> Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams.
Not that I disagree with the general gist, I had to facepalm at that!
I think the general risk is that a rival politician will promise to bring back sports teams, with some dodgy financial setup that conceals the true cost, and the electorate will gobble it up
I can’t speak for Paris, but London is a major sporting destination.
British sports are completely orthogonal to American sports, so it seems a bit disingenuous to say that ‘no one visits London for sport’ from an American perspective. No Brit will go to the US to watch MLS. Americans care less about Soccer, Rugby and Cricket, but much of the rest of the world does.
London-based Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham are the 7th, 8th and 10th most valuable soccer teams worldwide. Chelsea won the champions league last year. All three teams play in Europe (almost) every year.
Wembley Stadium is the publicly funded national soccer stadium, and hosted the recent Euros final. It is a regular host of European club competition finals, including the Champions League.
Lords is the home of cricket. It hosted the World Cup final a few years ago, and is a mandatory stop on international tours. It almost causes diplomatic incidents if a tour of England skips Lords. London also has The Oval, traditional host to the last test of the summer. Accordingly, many famous test series have been won there.
Wimbledon is the most prestigious and historic tennis tournament in the world. It’s staunch traditionalism is polarising online, but it’s perpetually sold out, and ‘ground passes’ (a ticket to all the smaller courts) have queues for days. I’m an annual queue-er, I’ve met people from all continents.
Your argument appears to be that you, personally, don't care much for the sports being played in those cities (and neither do your friends), and therefore those cities are making a mistake supporting said sports financially. Can you really not see the flaw in that?
I think you're undermining the rest of your argument (which I personally think is pretty decent) by defending the "sports in London/Paris/etc doesn't matter" angle so hard across multiple subthreads.
Well the argument was actually in the article
we are discussing here, which says it is a bad financial investment.
I actually believe that even on a back of the envelope calculation it's hard to imagine how one can come up with this being a net positive. Let's argue that a stadium brings in 1M visitors a year (which is a high number) . If a stadium costs 1B then the city (through taxes etc) needs to make around 100 per person for it to be a good investment (10% return). And we haven't even considered the costs of externalities, like large traffic jams during games, cleanup etc.. I find it difficult to imagine that this works.
I’m sure that globally London and probably Paris (probably a bit more debatable) are much better know for their professional sports teams than any city in the US.
I tried googling more directly for global popularity/famousness, but couldn't find any hard data.
And of course there's the issue of "has well known sports teams" vs "well known for their sports team". The former you could probably get data on somewhere, but the latter, I doubt it.
Travel outside the USA and every kid you meet has heard of Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham. If I were French or Spanish rather than British, these kids would say PSG or Real Madrid instead.
The fans don't have as much money as Americans, but there are 10-15x as many followers on Facebook.
But I would argue England is well known for its sports teams rather than London. (There's also Manchester, Liverpool etc.)
> Travel outside the USA and every kid you meet has heard of Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham. If I were French or Spanish rather than British, these kids would say PSG or Real Madrid instead.
I think what you mean by "travel outside the USA" might be "travel in Europe". I'd bet that you'd get more recognition of the Lakers in, say, China than any of those Premier League teams.
> But I would argue England is well known for its sports teams rather than London. (There's also Manchester, Liverpool etc.)
That's fair, those two cities are probably known for their football teams moreso than anything else.
No, I meant the entire world except the USA, Canada and probably Japan -- although I haven't been to Japan.
I may be out of date for China, I haven't been there for over 10 years.
My place of birth (in my passport) is an English city with a football team named after it. Outside Europe, in places with not so many tourists, it is very common for staff in hotels to recognize this and make some comment on it. Kids (and adults) who talk to me in the street will also comment on it — on the city's team if I say where I'm from, or with Manchester, Chelsea etc if I just say England/Britain.
I look up the names of the famous players before I travel to Africa or South America, so I don't seem like some ignorant idiot when hotel staff (or in one case, a border guard) open my passport and say "Thomas Partey! What a goal!".
Bear in mind the best European football teams often have a lot of foreign players. Chelsea currently have players from Spain, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Brazil, France, Croatia, Belgium, USA, England (only 8/26), Senegal, Mococco and France. Arsenal add Ghana, Norway, Portugal, Japan, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Switzerland. Tottenham Argentina, Ireland, Korea, Colombia, Sweden, Uruguay.
Many people are aware when if a player from their country plays for a famous European team. They often also play for their national team, or used to.
(I have no interest in football myself, which is partly why it's so noticeable to me when people ask me about it so much.)
>I think what you mean by "travel outside the USA" might be "travel in Europe". I'd bet that you'd get more recognition of the Lakers in, say, China than any of those Premier League teams.
Hard disagree on this one. It is in fact "outside the USA" because globally (not just in Europe), English Premier League teams like Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham, etc. are extremely popular, especially in China.
> The National Basketball Association (NBA) has been named the most popular sports league in China in a recent survey undertaken by Ampere Analysis.
> Soccer’s English Premier League and Uefa Champions League ranked second and third respectively, in the report that conducted research with Chinese internet users.
So, the EPL is indeed popular there...but not as popular as the NBA.
Being the most popular sport league is not the same as being the most popular sport. Out of ten league positions, basket has #1 and #10. Soccer has #2, #3, #4, #6, #7 and #9.
Yeah but that wasn't the original statement, the argument was that a Chinese person would be more likely to recognize the LA Lakers than a London pro soccer team. So popularity of the NBA specifically is quite relevant.
