The NBA did expand recently. It took a while to get off the ground, but the WNBA has recently gained respectable live and video audiences. They do need to decide whether women's pro basketball should be more closely modeled after college basketball or after roller derby, but you can't have everything. Similarly, while the US has the NFL, it also has had multiple professional women's football teams.
I 100% agree with the NFL, but I think baseball in Mexico City would be a big stretch. For a sport with 162 games a year, overcoming both the travel realities and the altitude would be tough.
The current Rockies ownership is pretty old school and out of touch, but I think the Coors altitude adjustment hurts more than people think. The ball flight in the outfield is what people always focus on, but I think the ball flight of the pitch is way more important. Facing the same pitcher in Coors vs Dodger Stadium, for example, means facing two pretty dramatically different ball flights. And pitchers for the Rockies have to build a repertoire that will work both at altitude and at sea level, which is a lot to ask for a complex kinetic chain motion that is already one of the hardest to master and repeat precisely in sports. Mexico would have those problems turned up even higher plus a brutal travel schedule on top of it.
Seattle is worse than Mexico City for team travel and they have a baseball team. The altitude would be the biggest problem, not sure if a domed stadium with climate control could do anything about that.
Seattle also has a lot of disposable income, no language barrier, and no going through Customs. The first one is the most important.
You also can't pressurize a domed stadium to the point where it'd make any difference. First off, it'd have to be airtight - at stadium scale, the amount of air you'd need to pump in to maintain a sea level pressure would be impossible to continuously pump otherwise.
If you somehow solved that issue, you'd also have to engineer it to handle all that extra pressure without exploding. To be fair, withstanding the pressure would necessitate an airtight build, so I guess you can view airtightness as a bit of a freebie if you just focus on the pressure.
Saddest of all from a nerd perspective, even after all that engineering you wouldn't have to engineer a decompression chamber to prevent killing fans on their way out the door. The pressure differential is enough to be a total and absolute pain in the ass to engineer at stadium scale, but not enough to cause even a mild case of the bends.
For a sense of perspective, the pressure differential in "clean rooms" (which maintain said cleanliness in part by being higher-pressure than the rest of the building) is about 0.1 kPa above ambient. The pressure differential you'd need for "Mexico City but Chicago on the Inside" is a bit less than 25 kPa above ambient. 30 kPa or thereabouts is around the point where people start experiencing serious discomfort, 100 kPa is almost certainly fatal but it's only internal trauma - not something that really televises dramatically or anything. 800 kPa was enough to make mincemeat out of (one of) the Byford Dolphin divers but the meat-mincing was mostly from the trauma of being forced through a tiny opening under immense pressure. If you wanted a real Hollywood-style human red mist after every home game, you'd probably want at least a 1000 kPa differential and extremely-sturdy screen doors.
"Still, in the NBA, for instance, there’s nearly a one-to-one correspondence between metro-area GDP and franchise value"
Bit of a stretch! Washington's GDP is 5.6x bigger than Milwaukee's and their NBA teams are worth almost exactly the same, and there are many other such examples.
I was squinting at that scatter plot, too... I'd be curious to see that "Metro GDP strongly predicts franchise values" regression run without those three big outliers of LA, NY, and SF.
Also, just as a math person... That's not the way a mathematician would use the phrase "a one-to-one correspondence."
I'm not sure if statisticians just use it to mean "highly significant relationship?"
One off-kilter aspect of MLB adding Mexico City is four places in Latin America have each supplied far more MLB players than Mexico, and are closer at least to the East Coast: Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Cuba.
Any Latin American MLB team would instantly gain a strong Latin following throughout the hemisphere, including in the US. It need not depend primarily on local retail ticket sales. In fact, it would be wise to fill the stands by keeping ticket prices low and count on advertising, television and corporate revenues.
Granted Venezuela and Cuba are likely impossible for political reasons, but Puerto Rico is actually easier politically than Mexico City. And none of the four locations has the altitude problems or terrible airport of Mexico City. I know taxes for professional athletes are complicated, but it's possible Puerto Rico could provide significant tax advantages for players.
I would love to see major sports expansion to Latin America, more for world peace advantages than improvements in sportstainment. And Mexico City is a logical place to start for a number of reasons. But for MLB, it does seem inconsistent with the sports' deep roots in the Caribbean.
If you add two teams, you may as well add two more so that we get up to 36. That’s a way more even number to divide the league up into three divisions per conference with 6 teams each.
