North American leagues expanding their borders
Mexico City and London likely franchise destinations, Paul Newberry writes.
An NFL team in London? Count on it.
An NBA franchise in Mexico City? Yep, that’s coming, too.
What was once a pipe dream — major-league teams based in cities outside the United States and Canada — is now just a matter of time. The aforementioned cities are the ones most likely to break through first, but others will surely follow when everyone sees how much potential revenue there is for the taking.
“The market is saturated in the U.S.,” said Gil Fried, a professor and chair of sports management at the University of New Haven. “They need to find new markets.”
The NFL has been trying for years to make inroads in Europe — especially London — and those efforts were turned up to full blast by revelations Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan is attempting to buy Wembley Stadium, a 90,000-seat, state-of-theart venue known the world over.
Khan brushed off the speculation that this is the first step toward moving the Jaguars to London — where they already have been playing some “home” games since 2013 — but didn’t exactly provide a resounding vote of confidence for Jacksonville, Fla., one of the smallest markets in the NFL.
“The first thing you want with certainty is you want a venue,” he said. “And this gives us a stadium solution for us or anyone else.”
In other words, better get used to calling his team the London Jaguars.
“Shad Khan’s purchase of Wembley Stadium portends that a substantive NFL presence in London, and ultimately a franchise, is inevitable,” said Vince Benigni, a College of Charleston sports communication professor.
The NBA, which last expanded in 2004, is looking to get the jump on Mexico City, a sprawling metropolis of more than 20 million people that opened an NBA-ready arena in 2012.
That facility hosted a pair of NBA regular-season games each of the last two seasons, drawing an average of more than 20,000 fans.
“You can feel it, you can smell it, you can breathe it in the streets,” said Gilberto Hernandez, president of the Mexican Basketball Federation. “They’re just craving basketball.”
There are a number of challenges that must be addressed before international expansion becomes a reality, especially in Mexico City, which is more than 2,200 metres above sea level (about 600 metres higher than Denver), is plagued by crime and economic-disparity issues and might have trouble signing top players reluctant to step outside their cultural comfort zone. But the appeal is enormous. “It’s the largest city in the Western Hemisphere,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said. “It’s part of a 130 million-person country. There’s a very strong, passionate Mexican-American fan base in the United States. This is also a potential gateway for all of Latin America.”
The NHL first floated the prospect of a European division in the late 1960s. Detroit Red Wings owner Bruce Norris was so fixated on the idea he launched his own team, the London Lions, who played a 72-game schedule against top European teams in 1973-74. But the Lions never had a league of their own, so the team quietly disbanded after that single season, leaving behind nothing more than a cool logo.
Over the last two decades, the NHL has scheduled regularseason contests in Europe and Japan, including two games in Stockholm in November. The Asian market remains a priority, especially heading into the 2022 Beijing Olympics — though the league sent mixed signals by refusing to send its players to this year’s Winter Games in South Korea.
For the NHL and the NBA, the enormous travel times between North America and either Europe or Asia remain the biggest obstacle to adding teams in those markets. Unless some sort of supersonic transportation becomes available, it would simply be too difficult to incorporate such faraway cities as London and Tokyo into an 82-game schedule, which requires teams to play games all through the week and sometimes on back-toback days.
Also working against European expansion: the lack on U.S.quality arenas and established basketball and hockey leagues in many countries would surely object to the NBA or NHL coming in to steal their limelight.
For the NFL, the challenges aren’t nearly so daunting and the potential rewards could be even greater for a league that has faced declining TV ratings and lots of bad publicity about the devastating physical toll on its players.
There are no major pro football leagues in Europe. Teams play only once a week and the regularseason schedule is 16 games. A team in London would have to make the transatlantic trek no more than eight times a year and the demands could be lessened by scheduling back-to-back road games, halving the number of round trips.
A London team could even maintain its base of operations in the U.S., essentially playing all its games on the road, but perhaps making it easier to sign players in free agency and cope with legal issues and currency fluctuations.
Travel would not be a concern for a Mexican team. The NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball have all played regular-season games south of the border. Next weekend, the Los Angeles Dodgers will meet the San Diego Padres in Monterrey.
MLB seems the most logical candidate to launch a Mexican team, given baseball’s popularity and the large number of Latin American players in the majors, but the NBA is leading the way. Silver wants to put a minorleague team in Mexico City, testing the waters for a possible NBA franchise.
“As we look down the road, frankly, to see whether there can be an opportunity to even dream about an NBA franchise here in Mexico City, we believe it makes sense as a first step to have a development league team here to work out some of the issues, to better understand what it would mean to have a team in Mexico,” Silver said.
There are still plenty of questions to answer, that’s for sure, but one is crystal clear: Are U.S. leagues going international? No doubt about it.