[Example] Why American sports teams switch cities so often

EVEN BEFORE Michael Lewis wrote “Moneyball”, about the genius of the Oakland Athletics (A’s) for doing more with less, the team was among baseball’s most celebrated. They are one of just two teams to win more than two consecutive World Series. Though they last triumphed in 1989, they have since made 13 playoff appearances. This year they sit last in their division, but they have a scrappy, spirited young squad.

Yet at a recent evening game against the Kansas City Royals, Oakland Coliseum was all but deserted. On the ramp connecting the stadium to the commuter train, rather than a gauntlet of vendors hawking team gear, there was just one. The crowd was too sparse to roar; individual claps and shouts echoed off tens of thousands of empty seats. The A’s average attendance this year—just over 6,400 in a park seating 63,000—is the lowest in America’s four major sports leagues. In this tomb of a stadium lurks a reminder for Americans and a warning for the rest of the world.

The reminder is that unlike a city’s landmarks or museums, teams can move. For all of the A’s success in Oakland, it is their third home; they began in Philadelphia and moved to Kansas City before settling in California. Since 1953, 12 major-league baseball teams have moved cities. So have 14 American-football teams since 1946 and 23 basketball teams since 1951.

The impetus to move is almost always financial—a team thinks it can get a more favourable stadium deal or attract more fans elsewhere. But the impact on the fans left behind is often devastating. An old joke about Walter O’Malley, who moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958, goes, “If a Brooklyn man were in a room with Hitler, Stalin and O’Malley but only had two bullets in his gun, what would he do? Shoot O’Malley twice.”

The owner of the A’s, John Fisher, spent years angling to replace the decaying stadium. He failed to reach a deal with Oakland, so will move the team to Las Vegas; they will become known as the Las Vegas A’s. But the stadium in Nevada will not be ready until 2028. The team’s lease in Oakland, however, expires at the end of this season, so the A’s will play in a minor-league park in Sacramento. Fans have responded with a boycott.

To non-Americans, this saga is somewhere between ridiculous and sinister. Roger Bennett, the host of a football podcast, notes that when the owners of England’s Wimbledon football club (“the Dons”) moved it to Milton Keynes in 2003, “They were despised, not just by fans in Wimbledon, but by fans of all teams.”

Outside America, teams—especially European football teams—often emerged from local workers’ associations and were composed of players who from the same town or neighbourhood. That is no longer true, especially in the upper echelons of football, but roots that deep are not pulled up easily. Nor are they immune to transplant. Europe’s leading sides play pre- and post-season matches around the world. The president of European football’s governing body said last year that playing the Champions League final in America was “possible”. And Liverpool’s chairman has said that he wanted to see a day when Premier League teams “play one game in Tokyo, one game a few hours later in Los Angeles, one game a few hours later in Rio, one game a few hours later in Riyadh”.

None of these would count as a full-scale move—but they all prioritise the financial interest of clubs’ owners over local fans, as American owners have been doing for decades. “Once that one game is played” abroad, Mr Bennett warns, “all bets are off.” Fans do not like being made to feel “like third cousins at a wedding, just lucky to be invited”. Making them fly across an ocean to see a match usually played down the street does just that.

Wrexham, a club in the third tier of English football enjoying a giddy revival under the ownership of two Hollywood actors, will play games this summer in California and Canada. If any Wrexham fans who head to California want to know how it feels to be jilted, they can just head up the coast to Oakland. ■