Relocation of major professional sports teams occurs when a team owner moves a team, generally from one metropolitan area to another, but occasionally between municipalities in the same conurbation. The practice is most common in North America, where a league franchise system is used and the teams are overwhelmingly privately owned. Owners who move a team generally do so seeking better profits, facilities, fan support, or a combination of these.
Unlike most professional sport systems, North America lacks comprehensive governing bodies whose authority extends from the amateur to the highest levels of a given sport. North American sports generally do not operate a system of promotion and relegation in which poorly performing teams are replaced with teams that do well in lower-level leagues, forming a franchise and minor league system instead.
Background A city wishing to get a team in a major professional sports league can wait for the league to expand and award new franchises. However, such expansions are infrequent, and generally limited to a narrow window in time. Many current owners believe 32 is the optimal size for a major league due to playoff structure and ease of scheduling. As of 2024, each of the major leagues has between 30 and 32 franchises. The National Hockey League (NHL) has expanded to 32 teams in total, with the Vegas Golden Knights having become the league's 31st team in 2017, the Seattle Kraken having become the 32nd team in 2021, and the Utah Mammoth joining the league in 2024 as a result of the deactivation of the Arizona Coyotes franchise.
In past decades, aspiring owners whose overtures had been rejected by the established leagues would respond by forming a rival league in hopes that the existing major league would eventually agree to a merger; the new league would attain major league status in its own right; or the established league was compelled to expand. The 1960s American Football League (AFL) is perhaps the most recent example of a successful rival league, having achieved each of the three goals listed above in reverse order. However, all major sports have had a rival league achieve at least some of these goals in the last half of the 20th century. Baseball's proposed Continental League did not play a game but only because Major League Baseball responded to the proposal by adding teams in some of the new league's proposed cities. The American Basketball Association (ABA) and World Hockey Association (WHA) each succeeded in getting some of their franchises accepted into the established leagues, which had both unsuccessfully attempted to cause their upstart rivals to fold outright by adding more teams.
However, the upstart leagues owed their success in large part to the reluctance of owners in the established leagues to devote the majority of their revenues to player salaries and also to sports leagues' former reliance primarily on gate receipts for revenue. Under those conditions, an ambitious rival could often afford to lure away the sport's top players with promises of better pay, in hopes of giving the new league immediate respect and credibility from fans. Today, however, established leagues derive a large portion of their revenue from lucrative television contracts that would not be offered to an untested rival. Also, the activism of players' unions has resulted in the established leagues paying a majority of their revenues to players, thus the average salary in each of the big four leagues is now well in excess of $1 million per season.
Under present market and financial conditions, any serious attempt to form a rival league in the early 21st century would likely require hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars in investment and initial losses, and even if such resources were made available the upstart league's success would be far from guaranteed, as evidenced by the failure of the WWF/NBC-backed XFL in 2001 and the UFL from 2009 to 2012. The current major leagues have established lucrative relationships with all of the major media outlets in the United States, who subsidize the league's operations because their established fame ensures strong ratings; the networks are far less willing to provide such coverage to an unproven upstart league, often requiring the upstart league to pay the network for those leagues to be covered or, in the post-network era, secure a streaming television contract.
Therefore, as long as leagues choose not to expand or reject a city's application, the only realistic recourse is to convince the owners of an existing team to move it (or convince a prospective owner to purchase a team with the intent of moving it). Owners usually move teams because of weak fan support or because the team organization is in debt and needs an adequate population for financial support or because another city offers a bigger local market or a more financially lucrative stadium/arena deal. Governments may offer lucrative deals to team owners to attract or retain a team. For example, to attract the NFL's Cleveland Browns in 1995, the state of Maryland agreed to build a new stadium in Baltimore and allow the team to use it rent-free and keep all parking, advertising and concession revenue. (This move proved so unpopular in Cleveland that the move was treated as the Baltimore Ravens being awarded an expansion franchise, and the Browns name and their official lineage would remain in Cleveland for a "reactivated" team that rejoined the NFL three years later.) A little more than a decade earlier, the Baltimore Colts left for Indianapolis (NFL owners voted to give Colts owner Robert Irsay permission to move his franchise to the city of his choosing after no satisfactory stadium would be built).
Moving sports teams is often controversial. Opponents criticize owners for leaving behind faithful fans and governments for spending millions of dollars of tax money on attracting teams. However, since sports teams in the United States are generally treated like any other business under antitrust law, there is little sports leagues can do to prevent teams from flocking to the highest bidders (for instance, the Los Angeles Rams filed suit when the other NFL owners initially blocked their move to St. Louis, which caused the NFL to back down and allow the move to proceed). Major League Baseball, unique among the major professional sports leagues, has an exemption from antitrust laws won by a Supreme Court decision but nonetheless has allowed several teams to change cities. Also recently, courts denied the attempted move of the team then known as the Phoenix Coyotes by siding with the NHL, which claimed that it had final authority over franchise moves.
