Bring the big leagues to Mexico City
The rewards outweigh the risks for the NFL, NBA and MLB
Tomorrow is Election Day! You can find my latest take on the New York mayoral race here, and then Eli’s stories on Virginia here and New Jersey here.
Since my article was published, AtlasIntel, Silver Bulletin’s highest-rated pollster, released a survey showing Zohran Mandani with only a 7-point lead over Andrew Cuomo in New York. The average of all surveys conducted since Oct. 22 is Mamdani +14.6, however. There isn’t consistent movement toward either candidate, and Mamdani’s lead in other polls is as large as 26 points. So I don’t think anything major has changed — other than that some pollsters could have egg on their faces depending on the outcome. A Cuomo win wouldn’t be entirely unprecedented, since NYC mayoral polling has not been especially accurate. But it would be a significant upset.
Whatever happens, Eli and I will have a Substack Live chat about the outcomes with Ross Barkan of Political Currents at noon on Wednesday. We’re also hoping to get SBSQ back on schedule to post in the early part of the month, which means it should run late this week or early next week. You can submit questions for SBSQ #26 in the comment thread to edition #25. But for today, you’re getting something a little different.
You probably don’t need me to tell you that Mexico City, which I visited last month, is a bustling and vibrant metropolis: great food, excellent museums, interesting architecture, and fun people-watching. I like pretty much everything about it except the altitude and traffic.1 There’s a reason more and more U.S. expats are moving there, sometimes to the annoyance of the local population.
And although it’s probably not the first thing most tourists notice, there’s a ubiquity of American sports logos in Mexico: unis, caps, even promotions at fast food restaurants. At the small airport I visited in Oaxaca, one guy even had a Blue Jays jersey on and an anxious look on his face which suggested he was white-knuckling it to make his connection on time to arrive in Toronto for Game 3 of the World Series that night.
I hope that fan will someday be able to see a World Series game in Ciudad de Mexico instead.
Expansion in the “Big 4” sports leagues has largely stalled out. Major League Baseball hasn’t added a team since 1998, the NFL since 2002, or the NBA since 2004. The NHL has been more aggressive, with two-and-a-half recent expansion franchises in Las Vegas, Seattle, and Salt Lake City2, in part because it’s the only league to fully embrace its North American identity with seven teams in Canada.
Although owners may be short-sighted about not wanting to share lucrative media rights deals with new franchises, there’s also a good reason for this: the leagues are running out of viable markets. By metro area GDP — the metric I prefer because the reality in professional sports today is that teams are heavily dependent on wealthy patrons and even wealthier corporations to generate the truly big bucks — the biggest outlier is the lack of an NBA franchise in Seattle, the 9th-largest market in North America by GDP. Bring back the Sonics, please.
But after that, potential expansion candidates tend to prompt as many questions as answers. There’s no NHL franchise in Houston, which has a larger GDP than Seattle, but the performance of NHL teams in major Sunbelt metros has been uneven. Austin is growing quickly and is the largest U.S. market by GDP without any “Big 4” franchises. But a future expansion team — the Austin Armadillos? The Austin Bats3? — would have to compete against other Texas megafranchises like the Cowboys. San Diego has a larger GDP than you might think, but both the NFL (recently) and NBA (not so recently) abandoned it, opting instead for second franchises in Los Angeles. And sure, there are options around the margin, but they’d mostly populate the leagues with new “small market” teams. Charlotte, a candidate for MLB expansion, is larger by GDP than eight current Major League cities, but smaller than the other 22:
Enter Mexico City. It might be out of mind to most of us U.S. Americans, but it’s about as close to the East Coast as Phoenix or Salt Lake City. And there’s undeniable upside there. Mexico City is both the most populous city proper and metro area in North America. No, it doesn’t have U.S. standards of wealth, although you wouldn’t know it when strolling through wealthier neighborhoods like Polanco, where you could squint and tell yourself that you were in Miami or a more walkable version of Los Angeles. Per-capita GDP in the Valley of Mexico was about $13,000 in 2021, though it’s closer to $18,000 today given healthy GDP growth. However, the huge population makes up for it. Do the math, and Mexico City is the 15th-largest metro area in North America by GDP, in the same vicinity as Phoenix and Toronto. But Phoenix and Toronto have three “Big 4” teams each, when Mexico City has none.
True, this is something of an apples-to-oranges comparison. (Or if you prefer, peras con manzanas.) The San Francisco and Silicon Valley metro areas, which I’ve combined into one market for purposes of this analysis4, has roughly 3x the GDP per capita as the poorest markets with major league teams, such as Milwaukee, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Memphis. That’s a bigger difference than you might assume. But even New Orleans is 3-4x wealthier per capita than Mexico City. There aren’t any great points of comparison, and there are no guarantees that a CDMX franchise would find financial success.
Still, in the NBA, for instance, there’s nearly a one-to-one correspondence between metro-area GDP and franchise value. This data suggests that a Mexico City NBA franchise would be worth on the order of $4.5 billion, right in line with the expansion fees that the league is reportedly seeking for new franchises.
Mexico City is already turning out big numbers for U.S. sports
Mexico City has shown a great deal of enthusiasm for the U.S. major leagues whenever it has had the opportunity to experience them. The largest crowd for an NFL game in history was in Mexico City, when 112,376 fans watched a preseason game between the Cowboys and Houston Oilers at Azteca Stadium in 1994. More recently, the NBA sold more than 20,000 tickets to its annual Mexico City game on Saturday night, while charging typically expensive prices.
