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Hambilderberglar
Dec 2, 2004

dex_sda posted:

that's a bit bollocks, many clubs have huge followings that overshadow a huge portion of an entire country except for small fringe clubs. What you speak of is really only the case in England.
Is this not only the case with the supermassive clubs that have international name recognition? The likes of Manchester United, Arsenal, Real Madrid, Juventus, AC/Inter Milan, Barca, PSG, maybe some others. Wouldn't exactly call that a particularly large selection of clubs in the grand scheme of things. And even then, I certainly get the idea that while all these people may support these clubs, they don't do so to the exclusion of a local team that they may have community ties with. Even if that team is incredibly garbage. Of course none of this is science and only my own anecdotal evidence. :shrug:

Hambilderberglar fucked around with this message at 10:19 on Sep 27, 2016

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steinrokkan
Apr 2, 2011



Soiled Meat
I think every major football country in Europe has like one or two major clubs with international potential that could conceivably live out of their name recognition after relocating (though I'd be skeptical about that), but ultimately the main body of all national competitions is made up of teams with no such privilege.

dex_sda
Oct 11, 2012


Hambilderberglar, steinrokkan basically responded to your question. I would pin it at 40-50 clubs in Europe who could relocate on a similar 'popularity' basis. There's 5300 clubs in England alone. So a small percentage, but a solid number nevertheless.

It just doesn't happen because it's a mental concept. It requires stifled competition, because otherwise (even if you're Barcelona) a move would make you lose fans, which will make you lose money, which will make you underperform, which will lose you fans. Remember, you can get relegated into nothingness in soccer. It's happened to Premier League winners who made huge missteps with treating their club, like Aston Villa. It's happening to Wisła Kraków - arguably the most known club in Poland - right now.

dex_sda fucked around with this message at 11:21 on Sep 27, 2016

Paul.Power
Feb 7, 2009

The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

To be fair, if Manchester United at the height of their power in the 90s had moved to London, you'd probably have had a lot of people (principally Manchester City fans, probably Liverpool and Leeds fans too) joking that it was the next logical step.

Simplex
Jun 29, 2003

steinrokkan posted:

Uh

European soccer teams usually have one town where they are popular. Sometimes even less, like there's one traditional city district where all their real fans live. Moving the team would be in effect the same as dissolving it and starting a completely different team somewhere else.

In comparison this is what the distribution of football fans looks like in the us



A bit more leeway, isn't there

Why would the Rams move to Los Angeles? Nobody even likes them there

get that OUT of my face
Feb 10, 2007

ShaneMacGowansTeeth posted:

players can gently caress off all over Europe for similar money if they don't like it where they're playing at the time
That actually explains things nicely. It's much easier to have labor unrest in the North American leagues that are the undisputed best in the world, since you gotta pay them like such. Sure, some players went to the KHL in the last lockout and a couple of players have actually transferred to that league while they still have years left, but let's not pretend it's on the level of the NHL.

Flutieflakes017
Feb 16, 2012

only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain

Pluskut Tukker posted:

The stadium itself was paid for by a joint venture of its two occupants, However, stadiums are useless without infrastructure improvements and area development, and the costs for those always end up being borne by the public. In Munich, the costs were expected to be so large (they ended up in excess of 200 million euro) that the city government sought approval from the voters.

Of course, this was effectively a kind of state aid (no infrastructure = no stadium), and cities all over Europe have found all sorts of ways to test the boundaries of EU state aid rules. In the Netherlands for instance, the city of Eindhoven bought the land under the stadium and training complex from the PSV football club to supply it with cash, and got away with it because they did so at market value, even though there was absolutely no economically sensible reason for the city to own the ground but not the stadium on the ground. Sometimes the cities own the stadiums themselves and accept reduced rents or payment delays if clubs are in financial difficulties (my local club wouldn't have survived without the city's forbearance - it loaned the club money to finance the stadium and now guarantees a large part of its debt), or they buy the stadiums outright. On the other hand, the city of Madrid was found to be in violation of state aid rules for a land swap deal with Real Madrid where it paid the club far above market value for its grounds.

