The movement of teams in professional sports is often referred to as the “sports franchise game.” To mayors of major cities across the country, the efforts to keep or obtain a professional sports franchise is no game. The District of Columbia at various times has been involved in two major sports-related struggles—to keep the Redskins playing within the District and to keep alert to the possibility of obtaining a baseball franchise to replace the twice-departed Senators.

What we are keenly aware of, and what Professor Shropshire addresses in this book, is that a professional sports franchise is no longer...

Chicago and Philadelphia are now the only two cities in the United States that can boast about having a full complement of professional sports franchises—football, baseball, basketball, and hockey—playing within their city limits. Other major cities have lost one or more of their franchises to the suburbs or to other cities. Until fairly recently, the owner of the team typically also owned the downtown stadium. For example, in 1950 the Cleveland Indians was the only major league franchise that played in a publicly owned facility.² A lot has changed since 1960 when a trip to the ballpark meant...

In Bang the Drum Slowly, a novel about baseball and life, the main characters are professional baseball players who pass time off the field with a card game they call Tegwar, “the exciting game without any rules.”² The veteran players invite an unsuspecting “cluck” to join the game, and then they take his money in every hand, as the mercurial rules develop. The players find a fresh cluck to pluck in every new city they visit.

In the sports franchise game the veteran Tegwar players are the franchise owners and their clucks are the cities that want to host their...

It is politically expedient to commission an economic impact study in support of a position concerning the acquisition or retention of a franchise or the construction of a new stadium or arena. Presented in a strategic manner, the economic impact evidence can be quite persuasive. This chapter summarizes the conclusions and some of the analyses from a selection of these studies, in order to show the type of fuel—or sometimes water—that gets thrown on the flames of the sports franchise game. Sections of other studies are discussed in other chapters, but those mentioned here provide an overview of...

In many ways Philadelphia is representative of the fiscal disasters that may strike any major American city. The City of Brotherly Love has come close to financial ruin. Last-minute loans, bonds, and impassioned pleas to Wall Street have made Philadelphia the focus of much of the municipal planning world since the late 1980s. In the 1990s, the city has been confronted with a series of plans and deadlines. “Bailout” is the term that has been attached to many of these plans.³

Philadelphia is the nation’s fifth largest city and has a team in each of the major sports leagues. At...

Perhaps the most publicized and longest-running relocation saga took place in the San Francisco Bay Area. Curiously, setting aside the former Oakland Raiders for a moment, San Francisco was one of the three cities that were involved in the first “modern-day” relocations. These are referred to as the modern-day relocations because they were the first moves made not simply for financial survival but for greater financial success.

The relocation of franchises is not a new phenomenon. In the formative years of professional sports leagues, during the first half of this century, franchises moved frequently.² Although the moves then were made...

Al Davis, the managing general partner of the Los Angeles Raiders, has long been referred to by many members of the media and by fans as a maverick owner. Some say his image is projected through the Raiders team, which has long accepted the castoffs of other teams, sports the color black, and has a logo featuring a rugged caricature with a skull and crossbones image and a patch over one eye. Davis’s success, however, cannot be disputed. While in Oakland, the franchise had thirteen consecutive sellout seasons.

By the end of the 1970s, Davis had apparently decided that his...

There are two events in the history of Baltimore that are significant to this discussion of the sports franchise game. The first is the departure of the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis in 1984, and the second is the construction of Oriole Park at Camden Yards for the 1992 Major League Baseball season.

The city of Baltimore suffered due to the initial success of the Raiders in court against the City of Oakland and the NFL. Precedent did not support forcing a team to stay in its present location. Further, the zealous pursuit of Indianapolis for acknowledgment as “America’s sports capital”...

Washington, D.C., was among the group of cities—along with St. Petersburg, Orlando, and Buffalo—that were passed over when Major League Baseball expansion franchises were granted to Miami and Denver in 1991. When these cities lost their bids for expansion teams, several announced publicly that they were resorting to what the New York Times called “Plan 2”—an attempt to lure an existing franchise from another location.² At that time, Baseball Commissioner Vincent’s guidelines for franchise relocations (quoted above) received wide attention.

Expansion may be defined as the “legitimate” way for a city to obtain a franchise. Expansion involves...

It is vividly clear that sports franchises and major sporting events will continue to be aggressively pursued by cities, and franchise owners and event organizers will continue to play one city off against the others. Cities must be willing to evaluate, in a more public way, whether the huge expenditures needed to be perceived as “big-league” are worth-while. Civic leaders must make it clear to their constituencies that there is no bright line cutoff point that determines when to give a franchise owner more or when to back off. The decision whether to pursue a franchise or a major event,...