While Soccer has some heavy hitters, the 18th most valuable soccer team in the world is about as valuable as the 18th most valuable hockey team in the NHL.
That is pretty crazy to think about considering the relative popularity of the two sports. A consistent mid-table finisher in the English Premier League in Crystal Palace is less valuable than a small market hockey team in the Sunbelt, the Nashville Predators.
Really speaks to the open/closed system and how different they are and why there was that push for a Super League from some of the big clubs a few years ago.
This is apples and oranges. This is partly because the imposition of a closed system in England would prompt the FANS to torch the places of business funding the change and the homes of the perps. Perhaps more importantly, there is the issue of supply, so to speak.
I watched Sunderland ‘Til I Die because I have been to the Stadium of Light for a derby, I have followed Sunderland to Old Trafford, and had a time of my life in that community. So I at least have a sense of the lay of the land, the conditions under which it operates, aka know enough to be dangerous and little else.
Sunderland is part of the “census designation” Northeast England. This runs generally from Newcastle to Middlesbrough. And this came to mind back when Portland announced an effort to go to Major League Soccer. The comparisons in 2008 were interesting.
Both Northeast and the Combined Portland-Salem metro area were about 2.5 million in population in 2008. The shape of Northeast and the populated shape of essentially the Willamette Valley and the Columbia extended north were similar.
In 2008, Portland had the Blazers, the Timbers were in USL, so this whole region only had the 19,500+ multipurpose stadium and the >20,000 Moda Center. (Corvallis and Eugene are to the south of this)
At the same time, Northeast England had three Premier League teams after Sunderland had bounced back up. Newcastle has the 52,000-seat St. James, Stadium of Light held 49,000, and “The Riverside” (a name that has changed more than once since, but the sponsors can stick it) holds 35,000 or so. Hartlepool had dropped to League Two and may have already dropped again by 2008. There were another 6 teams in the 4th-7th levels at that point…
…including Darlington. Darlington ended up with a new owner just before then who decided to build a 25,000-seater, went for the cheap tickets/make money off concessions tack, while harboring Premier League ambitions, and eventually bankrupted the club between doing that and maybe a little light money laundering. A newer version of Darlington exists at a small local rugby stadium while the bigger stadium is used by a third level rugby club.
I’m only mentioning the 8th through 10th levels for the fact that, besides cool names like Horden Community Welfare and the sadly folded Norton and Stockton Ancients, that level has close to the number of clubs that relate to the number of larger Portland area high schools.
Basically, England- and the rest of Europe- is loathe to regionalize the way the American cartel/leagues are structured. The valuations follow that steadily.