So to the OP: European sports teams (at least in football, and who cares about anything else?) don't use relocation to get money because they can usually already count on getting public money when they need it, within the flexible limits set by the EU. And beyond that, most teams are so tied to their local origins that they wouldn't be able to relocate, if just for their names. Look at the league tables for any European football league and you'll see that almost all clubs will have the name of their city or region in their name. Although there are exceptions (the Red Bull company seems to be trying to create franchises, but everybody hates them), mostly you can't just transplant AS Roma to Milan, SC Freiburg to Kiel, Lille OSC to Clermont-Ferrand or FC Twente to Limburg.

Thanks, great information. I'm going to follow up on several of these.

Hambilderberglar
Dec 2, 2004

dex_sda posted:

Hambilderberglar, steinrokkan basically responded to your question. I would pin it at 40-50 clubs in Europe who could relocate on a similar 'popularity' basis. There's 5300 clubs in England alone. So a small percentage, but a solid number nevertheless.

It just doesn't happen because it's a mental concept. It requires stifled competition, because otherwise (even if you're Barcelona) a move would make you lose fans, which will make you lose money, which will make you underperform, which will lose you fans. Remember, you can get relegated into nothingness in soccer. It's happened to Premier League winners who made huge missteps with treating their club, like Aston Villa. It's happening to Wisła Kraków - arguably the most known club in Poland - right now.
I agree with the conclusion you and steinrokkan are drawing. Relocation is a complete non-starter for the overwhelming majority of clubs and teams today, with even those aforementioned teams probably never opting for it.

My feeling is the situation you describe as "only the case in England", that is, many small clubs with dedicated local following, is likely the case in many other European footballing countries. Maybe not to the point that they have 5300 clubs, but there certainly seems to be a healthy amount of competition at all skill and league levels. There's a good 30 to 40 teams competing where I live that are based in the same city, with even more day-fly teams that manage to scrape together a side for a season. They might all together have just as much stadium capacity as the top dog, but if Ajax decides to roll on over to... I don't even know where, Luxembourg? They'd effectively cease to exist as a club. Player base and supporters base has ties to the community and will just watch another team over the weekend rather than travel to see a team that essentially told them to shove it and moved.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:
To add to what people have been saying about communities, there is also the fact that the soccer teams are really ancillary to the real point of soccer; getting into fights with other fans.

Marenghi
Oct 16, 2008

Don't trust the liberals,
they will betray you
Is that really true anymore. Most people I know support clubs for the community and enjoyment of the game.

XMNN
Apr 26, 2008
I am incredibly stupid
if you support manchester united you probably arent from manchester

also scum

not as bad as leeds tho

goethe42
Jun 5, 2004

Ich sei, gewaehrt mir die Bitte, in eurem Bunde der Dritte!

Hambilderberglar posted:



My feeling is the situation you describe as "only the case in England", that is, many small clubs with dedicated local following, is likely the case in many other European footballing countries. Maybe not to the point that they have 5300 clubs, but there certainly seems to be a healthy amount of competition at all skill and league levels.

There are more than 25.000 football clubs in Germany, with more than 32.000 teams, playing in 2257 divisions on up to 11 levels (from Kreisklasse D to 1. Bundesliga).
Wherever a team could go, there is already one (or a dozen) other clubs and teams that have the loyalty of the local population, especially as most clubs were founded in the late 19th and early 20th century.
In Germany, football (and sports) clubs are rooted in the local communities, they may rise and fall through the leagues, but they will never change their location, as that would be their end.

Cat Mattress
Jul 14, 2012

by Cyrano4747
Clubs don't move, but players do.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Marenghi posted:

Is that really true anymore. Most people I know support clubs for the community and enjoyment of the game.
Yes, sadly, this aspect has suffered in recent years, though it is not dead.

Jarmak
Jan 24, 2005

steinrokkan posted:

Uh

European soccer teams usually have one town where they are popular. Sometimes even less, like there's one traditional city district where all their real fans live. Moving the team would be in effect the same as dissolving it and starting a completely different team somewhere else.

In comparison this is what the distribution of football fans looks like in the us



A bit more leeway, isn't there

That map clearly explains the LA Rams moving to St. Louis (and back), the Minnesota Northstars moving to Dallas, and the Winnipeg Jets moving to Phoenix (!).

Actually off the top of my head I can't think of a single major franchise that has ever moved within the bounds of that map.

