SPORTS, unlike any other business, generates a sense of civic pride and community identity. New Yorkers don't cluster around the television to cheer on Wall Street investment bankers; Detroit citizens don't congregate in bars to watch Ford or GM workers build cars. But rooting for the Yankees and the Tigers and the Knicks and the Pistons is a natural communal activity.

At the amateur level, organized sports, especially with the advent of girls' sports leagues, involves more active and ongoing citizen involvement than virtually any other activity, including politics and religion. More communities are home to a little league team than to a MacDonalds.

But organized sports is becoming a business, and professional sports has become a business like any other: corporatized, absentee owned, increasingly mobile and disconnected from place.

This web page identifies rules, and models, of organized and professional sports that allow us not only to root for the home team to win, but to root the home team in place.

Battling Remote Ownership

• Give Fans A Chance Act
  Initially introduced in 1997 by Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer, The Give the Fans a Chance Act would forbid leagues from prohibiting community ownership. If a professional sports league ignores this provision, it will lose its sports broadcast antitrust exemption.
• Fairness in Antitrust in National Sports (FANS) Act
  In response to Major League Baseball's plan to eliminate the Minnesota Twins from the league, Senator Paul Wellstone introduced legislation in November 2001 to amend the Clayton Act to make the antitrust laws applicable to the elimination or relocation of major league baseball franchises. Current law provides baseball an exemption from antitrust rules and regulations.

Enabling Community Ownership

• State-level Enabling Legislation
  State level enabling legislation refers to rules that allow states to purchase sports franchises. The laws typically approve the use of loan funds or eminent domain coupled with public offerings of stock to permit community ownership of teams.

Models

• Appleton, WI Timber Rattlers
• Green Bay Packers
• Harrisburg Senators
• Memphis Redbirds
• Rochester, NY Red Barons and Syracuse, NY Sky Chiefs
• Toledo Mud Hens