Also, you see people wearing NY Yankees hats globally. Some of them don't even seem to know anything about baseball and just think it is some sort of NY merch. But still there are absolutely American sports teams that have recognizable brands more globally.
I get what you're saying, but you might not be realising that the top teams from the EPL _also_ play in the UCL. It's a "super league" made up of the top European soccer teams from the domestic leagues. There must surely be some kind of cumulative recognition effect from playing in both leagues.
I'm Spanish, and wherever I've been in Africa, South America or Asia, everybody ask me if I support Real Madrid or FC Barcelona, soccer teams of the main cities here. And the number 1 visited museum in Madrid is not the Prado, which is one of the 5 top art museums in the World, but Real Madrid museum in their stadium.
I bumped into kids in villages in the middle of no where with no internet and few TVs in the Himalayas and Central Africa that could list all the premier league teams. It's hard to imagine how popular football is worldwide for an American.
> > It's hard to imagine how popular football is worldwide for an American.
> It's really not that hard.
Depends what you mean by football. The GP, for example, apparently meant actual foot-ball football, not American hand-egg. Does that change your assessment?
Liverpool is definitely more known for The Beatles than its football team.
I'm also going to have to disagree on the Europe point.
South America, Mexico and Africa in particular are obsessed with football, and Russia, China and some parts of SEA are also huge football fans. Many of these will be well aware of the top British and Spanish football teams. On the other hand, basketball is also very popular in Asia so I don't know exactly how that would break.
> I think what you mean by "travel outside the USA" might be "travel in Europe". I'd bet that you'd get more recognition of the Lakers in, say, China than any of those Premier League teams.
You are still forgetting a few continents. I know from experience that Central and South America complexity stop for Champions League finals.
I it’s quite possible that Liverpool is known more for The Beatles than football.
Yeah it's more popular than Arsenal Football Club ... but that's one club. There are twenty in the English Premier League. And that's a single (albeit huge) league within the English league system, which is one of about four countries in Europe alone who you could probably say the same about.
Is it more popular than Arsenal though? I think the problem here is that following a league versus following a team are different actions. I am well aware of the Dallas Cowboys and watch quite a few of their games, but I would never follow their official social media accounts, because I fucking hate them. I suppose it depends how we define popularity, but the original question was about being well-known.
Yeah this is just a discussion based on the assumption that instagram accurately reflects popularity/renown, it's entirely possible that is not actually true
I think that’s partly because most US teams are run like business (i.e. their owners want them to be profitable) whereas European football is largely a competition between Russian and Gulf oligarchs on who can spend more money. This is especially the case in England, e.g. the two Spanish clubs near the top of the list are not privately owned.
It's worth bearing in mind that while they certainly make a lot of money, sports teams in Europe aren't primarily run as profit-making entities (they are sporting entities before all else). To the point that the national government stepped in to block a recent move by premier league clubs to form a new pan-european league which would have generated more money, but would have undermined the spirit of fair competition between teams by removing promotion and demotion between leagues.
Another example that occurred to me: I understand that American sports actually have regular breaks specifically to facilitate adverts. Whereas football (soccer) matches have two uninterrupted halves with a single 15 minute break in between.
It'd be difficult to directly measure "well known because of sports team", which I agree is a completely different question, but I think there are a few proxies you could use to try to address the question. If you normalize whatever measure of sports team popularity by other measures of a city's prominence/global reach it might turn up something. Just thinking on the US scale if you took each team's popularity and divided it by the size of the associated city (population), the Green Bay Packers would probably come out on top of US pro sports, which seems accurate.
That has more to do with relegation in European football than anything else. A bottom tier NFL team is at least 2 billion because you know they will be in the league in 20 years. A bottom tier EPL team is likely worth a few hundred billion as it will cost money to stay in the Premier League. The fact that there are football teams so high on the list should tell you of the global brand value they have.
By the time of writing this, it looks like Barnsley has replaced the Dallas Cowboys as most valuable sports team. I suppose some Barnsley F.C. fan has had some fun with Wikipedia.
I know tons of people who have visited many US cities and not one of them went to see one of that cities major sports teams. On the other hand I know several people who don't live in the UK yet travel to London or Liverpool at least once a year to watch their favorite football team play. What does that prove?
Fair, my thought process was more around "how many people wouldn't know about London if their sports teams disappeared?" And my intuition was, "not many, because London is a global city for lots of reasons," but it's possible I was wrong about that and some people only know about London because of their EPL teams. The thought feels very odd to me.
Obviously nobody 'only' knows London because of their sports team. But that is different from saying that London doesn't have many globally well known teams or that there aren't a fair number people that travel to London from all over Europe primarily to watch those teams play.
There are so many reasons to visit cities like London or Paris that individually each reason only makes up a small number of visitors percentage wise. I don't personally know anyone who came to London to see the Queen but it seems lots of people do.
Living here and experiencing the carnage common after football matches, I can promise you that a shit load of international and domestic tourists come to watch football.
That depends on your family and friends of course, but I live fairly close to Arsenal stadium, and I promise you people travel from all-over to see games there.
It is true though, those cities have big teams but aren't known because of the teams existing. I'd wager many more people know about Paris the city than PSG the club.
Not that I disagree with the general gist, I had to facepalm at that!
I think the general risk is that a rival politician will promise to bring back sports teams, with some dodgy financial setup that conceals the true cost, and the electorate will gobble it up