Simplex
Jun 29, 2003

I think people are maybe missing the forest for the tress here a little bit. For one, no one really gives a poo poo about lower division soccer, much like nobody really gives a poo poo about minor league baseball. Yeah, they have fan support and blah, blah, blah the revenue differences are orders of magnitude apart. To put it in perspective, if the Premier League consisted of just 5 teams, you would have a team in London, a team in Manchester, and a team in Birmingham and the teams could move about pretty freely ransoming one city or another. Conversely if you had 120 NFL teams every city of any consequence in the US would have one or more NFL teams, and there would be nowhere for any team to move to. Los Angeles isn't going to build a stadium to help the Toledo Mud Hens relocate, because they already have 6 teams.

e: To the OP here's something else you might also want to consider. I know that the Broncos pay a percentage of parking revenue to the city as part of their lease agreement. I'm fairly certain that's a pretty common agreement in the US. The problem with that in Europe is that many stadiums don't have parking. For some teams as much as 95% of their fans take public transit or walk to the games.

Simplex fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Sep 28, 2016

get that OUT of my face
Feb 10, 2007

OP, you should definitely look into West Ham United in the Premier League. They're a London club and they still play in the city, but they play in what was the 2012 Olympic Stadium, which isn't part of their former neighborhood. There was plenty of political controversy surrounding the move. I'm not sure what it was about exactly, but I know that there was public money involved.

The most telling part of their move is that they changed their logo once they settled in to their new home. Since 1903, West Ham's club logo included the Boleyn Castle AKA the Green Street House, which is a landmark building in their old neighborhood. The old stadium that they moved from last year was even called Boleyn Ground. Here's the last incarnation of that logo.



This is their current logo. It's been stripped of its old local identity in addition to looking generic as hell (as well as the complaint this guy has).

https://twitter.com/_SamAlex/status/765286416632913921/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

As for their on-the-field product, they're doing horribly so far.

Jarmak posted:

the Winnipeg Jets moving to Phoenix (!).
Hey, this nonsensical relocation and they hundreds of millions of dollars wasted by the city of Glendale, Arizona to sustain it was completely worth it because it produced Auston Matthews, a product of the Phoenix metro area. :colbert:

get that OUT of my face fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Sep 28, 2016

cant cook creole bream
Aug 15, 2011
I think Fahrenheit is better for weather
The concept of a moving soccer club in Germany is absolute nonsense to me. As it was stated earlier there are countless clubs here. And even though München is straight up dominating the league a lot of them are actually kinda good I guess.
Those clubs exist for over a hundred years in the same locations now. A lot of people grew up in cities where the only remarkable a big soccer club is the only remarkable thing. (Gelsenkirchen comes to mind.) And there are people who are fans of some clubs because their great grandfathers already were. Just like the sort of beer you grow up with it's just local cultural heritage. Of course you may find a few Cologne fans in Düsseldorf but on the whole those teams are tightly rooted into the ground.

ShaneMacGowansTeeth
May 22, 2007



I think this is it... I think this is how it ends

Simplex posted:

I think people are maybe missing the forest for the tress here a little bit. For one, no one really gives a poo poo about lower division soccer, much like nobody really gives a poo poo about minor league baseball. Yeah, they have fan support and blah, blah, blah the revenue differences are orders of magnitude apart. To put it in perspective, if the Premier League consisted of just 5 teams, you would have a team in London, a team in Manchester, and a team in Birmingham and the teams could move about pretty freely ransoming one city or another. Conversely if you had 120 NFL teams every city of any consequence in the US would have one or more NFL teams, and there would be nowhere for any team to move to. Los Angeles isn't going to build a stadium to help the Toledo Mud Hens relocate, because they already have 6 teams.

I could tear this apart and say how wrong it is, but I'll just point at Jamie Vardy whenever anyone says lower league football is rubbish.

dex_sda
Oct 11, 2012


ShaneMacGowansTeeth posted:

I could tear this apart and say how wrong it is, but I'll just point at Jamie Vardy whenever anyone says lower league football is rubbish.

The MK Dons story is really all that needs to be said. It was an actual attempt at relocation, with an attempt at appropriation of the history of Wimbledon FC. Supporters would have none of it and literally formed a new football team instantly. It had to start from the bottom, the 9th tier, without the finances or any players.

