Eli5: Why aren’t teams from the economic centers of the United States, such as New York, dominant in basketball or American football?

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In other countries, especially in sports like football (soccer), teams from major urban centers tend to dominate leagues and championships, often because of higher financial resources. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case in the United States, where titles in major sports like basketball and American football are more evenly spread among cities or regions. For example, about football in other countries, it seems almost impossible for a team located in a city similar to where the Green Bay Packers are located to be relevant. Just look at the history of the Premier League, Bundesliga, or La Liga.Perhaps the question is more about why titles are more evenly distributed among regions in these sports in United States, comparing with other countries.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s boring if the same teams win every year. The leagues don’t care who wins, they just want people to watch, so they do things like set salary caps and reward poor-performing teams with higher draft picks. US sports also don’t have relegation; no matter how badly a team performs, they don’t get kicked out of the league.

Green Bay admittedly is still quite a bit of an outlier; it’s far and away the smallest metropolitan area with a professional sports team (Buffalo is a distant second) and the reason they still exist is a bit of a fluke; most other teams which started in small cities like Green Bay move to larger cities once they get successful, but the Packers are community-owned so they’ve never moved.

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