Mind Your Business - 17 November 2008

Case Study - Montreal Expos

Imagine this - the Premier League buys Manchester United and decides to move it, lock, stock and barrel, to Surrey and renames it 'The Surrey Reds FC'. An absurd suggestion surely, although there are some detractors of Manchester United who might argue that Surrey was closer to its natural fan base!

Absurd it may be, but that is exactly what happened to a Major League Baseball (MLB) team in the United States. The demise of the Montreal Expos is not unique. If you watch the film 'Escape from Alcatraz', starring Clint Eastwood based on a true story set in 1960, an inmate asks the new prisoner how the Brooklyn Dodgers are getting on - 'they moved to Los Angeles years ago' comes Eastwood's moody reply!

In fact, the Brooklyn Dodgers moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1957; the move was made to help resurrect the financial position of the team and to provide it with a new home - the ballpark at Ebbets Field was old and unable to house all the fans who wanted to see the Dodgers. The owner of the Dodgers attempted to secure land in Brooklyn to build a new stadium, but met with hostility from the Brooklyn authorities. As a result, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, where over 78,000 fans saw their first game - a 6-5 win over the San Francisco Giants, the former New York Giants, who themselves had moved to California at the same time.

The Montreal Expos join a list of baseball teams in the United States that are now history. The Expos, like many of the other MLB teams, only exists on the back of the success of the MLB franchise network; it is the brand name of MLB that sells the team rather than the association with the town or city concerned.

The case of the Montreal Expos is the most recent in the relocation of MLB teams to new cities. The Expos joined the National League in 1969. The Expos were the first venture for MLB outside the United States. Throughout its history, the team had a mediocre level of success. It had a team of promise in the early to mid 1990s, but since that time faced growing financial difficulties.

By the early part of the new century, the pressure was on the Expos. Other cities in the United States are always on the lookout for the opportunity to bring an MLB team to their city, and the flagging fortunes of the Expos made them a ripe target for cities such as Portland, Oregon, in the northwest of the United States.

The support for the team in Montreal fell - using the team to generate income is a vital part of the business of baseball. As gate revenue and merchandise sales fell, the financial position became worse. The team was eventually purchased by MLB, Inc. in 2002. Its future was in doubt at that time but it survived two more seasons, one of which saw the team play some of its home matches in Puerto Rico.

The experiment of taking MLB to Puerto Rico was a partial success - attendances improved and so did the fortunes of the team. It narrowly missed out on reaching the play-offs with the eventual World Series winners, the Florida Marlins, but this proved to be a temporary upturn. In September 2004, MLB, Inc. announced that the Expos would relocate for the 2005 season to Washington DC and become known as the Washington Nationals.

For fans in Montreal, the loss of their team was a bitter pill to swallow. Many felt that there was not the support from MLB Inc that was necessary to really make a financial success of a baseball team, and they were constantly treated as the poor relation to the big teams in Los Angeles, New York, Boston and Chicago.

The Expos are not the only team looking over their shoulder; others may well find themselves in new locations with new names in the coming years. Baseball it seems, has little in common with the social and economic roots that soccer has with its location in the United Kingdom although the experience of Wimbledon (now the Milton Keynes Dons), Chelsea (having been bought by Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich), Manchester United, bought by Tampa Bay Buccaneers NFL owner Malcolm Glazer and a range of other top clubs who have been bought by foreign owners, may suggest that the tide may be turning more to the dominance of business logic over historical sentiment.

The Expos are not the only team looking over their shoulder; others may well find themselves in new locations with new names in the coming years. Baseball, it seems, has little in common with the social and economic roots that soccer has in the United Kingdom, although the experience of Wimbledon (now the Milton Keynes Dons), Chelsea (having been bought by the Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich), Manchester United, bought by Malcolm Glazer, who also owns the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL, and a range of other top clubs who have been bought by foreign owners, may suggest that the tide may be turning more to the dominance of business logic over historical sentiment.