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AbdiWahab252 wrote:My favorite basketball team is the Boston Celtics.

My nigga!!!

In Minnesota we have all the four major sports teams.

NFL --the Minnesota vikings
NBA---the Minnesota Timber wolves
MLB---The Minnesota Twins
NHL---The Minnesota Wild

but the Vikings are the most famous, followed by the Twins. even though we had a very successful basketball team called the Lakers, but California bought them. Timber Wolves not as successful.

College football is huge down here in the Southeast; home to the Southeastern conference. Then there's also the NCAA and the Football Bowl competitions, all for college football. My alma mater had the Bulldogs and on any given weekend, 80k fans would attend their games at the Stanford stadium. Its a revered institution down here in which both the school and the state milk it for everything they can get out of it. Then there's UGA Bulldog's arch rivals GA Tech Yellow Jackets which are extremely popular (most interstate exits in downtown Atlanta close for their home games). Historical black universities like Morehouse and Clark Atlanta also have their own football teams & culture. After the Southern colleges, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio are also big on football with just as much enthusiasm as Southerners for the game during the season. Basketball is also big here, most colleges and even high schools have decent basketball teams. Baseball is not as big down here, but Atlanta is home to the Braves which is an established team in town.

Between the Hawks, the Falcons and the Braves; the city is a busy place all year round. We're only missing MLS which is just starting to be picked up across most cities in the U.S.

This is what a football game @ my old school would look like on most home games:

brobaganda, I understand the main reason is to have a team is if it will be popular there and if they can sell out seats regularly. That seems reasonable. The thing is US sports seems like they support teams for a variety of reasons and if the team moves then they might still support that team. Whereas in britain, support for teams (mostly in football/soccer) is tribal they support their local teams and will rather die than support their neareast rivals even for a day.

ironm@n, so the lakers were originally minnesottan

anarchist, waa yaab 80k for a college match. They are very dedicated aren't they. I think their support for those teams is a college rivalry, so even the oldies who attended will still have alliegences for their school right.



I understand the dynamics of american sports is very different to UK sports because america is a much younger country and in terms of population to land size it is fairly low (300m pop), whereas britain is 60m for such a tiny island.

The city of london has 12 professional football clubs and another dozen who are semi professional and each club has a stadium of 40k on average with the largest being 90k. Add to that 3 rugby teams and another 7 or 8 cricket clubs.
All in all, just in football there 4 professional leagues with 20 clubs in each of them and 100s of semi professional teams

Cumar,

In the US, the football, basketball, soccer and ice hockey leagues are private leagues in which the owners have total control over the franchises and they don't allow teams to be set up without their approval. This makes it noncompetitive hence few teams unlike the UK where the Premier League is an open one in which any team can join provided they perform well. All of these US sports leagues rely heavily on public subsidies and without them they go bankrupt as only a handful are profitable.

Where I'm at now hockey is the creme de la creme. Back in Chitown tho, the Bulls were the ruling family. Basketball was religion. Every nicca wanted to be like Mike.