Could These 10 Football-Starved Cities Support an NFL Franchise? (2024)

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Panic is currently gripping a few NFL cities as we speak. The fear of losing their beloved franchise is a very real one for cities like Buffalo, Jacksonville, and even Minnesota.

The NFL is a booming enterprise, and right now league officials want to get the biggest bang for their business buck. That could spell doom for some smaller markets that have had trouble supporting their team in recent years.

Los Angeles has been a key city in the NFL’s supposed expansion plans, but there are other viable places in this country that could be suitable homes as well. The NFL is looking to keep growing so let’s look at ten cities who could be in the running for a future franchise.

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San Jose is just an hour’s drive down the road from both San Francisco and Oakland. The city has a slightly larger population than San Francisco with a little less than a million inhabitants. San Jose has supported an NHL team, the Sharks, for almost twenty years.

San Jose State’s football team has never been a very stable program and hasn’t really attracted a large following throughout the city.

A stadium and some surrounding infrastructure would have to be built for a franchise, but San Jose is a city that has a bit of money in its pocket. Still, the close proximity to Oakland and San Francisco would probably kill San Jose’s chances of every getting an NFL franchise.

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Seattle is the only city in America’s Pacific Northwest that has an NFL franchise to call their own. The city of Portland, Oregon is just three hours south of Seattle, and it’s the only other city in that area of the country that could support a team.

There isn’t a great disparity in the populations of Seattle and Portland, but while the city is beautiful and modern, it doesn’t have a very historic football foundation.

The Blazers are the only major sports franchise in town. The state has done a good job supporting two major college football teams, but supporting an NFL franchise in that market seems like a far fetched idea.

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The city of Columbus is right smack dab in the middle of Ohio splitting the distance between Cincinnati down south and Cleveland up north. The city is one of the twenty largest in the country, but it has consistently been overlooked for sports franchises. Even though Columbus is the biggest city in the state, markets like Cincinnati and Cleveland have been luckier acquiring teams.

That may have to do with the town’s loyalty to Ohio State University athletics. Buckeye football is the most important thing in Columbus and there probably isn’t room for an NFL team to come in and siphon away that passion.

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If the NFL wanted to cross the borders and expand globally, there are three cities that would be mentioned in the conversation first. London, Toronto, and Mexico City would be the three likely candidates.

Toronto has already been talked about as a future home for the Bills, but the Rogers Centre isn’t up to NFL standards, and a new facility would have to be built to accommodate a team.

Mexico City hosted a regular season game between the 49ers and Cardinals back in 2005, but the city just doesn’t have the funds right now to support a franchise.

London is the most desirable foreign city.

The regular season games at Wembley Stadium may have been snoozefests, but they generated some buzz and hype throughout England.

It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but there’s a possibility in the future that the NFL could start expanding around the world.

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The NFL’s Pro Bowl was held in Hawaii from 1980 to 2009 before being moved to Miami last year. Honolulu’s Aloha Stadium is a borderline NFL viable facility with a capacity of 50,000.

The city could probably support a team, but the time difference and travel hardships will probably prevent the islands from ever getting a full time franchise.

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San Antonio is currently second on the list of most populated American cities without an NFL organization. The second biggest city in Texas has 1.3 million people living in its borders. The concern though it that many of those citizens live outside the metro area.

The only major sports team in San Antonio right now is the Spurs of the NBA.

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Oklahoma City is a place out there in the Midwest that doesn’t get mentioned too often when it comes to the NFL. Even though it has a higher population total than places like Atlanta, Kansas City, and Miami, the city probably doesn’t have the resources and capabilities to sustain an NFL team right now.

The state of Oklahoma is very much a college football state, and the Dallas Cowboys already have a good grip on most of the NFL fans in the area.

The Oklahoma City Thunder have been a success story in the NBA but trying to introduce an NFL squad to the city would probably be a tougher sell.

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The NFL tries their very best to completely cut ties with sports gambling even though that’s how the league gains a good amount of their following.

The city of Las Vegas was one that grew substantially in the 90s and it’s a city that has a strong population to stand on. The city also has a vast amount entertainment features that the NFL would have to compete with.

In the end, the main deal breaker probably wouldn’t be the gambling; it would instead be the lack of a television audience. Like Oklahoma City, Las Vegas has a relatively small television audience, and that means less dollars from the all important advertisers.

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Los Angeles is the only team on this list that has actually supported a full time NFL organization before. In fact the city was able to balance two at one time before the Rams and Raiders both skipped town in the nineties.

The second largest city in America has been talked about for nearly a decade as the top candidate to receive an NFL franchise. A stadium and proper facilities would have to be built, and even though a few proposals have come up, nothing will be official until the NFL awards the city a team.

That seems like a strong possibility in the future, but there are still some kinks that need to be ironed out in order for it to happen.