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