I understand Vegas is a great city and probably a better market but now Oakland has lost all their teams in a matter of just a few years.
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Have you been to Oakland? Its turned to shit. Source: I used to live there.
Oakland’s a smaller/less wealthy market. Vegas is growing and there’s a huge influx of sports betting. Raiders are partnered with MGM, and offer cross promotional perks. The NFL has limits on stadium gambling and they sit in the grey area. I’m not familiar with MLB rules
Greed
Oakland offered the owner of the A’s $770+ million and land down by Downtown on the water to build a new stadium. It would have been an amazing location and would have revitalized the city.
The A’s owner then decided to pull out and tell the city he was looking at land in Las Vegas, apparently in an attempt to get more out of Oakland, a city already budget strapped.
Oakland couldn’t afford to give more than what it offered (again, 3/4 of a billion in subsidies) and the billionaire owner Fisher decided to move to Vegas.
Beyond all that, Fisher and his partner owned 50% of the previous stadium and never upgraded or renovated in the time they had it. Instead they let it degrade and used it as a bargaining chip for new city subsidies.
They did the same thing with the A’s roster, letting talent go and refusing to pull in anyone exciting even though they had the money. Fisher never did shit for the A’s or the city and expected Oakland to carry the weight.
You can’t shit all over your market and then get mad when the market doesn’t “organically” support you.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/sep/26/oakland-athletics-final-game-john-fisher
https://www.siliconvalley.com/2024/09/25/kurtenbach-billionaire-john-fisher-stole-oaklands-major-league-future-and-blamed-as-fans-on-his-way-out-the-town/amp/
Sports teams are like any other business and want to make as much money as possible. Oakland has been unwilling/unable to offer the teams the incentives they want to stay. These are things like fully or partially paying for stadiums, tax breaks, sales of public land, and similar things. This left teams with the choice of staying and paying for everything in a market that has seen attendance dropping in recent years or take offers elsewhere and hope that a fan base grows or at least attendance numbers increase.
Have you been to Oakland recently? Not a great place…
Greed.
American sports teams seem to think that the city owes them subsidies and money to stay there. Oakland correctly told them to go pound sand, and they left.
Good for them. Fuck the A’s. Fuck the Raiders.
Oakland has always been a tough market because it’s the “little brother” of the San Francisco sports market. Millions of people live in the Bay Area, but only a small fraction of those are going to favor an Oakland team over an SF team, especially if the Oakland team isn’t doing as well.
When leagues first started expanding out west, Oakland got a lot of attention because it developed relatively early. But if you were going to create a new expansion team today, why would you target the country’s 45th largest city in the shadow of its 13th and 17th largest cities? There will always be Bay Area sports teams, but they don’t have much reason to go by “Oakland” anymore rather than “San Francisco,” “San Jose,” or the generic “Golden State.”
They haven’t really lost ALL their teams… the Warriors remained in the Bay Area, they just moved to a new arena in San Francisco instead of Oakland.
But a big issue was the Oakland Coliseum and how terrible it was, and the inability to get new stadiums built for the Raiders or A’s. Local residents, rightfully so, didn’t want to subsidize new stadiums for the teams at a level that ownership wanted. And the owners found more lucrative opportunities in Las Vegas for their teams.
Crime. Oakland has become a cesspool. There was an In & Out that making big bucks but had to close because the guests were having their vehicles broken into. I think it was 100 times a night or some crazy number.
But to answer your question, crime.
>I understand Vegas is a great city and probably a better market
That is pretty much it. Oakland is a shrinking market, Vegas/LA are growing ones. One team left and found success, so now others want to do it.
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