Best Sports Cities Rank

[ZGare]

Originally Posted by ShampooBanana

There are a myriad of flaws with that methodology for ranking "best sports cities". For one, it makes far more sense to use metro area population as opposed to just municipal boundary population (as if fans only come from that one central city and none from adjacent). Also, I think the vast majority would agree that number of teams to root for is a big factor in what is a better sports city. A metro with 5 or 6 major professional sports teams is far better than one with only one. Seating capacity and variation in such (as well as number of home games) varies widely by sport. Baseball hosts 82 home games per season (not counting any playoff games) in stadiums with usually around 40,000+ capacity. NFL only has 8 games per season, so despite higher stadium capacities the methodology is going to skew far more in favor of cities with MLB teams. I would say attendance average as a % of capacity is a far better indicator that both takes into account differences in types of sports/facilities and also winning percentage, since you could expect a lot more full stadiums with winning teams, and doesn't having winning teams make for a better sports town?

If you go to the link just under the list, the article has another ranking by metro area. St Louis ends up at the top of every “city” list because the city is so small compared to its metro area. For so e reason, crime lists only use city populations, not metro. If you use metro population, St. Louis ranks 5th in sports and in the middle of the top 20 in crime.