The Mexico City Capitanes — who, full disclosure, Silver Bulletin Assistant Sports Analyst Joseph George consults for — also led the NBA G League in attendance in 2023-24, an especially impressive feat given that they’re the only independent G League team (all of the others are affiliated with NBA franchises). With a roster featuring players from the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Chile and of course Mexico, the Capitanes are a repository for Pan-American talent, but probably don’t have any budding NBA superstars on the roster. Still, they averaged around 6,500 fans per game last year and drew more than 19,000 for a game against the South Bay Lakers.5
Which sport should go first?
This is not necessarily meant to imply that the NBA should be the first league to make the leap to CDMX. Mexico has not exactly been a bastion of basketball talent; there are only four Mexican-born players in NBA history, none of them are currently in the league. However, the highest-profile Mexican prospect ever will soon join the league in the form of Karim Lopez, a lanky, mobile wing and a projected lottery pick who has drawn comparisons to everyone from Deni Avdija to — more flatteringly — Dr. J.
Based on Google Trends searches, the Big 4 league where interest is highest relative to the United States is Major League Baseball, where searches in Mexico are 50 percent of the volume as in the U.S. The comparable figures for the NFL and NBA are 36 percent and 28 percent, respectively. I’ll grant you that none of these numbers is extraordinarily impressive, but keep in mind that Mexico doesn’t currently have any Big 4 teams and they’d almost certainly increase if it did. Canada, by comparison, is fairly close to Mexico in search volume for the NFL, where it also doesn’t have a team. But it’s at par with the U.S. — indeed, exceeding it for MLB6 and greatly so for the NHL — in the leagues where it does.7
Personally, if you made me Czar of Sports for a day, I’d go with an NFL team there first. Put a Mexico City team in the AFC West — the Broncos, Chiefs, Chargers and Raiders all have fairly big followings in Mexico — and a Toronto team in the NFC North to help rekindle some old NHL Norris Division rivalries. It’s more of a logical stepping stone for the NFL than a London expansion franchise, which would create far more travel and logistical hurdles. (Our research for ELWAY suggests that time zone lags produce a massive difference in team performance.)
Why the NFL? For one thing, it’s by far the biggest league in Mexico City itself, with Google search volumes that exceed those for the other Big 4 leagues combined.8 And you can see this on the ground. When I stayed up to watch Game 3 of the World Series from my sad airport hotel room, the Spanish-language version of ESPN I was watching immediately switched to a recap of the Chiefs-Commanders Monday Night game once the baseball was over, including an interview with Patrick Mahomes.
With a relatively short season and low volume of games, the NFL could also be an easier sell to players who are hesitant about living year-round in Mexico, whether due to security concerns or other reasons. It’s also probably the sport least affected by altitude. At 7,349 feet, a Mexico City ballpark would make Coors Field look like a pitcher’s paradise, and with the cardiovascular demands that the NBA places on players, the Denver Nuggets consistently enjoy a massive home-court advantage. (ELWAY finds that altitude slightly helps the Denver Broncos, as well as adding yards to the kicking game, but the effects are more marginal.)
A CDMX team would find fans throughout Mexico
And in case you have any remaining doubts, keep in mind that a Mexico City expansion franchise would almost certainly find fans throughout a country of 130+ million people and not just in the capital.
We can state with some confidence by looking at the numbers for the Toronto Blue Jays and Toronto Raptors, the two singleton Canadian franchises in their respective leagues. Over the past five years, Google search volumes for the Blue Jays are about as 36 percent as high in other provinces as in Ontario. By contrast, the average U.S. MLB team achieves search volumes of only 5 to 6 percent of those in their respective home states.
For the Raptors, the numbers aren’t quite as impressive — and the NBA data is slightly weirder because teams can have comparatively high out-of-state search volumes either because the team has a strong national brand or because the team isn’t that popular at home (New York still hasn’t yet really taken to the Brooklyn Nets, for instance). Still, the Raptors perform relatively well. Their search volume is 21.5 percent as high outside of Ontario as within it, compared to 10.3 percent for the average NBA team outside of their home states.
Drawing in any material number of fans from outside CDMX would make the market truly massive. Excluding the Valley of Mexico, Mexico has a GDP of $1.44 trillion. If you give a Mexico City expansion team even 30 percent credit for that — so similar to the Blue Jays and Raptors — the total effective size of the market would be about $840 billion, larger than anything in the U.S. but New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago.
Finally, although I’m mostly trying to give you a break from our politics-heavy coverage lately, there is one final part of the pitch. Personally, I’m a big fan of inter-American cooperation, and I think the United States is fortunate to have two peaceful and (increasingly for Mexico) relatively prosperous neighbors. The 2026 World Cup will be shared among the three countries, whose relationship has grown increasingly rocky lately. An NFL, MLB, or NBA team in Mexico could help in some small way to restore the longer legacy of friendly rivalry.
And the pollution, which was bad on my visit but has gotten better over time.
Salt Lake City is the “half”; the NHL officially considers the Utah Mammoth to be an expansion team, although they inherited the roster of the Arizona Coyotes.
You know, as in the millions of bats that fly around Austin every evening. Or as in baseball bats. If there’s an MLB expansion franchise in Austin, Bats has to be the nickname.
The Census Bureau considers San Jose/Silicon Valley to be a separate MSA from San Francisco/Oakland, a distinction that I consider to be outmoded given the strong economic and cultural ties throughout the Bay Area.
Based on Google searches, the Lakers and Golden State Warriors are the most popular NBA teams in Mexico.
Some of this is undoubtedly because of the recent success of the Blue Jays.
Frankly, I also don’t know how effectively Google is capturing Spanish-language searches into its topic categories.
Keep in mind that the NFL is by far the biggest sports league in the U.S. So, while searches for MLB might be relatively higher in Mexico as compared to the United States, the NFL is highest in an absolute sense, and also slightly more concentrated in Mexico City as compared to the rest of the country.
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.