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Up until a few years ago in Oakland, the eighth largest city in California, which is in the inner part of the San Francisco Bay, there were three great teams that amassed 18 national titles: 6 with the Golden State Warriors in basketball, 3 with the Raiders in American football and 9 with the Athletics in baseball. The city itself, which has always been in the shadow of San Francisco, but also of other large Californian cities, owed much of its fame to its three winning teams, very present in American sports culture, for many reasons.
For two years, however, only the Athletics have remained in Oakland, and probably for a little while longer. The Warriors took advantage of the most successful period in their history to move definitively across the bay, in richer San Francisco, while the Raiders chose to relaunch in Las Vegas. And the Athletics are also in advanced negotiations to move to Las Vegas, a city that is making facilities and public money available to become a new center of North American sport.
The disappearance of professional sports in Oakland is closely related to the difficult period of change the city is experiencing. For years it has in fact grappled with serious economic and social problems, also common to other centers in that area of the United States at the center of the great expansion of the technological sector in the 2000s. Oakland has become one of the most unequal, unlivable and expensive areas in the country, and in the space of a few years it has found itself dealing with one emergency after another: the closure of small businesses, the homeless, the rundown suburbs.
In all of this, the city’s sports facilities, already among the oldest in use, would have needed new investments. But the local administration, grappling with rather serious problems and economically struggling, was unable to cooperate. So the properties have decided one after another to change cities to relaunch themselves in more attractive markets, and above all willing to support them.
The cups thrown on the field by Athletics fans (Brandon Vallance/Getty Images)
The relocation of professional teams is one of the two major differences between North American and European sports. The other is the absence of promotion and relegation, and the two things are closely linked. For each major sport (basketball, football, hockey, baseball, soccer) there is only one true professional league, with a limited number of participants ranging from a minimum of 29 to a maximum of 32. These leagues therefore concentrate the most rich, the largest cities or those in which the sporting tradition is greater, in order to maximize requests, interest and therefore revenues.
Each of these teams corresponds to a sort of license that recognizes them as such and that is not strictly connected to the place where they are based (a bit like sports titles in Italy, i.e. the rights to participate in certain championships). This is why in the United States we talk about activities in franchise, i.e. activities granted in concession to private individuals by the respective reference championships, a bit like what happens for the single local activities of the large restaurant chains. This is why in Italy, to indicate American teams, the term “deductibles” is often used, the real meaning of which is however different from that understood in America.
The teams depend exclusively on their properties, but these in turn belong to their respective championships in a much more stringent and binding way than in Europe. The championships impose common spending limits and standard contracts for everyone, but they can go much further: they can even expropriate a team in cases of violations deemed particularly serious, or decide whether or not to grant the transfer of cities.
Typically a transfer is approved if it is deemed to benefit the whole league. The most famous and emblematic case is still that of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, two historic New York baseball teams which in 1958 were both transferred with great astonishment to the other side of the country, in California: the Dodgers – Jackie’s team Robinson — in Los Angeles and the Giants in San Francisco. Baseball executives at the time believed that moving two such major teams would make the major league a true national championship, as there had been no team west of Kansas City until a year earlier. And the already famous Yankees, with their historic rivalries on the east coast, would still occupy the New York market (and then the Mets would arrive).
The history and evolution of the Major League rewarded that choice, which drove the expansion of the league from 16 to the current 30 participants. And in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Dodgers and Giants continued to be two of the major teams in the league, as well as local institutions in their own right. Since then, relocations have become routine: by 1996, of the 113 professional teams in North America at the time, 25 had moved at least once since 1950.
I Dodgers a Brooklyn nel 1954 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
When these transfers were dictated by the need to occupy new promising and hitherto unexplored markets, the results are still evident today. The Lakers, for example, were established in 1946 in Detroit and after just one year they moved to Minneapolis. They stayed there for thirteen years and in 1960 they were moved back to Los Angeles just as the American sport was expanding from east to west, and California in particular. Now the Lakers are by far the quintessential Los Angeles team, as well as one of the most successful and recognized in the world.
The other main reasons behind these relocations concern stadiums and local governments, as in the case of Oakland and in general the relocations that have taken place in the last two decades, many of which have proved unsuccessful.
Stadiums have always been fundamental for American teams: having them modern, spacious and up to date is essential to keep them profitable and competitive in their markets (and this is why only in football is the average age of stadiums slightly higher than thirty years old). Over time, however, the global growth of professional sport has made North American teams so rich, influential and powerful that they can deal on an equal footing with local governments, which are asked to contribute public money to the construction of new facilities. If, on the other hand, as happened in Oakland, the local administrations cannot afford it, or do not want to, the properties know that there are dozens of cities willing to satisfy them in any way possible in order to have their own team, as in the recent case of Las Vegas.
This trend is also one of the most criticized aspects of the current North American professional sports system. Several studies argue, for example, that the use of public money for the construction of large sports facilities mostly benefits both private individuals and the communities in which they are built. The attitude of the properties is also defined in some cases as blackmailing towards the cities and harmful to the local sporting culture, especially in cases where teams with rooted traditions are transferred.
One of the most emblematic cases in recent years has involved the city of Saint Louis, to which the National Football League (NFL) will pay 790 million dollars in compensation for the transfer of its football team to Los Angeles seven years ago. Previously, the administration of St. Louis had sued the NFL for having made it spend 17 million dollars just to start projects for the construction of a new stadium, a move also recommended by the league itself as an insurance for the permanence of the team. But then the NFL still allowed the Rams’ ownership to leave a minor center like St. Louis to move to Los Angeles with the aim of reviving football in the second largest city in the United States.
Kansas City fans ridicule Chargers move from San Diego to Los Angeles (Getty Images)
As for the Oakland Athletics, however, the situation has become a bit of a problem for everyone involved. Since the intention of the owners to change the city became evident, the team has been left in disarray: its case is reminiscent in some respects of the one told in an episode of the Simpson 2001 in which Homer learns that Springfield’s baseball team, the Isotopes, is moving to Albuquerque.
The Athletics are the team of Moneyball, one of the most famous baseball films produced by American cinema, based on a book by Michael Lewis. At the center of that story was Billy Beane, the team’s general manager who became famous for how he expanded the use of baseball statistical analysis, decisively contributing to making it a standard in the management of all teams. When Beane and his associates began applying it in Oakland, the results were outstanding, so much so that the 2002 season was one of the best in recent team history.
In recent years, however, the Athletics’ best players have been sold without being replaced and the losses are steadily increasing. Last season they lost 102 games out of 162 played in the regular season: it was one of the worst results ever, but according to the results of the current season (55 losses and 19 wins), an even worse could come. Even the stadium, the old Coliseum, is now left to itself: the lights don’t work, the seats come off, the benches are submerged in sewage when it rains, and dead rats have been found inside the food and drink vending machines.
For all these reasons, the public is at an all-time low and the Athletics, very last in the standings, are now used to playing in front of a few thousand spectators. Lately, however, after the news that brings the team ever closer to Las Vegas, the Coliseum has returned to being almost completely filled but only as a protest by the fans against the property, invited to sell the team to keep it in Oakland.
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2023-06-20 10:26:50
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