+1 on Mexico City / NFL - quickly followed by 1 of the majors in Austin, despite close proximity to Dallas / Houston. If San Antonio can have an NBA franchise with similar proximity considerations, Austin can definitely take on NFL or MLB. With a number of zillionaire tech bros now here, one of them can easily afford it
San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas are in a roughly equilateral triangle with Austin fairly close to San Antonio. I think the league best demographically suited to expand to Austin might be the NBA but they have a San Antonio franchise already.
I'm glad you got to it in the third half of the show, but if I had multiple and various suitors offering to pay me millions or tens of millions of dollars, I flat out would not live in Mexico. ~ fin ~
For a post about sport fandom in Mexico, it is odd that soccer didn’t get a mention until almost the end. And that probably explains why the us-centric sports leagues find it hard to break through in mx. The meta point is super valid though. The world would find it much easier to relate to and understand the US, and US the world, if only we had a bit more pro soccer.
It doesn't matter how many people there are in the metro area - if none of them have the money for $1,500 courtside tickets or $200 official jerseys then it's going to be a net loss for the existing owners.
How does this play out on the ground? Well, actual front-row courtside tickets for the Mexico City Capitanes (Mexico City's G-League team) this Friday night are $33.20 on Ticketmaster, which seems about $10-15 cheaper than comparable American G-League teams from ten minutes of fooling around on Ticketmaster's site.
So if you charge NBA prices, nobody's going to show up. They can't afford it, and if they could afford it they still wouldn't consider it worth the money. If you're not charging NBA prices, then what does the NBA gain from it? The NBA and MLB don't need to grow their sports in Mexico, basketball and baseball are already pretty dang popular. Top-tier Mexican players already join teams in the NBA and (especially) MLB.
The NFL is perhaps a bit more interested in the idea of growing the sport in Mexico (at least until they look at the actual numbers involved), but that's what Jacksonville and Las Vegas home games are for.
Great points here, but taken one step further on the G league comparison, we also want to consider that costs are Mexico price-level costs. For example, the daily minimum wage in Mexico is MXN $278.80 around $13.76 USD. I thought, wait, that's not right, then realized that means the HOURLY minimum is then about $1.72 USD in an eight-hour workday. (Source: https://ogletree.com/insights-resources/blog-posts/mexicos-daily-minimum-wage-for-2025-will-increase-by-12-percent/)
Once that's taken into account, the profit in dollar terms is probably still lower than a US market, but I think we're starting to get comparable.
I also don't know if the median disposable income is the relevant point of comparison for filling a stadium. You need a large enough pool of rich enough people to fill seats, and a close enough profit margin that Mexico city is worth it.
I think what you're writing just proves my point. Maybe it's worth it to George T. Mexico, Mexico City Entrepreneur, but it's not going to be worth it to the NBA or the 30 owners of other NBA teams.
Also, keep in mind that the G-League in Mexico City is the top level of local basketball, whereas G-League in the US is, well, the G-League - and the tickets are still more expensive on this side of the Rio Grande.
If selling strictly to the local super-rich was a viable revenue stream, you'd already see it here in the States, with the worst Lakers or Knicks seats (can any seat in a basketball arena really be called a "nosebleed", no matter how terrible?) priced in the thousands instead of the low-hundreds.
Regarding the intersection of population and GDP - also consider that, much like the Blue Jays, a Mexico City-based pro sports team would likely have a nationwide fanbase, which would drive up the numbers at least a little bit further.
One quibble on your placing of Toronto relative to other US cities in terms of GDP. Normalizing for currency cuts both ways, costs in Toronto are in Canadian dollars so the capacity of Metro Toronto to actually "afford" major league sports is somewhat under represented. Multiply by 1.3 roughly.
Same applies to the 6 other Canadian cities in the NHL relative to other US cities in the NHL.
Admittedly, the williingness of Canadians to pay to watch NHL hockey almost regardless of price is almost infinite.
As for Mexico City in the NFL? I doubt it. NFL obviously covets London, England, but dealing 4 time zones in North America is almost too much.
As for MLB, why don't you do a piece on the moral imperative of getting a hard salary cap in baseball so the abomination of the LA Dodgers cannot replicated again , and competitive balance can actually be restored.
> One quibble on your placing of Toronto relative to other US cities in terms of GDP. Normalizing for currency cuts both ways, costs in Toronto are in Canadian dollars so the capacity of Metro Toronto to actually "afford" major league sports is somewhat under represented. Multiply by 1.3 roughly.
I don't think this really matters, because wealth is measured in terms of "how many yachts can I buy", not "what percentage of local GDP do I get". A team that made $10,000 a year would make its owner the wealthiest man in Yemen, but wouldn't do much for the yachting desires of the rest of the league.