Fast forward 13 years, AFC Wimbledon (the supporter's club) climbed up to the third tier, an unprecedented rise. In the same time, MK Dons, due to loss of fans and revenue making them unable to compete, fell to the third tier. Guess which club has a better time filling up a stadium.

The community aspect of soccer is the primary reason to watch the sport for most people. I've personally went to more Polish 6th tier games than to the games of the biggest club in Poland, simply because my dad cheered for that 6th tier team as he represented it in a different discipline, one where they were actually good. In a hosed way, the ultras/hools culture underscores just how big a deal it is. "Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important."

dex_sda fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Sep 29, 2016

Flutieflakes017
Feb 16, 2012

only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain

Y-Hat posted:

OP, you should definitely look into West Ham United in the Premier League. They're a London club and they still play in the city, but they play in what was the 2012 Olympic Stadium, which isn't part of their former neighborhood. There was plenty of political controversy surrounding the move. I'm not sure what it was about exactly, but I know that there was public money involved.


Thanks for this.

Given the cultural and market forces that prevent teams from threatening to relocate in the UK and on Continental Europe it probably makes more sense for me to refocus my research on the kind of arrangements clubs make to utilize public stadiums and the legal limitations on these kind of arrangements (i.e. EU limitations on "state aid").

Simplex
Jun 29, 2003

ShaneMacGowansTeeth posted:

I could tear this apart and say how wrong it is, but I'll just point at Jamie Vardy whenever anyone says lower league football is rubbish.

Quick Wikipedia search for 2015 revenue per club by league

Premier League - $227 million
Championship - $29 Million
League One - $7.5 Million
League Two - $5 Million

bitterandtwisted
Sep 4, 2006




Simplex posted:

I think people are maybe missing the forest for the tress here a little bit. For one, no one really gives a poo poo about lower division soccer, much like nobody really gives a poo poo about minor league baseball. Yeah, they have fan support and blah, blah, blah the revenue differences are orders of magnitude apart. To put it in perspective, if the Premier League consisted of just 5 teams, you would have a team in London, a team in Manchester, and a team in Birmingham and the teams could move about pretty freely ransoming one city or another. Conversely if you had 120 NFL teams every city of any consequence in the US would have one or more NFL teams, and there would be nowhere for any team to move to. Los Angeles isn't going to build a stadium to help the Toledo Mud Hens relocate, because they already have 6 teams.



Your new Premier League teams would each have a 20% chance of ending at the bottom. No way would one of them risk their precarious position in the most prestigious league by relocating.

Relegation is the difference, not the number of teams in the top league.

Marenghi
Oct 16, 2008

Don't trust the liberals,
they will betray you

Simplex posted:

Quick Wikipedia search for 2015 revenue per club by league

Premier League - $227 million
Championship - $29 Million
League One - $7.5 Million
League Two - $5 Million

Money isn't the be all and end all. In fact there's considerable benefits to lower league football speicifically due to it's lower revenue.
I know plenty of people who follow local teams in lower league which are actually affordable to buy a season ticket and go to all their games. Good luck doing that as a working class supporter of premier league teams.

lilljonas
May 6, 2007

We got crabs? We got crabs!
There are actually two teams in Sweden that I know are in the process of moving or considering a move, and where it is connected to stadiums.

AFC United, a new club (formed 2006), is going to move from the outskirts of Stockholm to Eskilstuna, a city about 1.5 hour away by car, basically because it's hard to get access to good stadiums for an upstart team in Stockholm, while Eskilstuna doesn't have a major team (IFK Eskilstuna is in the 6th ranking league). AFC were playing in the third ranked League, but managed to qualify for the second ranked League (superettan) this year. They had already moved to a different area in Stockholm once before this move.

The other one is Dalkurd FF, created by Kurds in Borlänge (a small town) in 2004, who rapidly climbed in the leagues as well, and currently play in the second highest league. They are considering moving to a new town, as they consider themselves unfairly treated by the local municipality. They might move to Uppsala, which is a lot closer to Stockholm, or some other town.