Newer sports leagues tend to have more transient franchises than more established, "major" leagues, but in the mid-1990s, several NFL and NHL teams moved to other cities, and the threat of a move pushed cities with major-league teams in any sport to build new stadiums and arenas using taxpayer money. The trend continued in the 2000s, when three National Basketball Association (NBA) teams moved in a seven-year span after there were no moves at all in the 16 years before it. Critics referred to the movement of teams to the highest-bidding city as "franchise free agency."
List The following charts list movements of franchises in the modern eras of the major North American sports leagues. It does not include: Moves within a city, which have occurred many times in all major leagues. Short distance moves from one city in a metro area to another city in the same metro area. (For example, San Francisco to Oakland or vice versa.) Short-distance city-suburb moves. (For example, Los Angeles to Anaheim, both of which are in the same urban agglomeration.) Team moves that happened before the organization joined its current league. However, the NFL has fully incorporated the American Football League of the 1960s in its own history. Moves of AFL teams during the existence of that league are therefore included. Moves of teams that, as of 2025, no longer exist. There were many such moves in the early years of the NFL in particular. Teams that have threatened to move as leverage for a new stadium or arena in their current market without actually moving, as well as teams that nearly moved for other reasons, not related to team dissatisfaction in a given market. (For example, the Pittsburgh Pirates nearly moving to Denver following the Pittsburgh drug trials in 1985, the Minnesota Timberwolves almost moving to New Orleans in 1994, or the Sacramento Kings almost moving to Anaheim, Seattle, and Virginia Beach from 2011 to 2013.)
Major League Baseball
1902: Original Milwaukee Brewers moved to St. Louis and became the St. Louis Browns. 1903: Original Baltimore Orioles moved to New York City and became the New York Highlanders. The team was renamed as the New York Yankees in 1913. As this situation may also be considered a case of the American League dissolving the Baltimore franchise and issuing a new franchise in New York City, Yankees history information usually begins in 1903. 1953: Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee. It was the first move for a team in MLB, which for 50 years had consisted of 16 teams playing in their original 10 cities. 1954: St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Baltimore Orioles. 1955: Philadelphia Athletics moved to Kansas City, Missouri. 1958: Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles; the New York Giants moved to San Francisco. These were the first major league teams to be based in the U.S. West Coast; the teams moved simultaneously to facilitate travel for other National League (NL) teams. The NL granted New York City a new expansion franchise, the New York Mets, in 1962. 1961: Washington Senators moved to the Twin Cities area and became the Minnesota Twins. Not wishing to alienate Washington, D.C., the American League (AL) granted the city a new expansion franchise, also called the Washington Senators. 1966: Milwaukee Braves moved to Atlanta. 1968: Kansas City Athletics moved to Oakland, California, becoming the Oakland Athletics. Because Charles O. Finley broke a recently signed lease and public bonds were already issued for the building of what is now known as Kauffman Stadium, Major League Baseball was in danger of anti-trust legislation from Stuart Symington, U.S. Senator from Missouri. As a result, the AL granted Kansas City a new expansion franchise, the Kansas City Royals, in 1969. 1970: Seattle Pilots moved to Milwaukee and became the Milwaukee Brewers. The AL granted Seattle a new expansion franchise, the Seattle Mariners, in 1977. 1972: Washington Senators moved to Arlington, Texas and became the Texas Rangers. 2005: Montreal Expos moved to Washington, D.C., and became the Washington Nationals. The Expos had split time between Montreal and San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2003 and 2004. This was the first move in 33 years. 2020: Toronto Blue Jays temporarily moved to Buffalo, New York, the home of their AAA affiliate, after the Canada–United States border was closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, preventing visiting teams from traveling to the Rogers Centre. It saw the first MLB games played in Buffalo since the Buffalo Blues of the Federal League folded in 1915, and marked the first time no games were played in Canada since 1968.
2021: The Toronto Blue Jays played in Dunedin, Florida, from April 8 to May 24, then in Buffalo, New York, from June 1 to July 21. On July 30, the team moved back to Toronto and the Rogers Centre.
2025: Oakland Athletics moved temporarily to West Sacramento, California, ahead of their move from Oakland to Las Vegas, Nevada, and were simply being referred to as the Athletics. 2028: The Athletics will move to New Las Vegas Stadium in Las Vegas, upon its opening, and will retain the "Athletics" name.
National Basketball Association