> As for MLB, why don't you do a piece on the moral imperative of getting a hard salary cap in baseball so the abomination of the LA Dodgers cannot replicated again , and competitive balance can actually be restored.
I don't for the life of me understand the bellyaching about the lack of an MLB salary cap. Well, I do, but I can't explain it in a civilized fashion - it's just bellyaching from smaller-market fans who labor under the delusions that 1. their teams are shit because of spending differential rather than shitty ownership and 2. a season where every team went 81-81 last year and goes 81-81 this year is somehow more exciting than a season full of Davids and Goliaths that itself results in Goliaths for Davids to take down in years to come.
MLB has had 16 different World Series champions in the 21st century, including the Kansas City Royals and Tampa Bay No-Longer-Devil Rays. The Mets spent more than the Dodgers and didn't even make the playoffs, the Brewers were the 8th-lowest spenders and made it to the NLCS (beating the 10th-highest spender on the way).
The only MLB teams which have been consistently-dreadful in the 21st century are the Pirates, the Marlins, and arguably the Rockies and Royals (though all of those teams save for the Pirates have been in the World Series - the Royals winning in 2015 and losing in 2014, the Rockies losing in 2007, and the Marlins winning in 2003). You could maybe throw the Reds into the list as well - they're generally fair-to-middling in the regular season, but haven't actually won a postseason series since the mid-90s.
The NHL has a strict salary cap and about the same different champions (14 by my count, but there's one less season due to the lockout), and probably a comparable amount of perennial losers (the Coyotes/Mammoth for sure, almost certainly the Sabres, probably the Blue Jackets and the Maple Leafs), and that's with more playoff teams per-year than the MLB (twice as many up until 2012, in fact!).
The NBA did expand recently. It took a while to get off the ground, but the WNBA has recently gained respectable live and video audiences. They do need to decide whether women's pro basketball should be more closely modeled after college basketball or after roller derby, but you can't have everything. Similarly, while the US has the NFL, it also has had multiple professional women's football teams.
I 100% agree with the NFL, but I think baseball in Mexico City would be a big stretch. For a sport with 162 games a year, overcoming both the travel realities and the altitude would be tough.
The current Rockies ownership is pretty old school and out of touch, but I think the Coors altitude adjustment hurts more than people think. The ball flight in the outfield is what people always focus on, but I think the ball flight of the pitch is way more important. Facing the same pitcher in Coors vs Dodger Stadium, for example, means facing two pretty dramatically different ball flights. And pitchers for the Rockies have to build a repertoire that will work both at altitude and at sea level, which is a lot to ask for a complex kinetic chain motion that is already one of the hardest to master and repeat precisely in sports. Mexico would have those problems turned up even higher plus a brutal travel schedule on top of it.
Seattle is worse than Mexico City for team travel and they have a baseball team. The altitude would be the biggest problem, not sure if a domed stadium with climate control could do anything about that.
Seattle also has a lot of disposable income, no language barrier, and no going through Customs. The first one is the most important.
You also can't pressurize a domed stadium to the point where it'd make any difference. First off, it'd have to be airtight - at stadium scale, the amount of air you'd need to pump in to maintain a sea level pressure would be impossible to continuously pump otherwise.
If you somehow solved that issue, you'd also have to engineer it to handle all that extra pressure without exploding. To be fair, withstanding the pressure would necessitate an airtight build, so I guess you can view airtightness as a bit of a freebie if you just focus on the pressure.
Saddest of all from a nerd perspective, even after all that engineering you wouldn't have to engineer a decompression chamber to prevent killing fans on their way out the door. The pressure differential is enough to be a total and absolute pain in the ass to engineer at stadium scale, but not enough to cause even a mild case of the bends.
For a sense of perspective, the pressure differential in "clean rooms" (which maintain said cleanliness in part by being higher-pressure than the rest of the building) is about 0.1 kPa above ambient. The pressure differential you'd need for "Mexico City but Chicago on the Inside" is a bit less than 25 kPa above ambient. 30 kPa or thereabouts is around the point where people start experiencing serious discomfort, 100 kPa is almost certainly fatal but it's only internal trauma - not something that really televises dramatically or anything. 800 kPa was enough to make mincemeat out of (one of) the Byford Dolphin divers but the meat-mincing was mostly from the trauma of being forced through a tiny opening under immense pressure. If you wanted a real Hollywood-style human red mist after every home game, you'd probably want at least a 1000 kPa differential and extremely-sturdy screen doors.
