Home Team [Hardcover]

Michael N. Danielson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 3, 1997

This text studies the connections between professional team sports in North America and the places where teams play. It examines the relationship between the four major team sports - baseball, basketball, football and hockey - and the cities that attach their names, hearts and an increasing amount of tax dollars to big league teams. From the names on the uniforms to the loyalties of their fans, team are tied to the places in which they play. Nonetheless, teams, like other urban businesses, are affected by the changes in their environments, like the flight of their customers to suburbs and changes in local political climates. In "Home Team", professional sports are scrutinized in the larger context of the metropolitan areas that surround and support them. The author is particularly interested in the political aspects of the connections between professional sports teams and cities. He points out that local and state governments are now major players in the competition for franchises, providing increasingly lavish publicly funded facilities for what are, in fact, private business ventures. As a result, professional sports enterprises, which have insisted that private leagues rather than public laws are the proper means of regulating games, have become powerful political players, seeking additional benefits from government, often playing off one city against another. The wide variety of governmental responses reflects the enormous diversity of urban and state politics in the United States and in the Canadian cities and provinces that host professional teams.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When the Carolina Panthers and Jacksonville Jaguars each came within a game of Super Bowl XXXI earlier this year, observers of the National Football League speculated that the two-year-old clubs benefited from an overly generous draft system. Not coincidentally, both teams also faced an all-out support blitz from local fans and political leaders. The relationship between professional baseball, basketball, football and hockey and the cities in which those sports are played is the focus of this academic and only occasionally intriguing book. Danielson's source material often is dated, but the professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University redeems himself by offering details of Major League baseball's projected 1998 expansion and stories behind other sports' recent expansion teams. Danielson makes some mistakes that color the book, like persistently calling the Carolina's Panthers the Cougars, the name of that state's American Basketball Association team?defunct for 25 years. Don't look here for juicy insider info that will make die-hard fans sit still for several hundred pages of textbook-like writing, detailed source notes and an appendix of every home-team city in the United States and Canada since 1871. Danielson (Profits and Politics in Paradise: The Development of Hilton Head Island) fails to offer more than a handful of compelling arguments and takes a hands-off approach to reporting such business of sport as shared revenues, salary caps, competition for teams, relocation strategies and television rights. The athletes themselves don't even matter here. But despite its faults, Home Team has the power to agitate thinking sports fans with its overwhelming message that dollars and cents mean more to professional sports today than do home runs, touchdowns, goals and free throws.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Danielson brings to this book a lifelong interest in sports as a dedicated fan. He provides an account that will inform and entertain all readers interested in the phenomenon of professional teams. -- James Quirk, author of Pay Dirt: The Business of Professional Team Sports

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 424 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr (March 3, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691036500
• ISBN-13: 978-0691036502
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,637,047 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars The best overview of the sports industry and the politics of stadiums, December 29, 2006

By 

Charlie from New Haven (New Haven CT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Home Team: Professional Sports and the American Metropolis (Paperback)

"Michael Danielson has produced the most thorough and evenhanded analysis yet of the politics of sports and cities. He focuses on the way that sports teams foster and exploit a sense of 'place,' particularly in cities were dynamic economic growth or decline undermines a more organic and abiding civic identity." -- Charles Euchner, author of "Playing the Field," writing in The American Political Science Review, March 1998, p. 227.

0 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Home Team, February 8, 2000

By 

John Kernaghan (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Home Team (Hardcover)

Actually, I'd like to review the book in my newspaper, which is published in Ontario, Canada. Is it possible to have it and Field of Schemes couriered to me. You can reach me by email or at [phone]. Thanks, JK