Why League Rules, Not Fan Passion, Decide Which Cities Get a Team
Picture the scene: you are standing in a civic arena, not the sporting kind, holding a signed petition. Two hundred thousand names. The mayor is at the podium behind you, promising a new arena, a tax break, a riverfront development deal wrapped in the language of civic destiny. The cameras are there. The passion is, by any honest measure, real. And then, over the following months, nothing happens. The team does not come. Or it leaves anyway, and the city is left holding a half-renovated stadium and a great deal of awkward silence. The fans did everything right. So why does this keep happening to the same kinds of cities, over and over, across generations of petitions and podiums?
The answer is not geography. It is not, in any simple sense, market size. It is internal governance: the specific ownership rules, voting thresholds, and revenue-sharing structures that determine how power is distributed among the franchises that already exist. Those rules, largely invisible to fans, function as a cartel's constitutional document. They protect incumbents. They were written by incumbents. That is not a conspiracy theory; it is just an accurate description of how private leagues organize themselves, and it deserves to be said plainly.
The franchise vote is the hidden veto
In every major North American professional league, expansion or relocation requires approval from existing team owners. The NFL requires a three-quarters supermajority: 24 of 32 owners must vote yes before any new market receives a franchise. The NBA has similar thresholds. This structure sounds reasonable, procedurally tidy even, until you trace the incentives.
Existing owners in large markets do not want a new team in a medium-sized city splitting the national television audience into a smaller per-team share. Owners in geographically adjacent markets do not want a new franchise cutting into their regional broadcast footprint or their recruitment of free agents. Every owner, everywhere, understands that a new team dilutes the scarcity value of the franchises they already hold. A league with 32 teams is a rarer asset class than a league with 36. The vote, in other words, is not a neutral civic judgment. It is a financial calculation made by people whose interests structurally favor the status quo, dressed up in the language of competitive balance and league integrity.
Consider what this means in practice. Take a metro area of 1.8 million people with a newly built arena, a television market ranked around 25th nationally, and no existing franchise. On any reasonable metric of fan interest, it qualifies. But to receive a team, it needs 24 NFL owners to conclude that its arrival benefits them collectively more than it costs them individually. That is a very high bar. It is designed to be.
The history of expansion bids is littered with this pattern. Two cities with comparable populations pursue NFL expansion at roughly the same moment. One has an ownership group with existing relationships inside the league's inner circle, a stadium deal requiring no league financing, and a market that does not overlap with any incumbent's television territory. The other has a passionate local bid, a slightly smaller market, and the misfortune of sitting within 200 miles of two established franchises. The first city gets its team. The second gets a polite rejection and a decade of waiting. Passion, in both cases, was identical. Governance decided the outcome, as it almost always does.
Revenue sharing is the other lever most people miss
League governance does not only control entry. It controls how money moves once you are inside, which shapes which markets are even viable over the long term.
The NFL shares national television revenue equally among all 32 franchises, roughly 300 million dollars per team annually at recent broadcast deal scales. That pooling is why a franchise in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a city of around 110,000 people, can compete financially with one in New York. Equal television shares are the great equalizer, the structural anomaly that makes the league's geography look broader than it otherwise would. Local stadium revenue, premium seating, naming rights, and local sponsorships, though, are not shared. Those stay with the individual franchise.
So while the television floor makes small markets survivable, the ceiling is set by local commercial capacity. A city of 900,000 can sustain a team on shared national revenue. It will, however, perpetually field a roster built on the league minimum and draft picks, because it cannot generate the local revenue to supplement the national pot the way Dallas or Los Angeles can. Think of it less like a level playing field and more like a track race where everyone starts at the same line but some runners have a tailwind nobody officially acknowledges. The governance structure does not prevent small-market teams from existing. It prevents them from competing on equal terms over time, which quietly discourages leagues from expanding into them in the first place. The two mechanisms reinforce each other, which is presumably the point.
What people get wrong about "market size"
Fans and journalists often treat market size as the explanatory variable, as though leagues were running a neutral actuarial calculation and simply concluded that certain cities are too small. That framing is wrong, and it does real intellectual damage to the debate.
Market size matters, but it matters through governance. The question a league actually asks is not whether a city can support a team. The question is whether admitting that city makes existing members better or worse off. Those are different questions, and they produce different answers. Cities that never get meaningfully served are not necessarily too small. They are the ones whose arrival would threaten an incumbent's local territory, dilute a scarce asset, or require the league to share revenue in ways that disadvantage established owners.
Ask yourself this: if fan passion and market viability genuinely drove expansion decisions, why would the people making those decisions be the same people with the most to lose from a yes vote?
The governance structure ensures that incumbent concerns always outweigh the claims of fans holding petitions outside city hall. This is not an accident of design; it is the design. Professional sports leagues are, at their core, joint ventures among private owners who have agreed to compete on the field while cooperating, vigorously, on everything else. The arrangement has produced remarkable stability for franchise values across decades, which is a considerable achievement if you happen to own a franchise.
The real competition for a professional sports franchise was never between cities. It was always between cities and the people who already own the league. That distinction, once understood, makes the outcome of most expansion bids entirely predictable, and the rallies, the petitions, the mayors at podiums, rather easier to read for what they are.