Home Team
Subtitle: Professional Sports and the American Metropolis
Edition: New Ed edition
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: January 15, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 420
ISBN-13: 9780691070643
Subjects: Leisure; POLITICS & GOVERNMENT; Sport & leisure industries; Sports psychology; Urban communities; Sports & Recreation; Sports; North America; USA; General; Government - State & Provincial; Economics; Political Science and International Relations; Sociology; Sports & Recreation / General
First sentence: ON November 6, 1995, Arthur Modell, the owner of the Cleveland Browns, announced that he was moving his football team to Baltimore.
Description: Most books that study professional sports concentrate on teams and leagues. In contrast, Home Team studies the connections between professional team sports in North America and the places where teams play. It examines the relationships between the four major professional team sports-baseball, basketball, football, and hockey-and the cities that attach their names, their hearts, and their increasing amount of tax dollars to big league teams. From the names on their uniforms to the loyalties of their fans, teams are tied to the places in which they play. Nonetheless, teams, like other urban businesses, are affected by changes in their environments-like the flight of their customers to suburbs and changes in local political climates. In Home Team, professional sports are scrutinized in the larger context of the metropolitan areas that surround and support them. Michael Danielson is particularly interested in the political aspects of the connections between professional sports teams and cities. He points out that local and state governments are now major players in the competition for franchises, providing increasingly lavish publicly funded facilities for what are, in fact, private business ventures. As a result, professional sports enterprises, which have insisted that private leagues rather than public laws be the proper means of regulating games, have become powerful political players, seeking additional benefits from government, often playing off one city against another.