Franchise relocations in North America

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Main article: Professional sports league organization § Structure of North American leagues (franchise system)

Background

Unlike most professional sport systems worldwide, sports organizations in North America 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. North America does not have comprehensive governing bodies whose authority extends from the amateur to the highest levels of a given sport. Unlike in other countries, where one may invest in a local lower-level club and through performance see that club rise to major league status, the only three ways a North American city can host a major league sports team are through league expansion, forming/joining a rival league, or most commonly, buying an existing league franchise and relocating it.
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, as of 2015, each of the major leagues has 30 or 32 franchises. Many current owners believe this is the optimal size for a major league and aside from the possible expansion of the National Hockey League (NHL) to 32 teams (a 31st team already approved to begin play by 2017),^[1][2] none of the major leagues is believed to be considering an imminent expansion. In fact, Major League Baseball (MLB) actually considered contracting the Montreal Expos and Minnesota Twins in 2002, which would have taken effect in the 2007 season, but the baseball players union sued MLB to prevent the dissolution of the teams. In the end, nothing happened to the Twins, which had the issue leading to their possible contraction, a new stadium, resolved with the opening of Target Field in 2010, and the Expos relocated to Washington, D.C. to become the Washington Nationals in 2005.
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 will eventually agree to a merger. The new league would attain major league status in its own right and/or the established league is 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 on 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.^{[citation needed]} At no point since the start of the 1980s have any of the established leagues even added expansion teams while a rival was operating (or establishment of a rival league was being seriously considered). Therefore, as long as leagues choose not to expand and/or reject a city's application, the only realistic recourse is to convince the owner(s) 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).
The relocation of 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 that relocation 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 relocation 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 relocations at all in the 16 years before it. Critics referred to the movement of teams to the highest-bidding city as "franchise free agency."

List of relocations

The following charts list movements of franchises in the modern eras of the major North American sports leagues. It does not include:

• Moves within a city, which have occurred many times in all major leagues.
• Short distance moves from one city in a metro area to another city in the same metro area. (For example, San Francisco to Oakland or vice versa.)
• Short-distance city-suburb moves. (For example, Los Angeles to Anaheim, both of which are in the same urban agglomeration.)
• Team moves that happened before the organization joined its current league.
• Moves of teams that, as of 2017, no longer exist. There were many such moves in the early years of the NFL in particular.
• Teams that have threatened relocation as leverage for a new stadium or arena in their current market without actually moving, as well as teams that nearly moved for other reasons, not related to team dissatisfaction in a given market. (For example, the Pittsburgh Pirates nearly moving to Denver following the Pittsburgh drug trials in 1985, the Minnesota Timberwolves almost moving to New Orleans in 1994, or the Sacramento Kings almost moving to Anaheim or Seattle from 2011 to 2013.)

Major League Baseball

See also: Major League Baseball relocation of 1950s–60s

• 1902: Original Milwaukee Brewers moved to St. Louis and became the St. Louis Browns.
• 1903: Original Baltimore Orioles moved to New York City and became the Highlanders. The team was renamed the Yankees in 1913.
• 1953: Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee. This was the first relocation in 50 years. During those 50 years, there had also been no expansions or contractions – Major League Baseball had consisted of the same 16 teams, 8 in each league, playing in the same 10 cities without interruption for half a century.
• 1954: St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles.
• 1955: Philadelphia Athletics moved to Kansas City.
• 1958: Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles and became the Los Angeles Dodgers; New York Giants moved to San Francisco and became the San Francisco Giants. These were the first major league teams to be based in the U.S. West Coast; the teams moved simultaneously to facilitate travel for other National League (NL) teams. The NL granted New York City a new expansion franchise, the New York Mets, in 1962.
• 1961: Washington Senators moved to the Twin Cities area and became the Minnesota Twins. Not wishing to alienate Washington, D.C., the American League (AL) granted the city a new expansion franchise, also called the Senators.
• 1966: Milwaukee Braves moved to Atlanta.
• 1968: Kansas City Athletics moved to Oakland. Because Charles O. Finley broke a recently signed lease and public bonds were already issued for the building of what is now known as Kauffman Stadium, Major League Baseball was in danger of anti-trust legislation from Stuart Symington, U.S. Senator from Missouri. As a result, the AL granted Kansas City a new expansion franchise, the Kansas City Royals, in 1969.
• 1970: Seattle Pilots moved to Milwaukee and became the Brewers. The AL granted Seattle a new expansion franchise, the Seattle Mariners, in 1977.
• 1972: Washington Senators moved to Arlington and became the Texas Rangers.
• 2005: Montreal Expos moved to Washington, D.C. and became the Washington Nationals. The Expos had split time between Montreal and San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2003 and 2004. This was the first relocation in 33 years.