Basically what these teams have in common is that they are recently created teams that have rapidly advanced into the upper leagues, growing in size and followers. They don't have a hundred years of history, and in the case of Dalkurd, they rather have an cultural community as a unifying foundation, rather than a local community. But you'd never see, say, one of the big Gothenburg teams move to Stockholm, that would be worse in the eyes of the supporters than closing down the club entirely.

lilljonas fucked around with this message at 13:20 on Sep 29, 2016

Simplex
Jun 29, 2003

dex_sda posted:

The MK Dons story is really all that needs to be said. It was an actual attempt at relocation, with an attempt at appropriation of the history of Wimbledon FC. Supporters would have none of it and literally formed a new football team instantly. It had to start from the bottom, the 9th tier, without the finances or any players.

Fast forward 13 years, AFC Wimbledon (the supporter's club) climbed up to the third tier, an unprecedented rise. In the same time, MK Dons, due to loss of fans and revenue making them unable to compete, fell to the third tier. Guess which club has a better time filling up a stadium.
People say this a lot, and it's become kind of an urban legend at this point where nobody bothers to check if it's actually true. So I looked at average league attendances of the teams, and here's the results. I included Brentford as a comparison as they are a team of similar stature to MK Dons and is located geographically close to Wimbledon:
code:
Season Ending	Wimbledon FC	MK DONS	AFC Wimbledon	Brentford
1997		14416					5832
1998		16156					5029
1999		18207					5445
2000		17156					5742
2001		7901			
2002		6958					6713
2003		2697				3003	5759
2004		4750				2606	5541
2005				4667		2858	6081
2006				5446		2706	6774
2007				5876		2512	5599
2008				9176		2603	4469
2009				10121		3219	5707
2010				9323		3535	6017
2011				8112		3486	5172
2012				8846		4295	5643
2013				8837		4060	6460
2014				8474		4135	7715
2015				9460		4073	10822
2016				13112		4138	10310
2017				8520		3799	9862

Marenghi posted:

Money isn't the be all and end all. In fact there's considerable benefits to lower league football speicifically due to it's lower revenue.
I know plenty of people who follow local teams in lower league which are actually affordable to buy a season ticket and go to all their games. Good luck doing that as a working class supporter of premier league teams.
I'm sure there are a lot of benefits to going to a lower league game. I imagine the lower level clubs offer a lot more fan access to the team for one.

That said Premier League attendance is much higher than lower league attendance, not just in raw numbers, but in percent of stadium capacity as well. I can't find numbers, but I'm guessing if you included things like cup matches and European games, attendance for Premier League teams might be higher than all other professional leagues combined.

happyhippy
Feb 21, 2005

Playing games, watching movies, owning goons. 'sup
Pillbug

Paul.Power posted:

To be fair, if Manchester United at the height of their power in the 90s had moved to London, you'd probably have had a lot of people (principally Manchester City fans, probably Liverpool and Leeds fans too) joking that it was the next logical step.

Viz used to run the joke in its mail section on who was the closest Man Utd supporter.
And you would get people claiming they are were living in Nottingham or Norwich claiming to be the closest.

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dex_sda
Oct 11, 2012


Simplex posted:

People say this a lot, and it's become kind of an urban legend at this point where nobody bothers to check if it's actually true. So I looked at average league attendances of the teams, and here's the results. I included Brentford as a comparison as they are a team of similar stature to MK Dons and is located geographically close to Wimbledon:
code:
Season Ending	Wimbledon FC	MK DONS	AFC Wimbledon	Brentford
1997		14416					5832
1998		16156					5029
1999		18207					5445
2000		17156					5742
2001		7901			
2002		6958					6713
2003		2697				3003	5759
2004		4750				2606	5541
2005				4667		2858	6081
2006				5446		2706	6774
2007				5876		2512	5599
2008				9176		2603	4469
2009				10121		3219	5707
2010				9323		3535	6017
2011				8112		3486	5172
2012				8846		4295	5643
2013				8837		4060	6460
2014				8474		4135	7715
2015				9460		4073	10822
2016				13112		4138	10310
2017				8520		3799	9862
I'm sure there are a lot of benefits to going to a lower league game. I imagine the lower level clubs offer a lot more fan access to the team for one.

That said Premier League attendance is much higher than lower league attendance, not just in raw numbers, but in percent of stadium capacity as well. I can't find numbers, but I'm guessing if you included things like cup matches and European games, attendance for Premier League teams might be higher than all other professional leagues combined.

That's interesting, I thought MK Dons' numbers would be lower (but it bears mentioning that AFC Wimbledon's stadium has only 4850 capacity, with 2250 seats)

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