Chicago has going for it is that it cares about every sport. Every sport has ardent, passionate fans. There’s something of a hierarchy—the White Sox are on the bottom—but no single sport itself is a forgotten child. It’s also hard to rival how great Chicago was with those Bulls teams, and actually I’m talking about the Derrick Rose/Joakim Noah ones. That was special.
3. Boston
Boston would be higher, even at the top, if its fans were not such notoriously pompous assholes (important distinction from Philly assholes, who are the opposite of pompous and therefore beloved). At the same time, though, it wouldn’t be Boston. Also, Boston doesn’t have that many transplants. Or if they do, they aren’t allowed to talk. Not having transplants keeps the bandwagon leaner. ALSO, Boston is still a Red Sox town, judging by what you see people wearing around town. Sports fans who follow baseball, basketball, and hockey are likelier to be real fans because those sports are more of a grind to follow than the NFL.
4. Detroit
You ever know someone that’s going through so much shit that you can’t relate, but every now and then you look over and they’re doing something incredible through all the grief or hardship or whatever that you’re kind of in awe?
That’s Detroit. They aren’t winning. But dammit, they keep showing up.
5. Los Angeles
I’m high on Los Angeles as a sports town, and this is why:
I know I said Chicago was good because no sports were stepchildren. But that’s what fits Chicago. What fits Los Angeles is only caring about the Lakers and Dodgers and thoroughly ignoring the Clippers, Rams, Chargers, Kings, and Angels (alas, though the Angels aren’t in Los Angeles, by using metro areas we did include them in our rubric, which was a mistake by us). It would have been disingenuous for Angelenos to have shown up to the Rams’ Super Bowl parade, so they didn’t do it! Bravo.
6. Washington
Is this a reach? Hear me out.
Thanks to the obscene growth of the bureaucratic state, there are a lot more Washington lifers than our founders designed there to be. Thanks to the nature of who works in politics these days, there are also a lot of upper-middle-class middle school boys in the D.C. suburbs. Who’s a good sports fan? An upper-middle-class middle school boy. They have all this pent up evolutionary energy to expend on keeping their family alive but their family’s doing just fine so instead they lose their minds about sports. So long as video games aren’t keeping them away, that is. Nobody does delusional like middle schoolers, and Nats fans are well-stocked in the middle school ranks. Those middle schoolers turn into nerdy college baseball fans. Because all suburban D.C. kids go to college, too. Most educated place in the country is Falls Church, Virginia.
7. New York
New York’s teams are mostly cool, but they’re overshadowed by the city itself, and not in the Los Angeles way where that’s the point.
8. Minneapolis
Minneapolis fans are a whiny bunch, and they entirely justifiably don’t actually like their hockey team, because the North Stars should still exist and the Wild are a sad replacement, like the Granite City that went into the spot in the strip mall that used to be a Mexican diner which delivered its food on model trains. Minneapolis fans do really like sports, though. Some of the same phenomena as D.C. happening there.
9. San Francisco
I guess we’re technically including Oakland in this, but Oakland’s just the A’s now anyway, and they don’t move the needle.
The last thing you think of when you think of San Francisco is Danny Tanner coming home in his Niners jacket. That’s a problem for a city trying to be a sports town.
10. Denver
Denver has too many transplants to be a good sports town, for one thing, but it also only really cares about the Broncos, and to go back to our Boston point, it’s easy to only care about the NFL team. You only have to tune in on weekends, it’s the shortest of the seasons, the games are easy to follow and you only really need to have an opinion on the quarterback to be able to have conversations about it. This isn’t football’s fault—it’s why football’s so popular—but if someone’s a “big sports fan” and only cares about the NFL…they aren’t that big a sports fan. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just a different thing.
11. Miami
Miami might as well be Bermuda. It’s playing a different game.
12. Dallas
The thing about Dallas here is that Dallas is a good college football town, but that’s not the same as being a good sports town, because everyone is caring about teams that exist somewhere else, and not everyone is caring about the same teams. Next: The Cowboys aren’t Dallas’s team so much as they’re Texas’s team. The Mavs are Dallas’s team, which is a cool twist, but they aren’t carrying enough weight to get the city above Miami.
13. Phoenix
I’m sorry. You just…you have to have an identity. I don’t know what Phoenix’s identity is. I think it’s backyard swimming pools. Which is cool! But not very “sports town.”
