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Professional Sports Teams Move Essay

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Professional Sports Teams Move - Cities Fight To Keep Them      Professional sports, like most of our popular culture, can be understood only partly by through its exiting plays and tremendous athletes. Baseball and football most of all are not only games anymore but also hardcore businesses. As businesses, sports leagues can be as conniving, deceitful, and manipulative as any other businesses in the world. No matter what the circumstances are, it seems that Politicians are always some how right around the corner from the world of sports. These Politicians look to exploit both the cultural and the economic dimensions of the sports for their own purposes. This is what is known in the sports industry as “playing …show more content…

This type of political confrontations enables teams to control debate, leaving city officials playing defense.      Possibly those who are most effected by the sport’s industry’s willingness to abandon a community are the dedicated fans. When Al Davis moved the Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles, he pulled away from some of sport’s most loyal fans and also hurt his football team. The NFL’s Colts and Cardinals have also had failures on the field since their moves. These three teams are proof that all the greed that was put into the moving of their franchises hasn’t brought them more success or in some cases less success.      In every move there are two sides to the politics. There are the teams themselves and there are the cities that fight to keep them. In May 1991, Sharon Pratt Dixon, Mayor of Washington, D.C. said, “We’re going to do whatever it takes to keep the Redskins here. Sports has become an industry, and to the extent that we can guarantee jobs for the District residents, we will do whatever it takes, including building the stadium ourselves” (Euchner 1), this is one view of how a city official fights for a team. The other viewpoint is from the side of the team owner, Al Davis, managing general partner of the Raiders said, “just build it” (Euchner 1). These viewpoints are why sports teams move and cities fight to keep

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