If we can get Dean Spanos out of the country in exchange for moving the Chargers to Mexico City, everyone wins!
"Still, in the NBA, for instance, there’s nearly a one-to-one correspondence between metro-area GDP and franchise value"
Bit of a stretch! Washington's GDP is 5.6x bigger than Milwaukee's and their NBA teams are worth almost exactly the same, and there are many other such examples.
I was squinting at that scatter plot, too... I'd be curious to see that "Metro GDP strongly predicts franchise values" regression run without those three big outliers of LA, NY, and SF.
Also, just as a math person... That's not the way a mathematician would use the phrase "a one-to-one correspondence."
I'm not sure if statisticians just use it to mean "highly significant relationship?"
One off-kilter aspect of MLB adding Mexico City is four places in Latin America have each supplied far more MLB players than Mexico, and are closer at least to the East Coast: Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Cuba.
Any Latin American MLB team would instantly gain a strong Latin following throughout the hemisphere, including in the US. It need not depend primarily on local retail ticket sales. In fact, it would be wise to fill the stands by keeping ticket prices low and count on advertising, television and corporate revenues.
Granted Venezuela and Cuba are likely impossible for political reasons, but Puerto Rico is actually easier politically than Mexico City. And none of the four locations has the altitude problems or terrible airport of Mexico City. I know taxes for professional athletes are complicated, but it's possible Puerto Rico could provide significant tax advantages for players.
I would love to see major sports expansion to Latin America, more for world peace advantages than improvements in sportstainment. And Mexico City is a logical place to start for a number of reasons. But for MLB, it does seem inconsistent with the sports' deep roots in the Caribbean.
If you add two teams, you may as well add two more so that we get up to 36. That’s a way more even number to divide the league up into three divisions per conference with 6 teams each.
+1 on Mexico City / NFL - quickly followed by 1 of the majors in Austin, despite close proximity to Dallas / Houston. If San Antonio can have an NBA franchise with similar proximity considerations, Austin can definitely take on NFL or MLB. With a number of zillionaire tech bros now here, one of them can easily afford it
San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas are in a roughly equilateral triangle with Austin fairly close to San Antonio. I think the league best demographically suited to expand to Austin might be the NBA but they have a San Antonio franchise already.
I'm glad you got to it in the third half of the show, but if I had multiple and various suitors offering to pay me millions or tens of millions of dollars, I flat out would not live in Mexico. ~ fin ~
For a post about sport fandom in Mexico, it is odd that soccer didn’t get a mention until almost the end. And that probably explains why the us-centric sports leagues find it hard to break through in mx. The meta point is super valid though. The world would find it much easier to relate to and understand the US, and US the world, if only we had a bit more pro soccer.
Now I just want to know more about how one becomes a consultant for a G League team in Mexico City
It doesn't matter how many people there are in the metro area - if none of them have the money for $1,500 courtside tickets or $200 official jerseys then it's going to be a net loss for the existing owners.
The median gross disposable income in the US is around $40K (this is "median", so Elon Musk and Bill Gates don't mess with the number that much). For Mexico, it's less than half that (about $17K per the OECD (see https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2025/04/17/what-it-means-to-be-wealthy-in-mexico/).
How does this play out on the ground? Well, actual front-row courtside tickets for the Mexico City Capitanes (Mexico City's G-League team) this Friday night are $33.20 on Ticketmaster, which seems about $10-15 cheaper than comparable American G-League teams from ten minutes of fooling around on Ticketmaster's site.
Tickets for the 2025 CONCACAF Gold Cup Final between Mexico and America were under $200 per https://athlonsports.com/soccer/how-to-buy-tickets-for-usmnt-vs-mexico-price-availability-other-details-on-gold-cup-final- - and that's about as high-profile as it's going to get outside of that one soccer thing that happens every four years.
So if you charge NBA prices, nobody's going to show up. They can't afford it, and if they could afford it they still wouldn't consider it worth the money. If you're not charging NBA prices, then what does the NBA gain from it? The NBA and MLB don't need to grow their sports in Mexico, basketball and baseball are already pretty dang popular. Top-tier Mexican players already join teams in the NBA and (especially) MLB.
The NFL is perhaps a bit more interested in the idea of growing the sport in Mexico (at least until they look at the actual numbers involved), but that's what Jacksonville and Las Vegas home games are for.
