This just in: the NFL and MLB have joined forces to put a team for both leagues in Turkmenistan. News of this has angered jealous neighbor to the north Uzbekistan, but both leagues have vowed to have a team in both countries within five years.
While none of this is true it is rather close to being so. There is an alarming trend going in both the NFL and MLB. Both leagues and their respective commissioners seem dead set on expanding across the ocean. Last year the NFL held a regular season game between the Miami Dolphins and the New York Giants in London. England and have vowed to have more. Not to be outdone MLB just had two teams (Oakland Athletics; Boston Red Sox) begin their 2008 season's with a two-game series in Japan.
Why are both leagues expanding across oceans? The money hungry leagues are trying to gain fans from places not yet tapped. I guess being a multi-billion dollar business just isn't enough. They want, as Andrea True put it, More, More, More. There's little doubt that both leagues will gain money by these expansions but they come at a cost. A cost that is too steep.
There are two major problems with having regular season games played thousands of miles away. First and foremost by having games played outside of the U.S. the home fans are robbed of a home game. For every game played overseas there is one less game to be played in the hundred million dollar stadiums built for the teams. Stadiums paid for in many cases at least partially by the people who live in the city of the team, whether they are a fan or not.
This is a much larger problem in the NFL than MLB. Losing a home game in the NFL means you have seven home games rather than eight. In MLB you have 80 rather than 81. How would you feel if you had been to eight home games for your favorite NFL team for 20 straight seasons and all of a sudden you only get seven because the NFL wants to give people in England who wouldn't support NFL Europe a game.
This brings us to the second problem with the expansion. If the countries the NFL and MLB are sending games to cared enough they would have their own leagues. Japan does have professional baseball leagues and they dominant the sporting world over there.
They don't.
In England, and all of Europe for that matter, they had the NFL Europe. That league in everywhere but Germany flopped. The people didn't care and didn't support the teams. Yet the NFL is taking games away from loyal fans here to allow people who wouldn't support the sport a chance to see a game.
Playing overseas isn't a completely bad idea. Any professional league should feel free to have teams play exhibition games overseas to build a fan base, but never regular season games. The travel just takes too long and causes scheduling problems.
For instance by having the Red Sox and A's start the MLB season in Japan the two teams had to play exhibition games upon getting back in the States to avoid having a full week off going into "Opening Day."
The league that might actually benefit from playing games overseas is the NHL (you remember hockey). More than one third of all NHL players are now from countries outside of North America. Come to think of it, why doesn't the NHL just move over to Europe permanently? At least then they could make money.
Gaining new fans from all over the world is a good thing, (look at what Yao Ming has done for the NBA in China) but getting those fans at the expense of robbing the people who have bankrolled the league isn't the right way to do it.
Write to Levin at ltblack@bsu.edu
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