Great points here, but taken one step further on the G league comparison, we also want to consider that costs are Mexico price-level costs. For example, the daily minimum wage in Mexico is MXN $278.80 around $13.76 USD. I thought, wait, that's not right, then realized that means the HOURLY minimum is then about $1.72 USD in an eight-hour workday. (Source: https://ogletree.com/insights-resources/blog-posts/mexicos-daily-minimum-wage-for-2025-will-increase-by-12-percent/)
Once that's taken into account, the profit in dollar terms is probably still lower than a US market, but I think we're starting to get comparable.
I also don't know if the median disposable income is the relevant point of comparison for filling a stadium. You need a large enough pool of rich enough people to fill seats, and a close enough profit margin that Mexico city is worth it.
And as the sport gets more popular, more rich people start getting more interested, pushing up prices, right? The New York Times recently ran an article on this happening with the WNBA: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/business/wnba-fans-tickets-prices.html
I think what you're writing just proves my point. Maybe it's worth it to George T. Mexico, Mexico City Entrepreneur, but it's not going to be worth it to the NBA or the 30 owners of other NBA teams.
Also, keep in mind that the G-League in Mexico City is the top level of local basketball, whereas G-League in the US is, well, the G-League - and the tickets are still more expensive on this side of the Rio Grande.
If selling strictly to the local super-rich was a viable revenue stream, you'd already see it here in the States, with the worst Lakers or Knicks seats (can any seat in a basketball arena really be called a "nosebleed", no matter how terrible?) priced in the thousands instead of the low-hundreds.
Regarding the intersection of population and GDP - also consider that, much like the Blue Jays, a Mexico City-based pro sports team would likely have a nationwide fanbase, which would drive up the numbers at least a little bit further.
One quibble on your placing of Toronto relative to other US cities in terms of GDP. Normalizing for currency cuts both ways, costs in Toronto are in Canadian dollars so the capacity of Metro Toronto to actually "afford" major league sports is somewhat under represented. Multiply by 1.3 roughly.
Same applies to the 6 other Canadian cities in the NHL relative to other US cities in the NHL.
Admittedly, the williingness of Canadians to pay to watch NHL hockey almost regardless of price is almost infinite.
As for Mexico City in the NFL? I doubt it. NFL obviously covets London, England, but dealing 4 time zones in North America is almost too much.
As for MLB, why don't you do a piece on the moral imperative of getting a hard salary cap in baseball so the abomination of the LA Dodgers cannot replicated again , and competitive balance can actually be restored.
> One quibble on your placing of Toronto relative to other US cities in terms of GDP. Normalizing for currency cuts both ways, costs in Toronto are in Canadian dollars so the capacity of Metro Toronto to actually "afford" major league sports is somewhat under represented. Multiply by 1.3 roughly.
I don't think this really matters, because wealth is measured in terms of "how many yachts can I buy", not "what percentage of local GDP do I get". A team that made $10,000 a year would make its owner the wealthiest man in Yemen, but wouldn't do much for the yachting desires of the rest of the league.
> As for MLB, why don't you do a piece on the moral imperative of getting a hard salary cap in baseball so the abomination of the LA Dodgers cannot replicated again , and competitive balance can actually be restored.
I don't for the life of me understand the bellyaching about the lack of an MLB salary cap. Well, I do, but I can't explain it in a civilized fashion - it's just bellyaching from smaller-market fans who labor under the delusions that 1. their teams are shit because of spending differential rather than shitty ownership and 2. a season where every team went 81-81 last year and goes 81-81 this year is somehow more exciting than a season full of Davids and Goliaths that itself results in Goliaths for Davids to take down in years to come.
MLB has had 16 different World Series champions in the 21st century, including the Kansas City Royals and Tampa Bay No-Longer-Devil Rays. The Mets spent more than the Dodgers and didn't even make the playoffs, the Brewers were the 8th-lowest spenders and made it to the NLCS (beating the 10th-highest spender on the way).
The only MLB teams which have been consistently-dreadful in the 21st century are the Pirates, the Marlins, and arguably the Rockies and Royals (though all of those teams save for the Pirates have been in the World Series - the Royals winning in 2015 and losing in 2014, the Rockies losing in 2007, and the Marlins winning in 2003). You could maybe throw the Reds into the list as well - they're generally fair-to-middling in the regular season, but haven't actually won a postseason series since the mid-90s.
The NHL has a strict salary cap and about the same different champions (14 by my count, but there's one less season due to the lockout), and probably a comparable amount of perennial losers (the Coyotes/Mammoth for sure, almost certainly the Sabres, probably the Blue Jackets and the Maple Leafs), and that's with more playoff teams per-year than the MLB (twice as many up until 2012, in fact!).
Mariners should probably be listed among the consistently dreadful franchises.