The Geography of Erasure
Sport sells itself as a meritocracy. It is closer to a real estate game: every franchise that ever packed up and left is on the board below, by league, by decade, by distance.
AS OF 2026-09-13 · 89 moves · 5 leagues · 1877 to 2025 · source: per-season team sheets + relocations ledger
Companion to the essay on Citizen of Nowhere.
Sporting history is not written by the winners but by the markets that survived. When a champion is based in a metro the modern corporate league has outgrown, the legacy does not get an asterisk. It gets deleted, or packed onto a truck. This page is the full ledger behind that argument: 89 moves the site's own team data can document, from an 1877 baseball club's short hop to Brooklyn through last decade's NFL and NHL relocations.
Every move, by decade
One stacked bar per decade, one colour per sport. Height is move count.
How this is measured
By league
Moves per decade, one strip per league. The lit bar is that league's busiest decade.
Busiest decade: 1970s
Busiest decade: 1970s
Busiest decade: 1920s
Busiest decade: 1950s
Busiest decade: 2000s
The metros that lost the most, and gained the most
Departures and arrivals counted across every league on record; Net is arrivals minus departures.
Lost the most
| # | Metro | Departures | Arrivals | Net |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | San Francisco-San Jose | 5 | 4 | -1 |
| 2 | Boston | 4 | 1 | -3 |
| 3 | Los Angeles | 4 | 7 | +3 |
| 4 | Minneapolis | 4 | 2 | -2 |
| 5 | St. Louis | 4 | 7 | +3 |
| 6 | Washington-Baltimore | 4 | 5 | +1 |
| 7 | Cleveland | 3 | 1 | -2 |
| 8 | Kansas City | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| 9 | Milwaukee | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| 10 | New York | 3 | 5 | +2 |
Show all 10 metros
Gained the most
| # | Metro | Arrivals | Departures | Net |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Los Angeles | 7 | 4 | +3 |
| 2 | St. Louis | 7 | 4 | +3 |
| 3 | New York | 5 | 3 | +2 |
| 4 | Washington-Baltimore | 5 | 4 | +1 |
| 5 | Detroit | 4 | 1 | +3 |
| 6 | San Francisco-San Jose | 4 | 5 | -1 |
| 7 | Chicago | 3 | 2 | +1 |
| 8 | Dallas | 3 | 2 | +1 |
| 9 | Kansas City | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| 10 | Milwaukee | 3 | 3 | 0 |
Show all 10 metros
How far they went
Straight-line distance between metro centers. The longest ten below, the full spread as a single bar.
| # | Franchise | From | To | Year | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Giants | New York | San Francisco-San Jose | 1958 | 4,129.1 km |
| 2 | Warriors | Philadelphia | San Francisco-San Jose | 1963 | 4,050.4 km |
| 3 | Virginia Squires | San Francisco-San Jose | Norfolk | 1971 | 4,040 km |
| 4 | Dodgers | New York | Los Angeles | 1958 | 3,935.7 km |
| 5 | San Diego Mariners | New York | San Diego | 1975 | 3,907.2 km |
| 6 | Clippers | Buffalo | San Diego | 1979 | 3,516.4 km |
| 7 | Cleveland Barons | San Francisco-San Jose | Cleveland | 1977 | 3,479.5 km |
| 8 | Los Angeles Rams | Cleveland | Los Angeles | 1946 | 3,290.9 km |
| 9 | Calgary Cowboys | Philadelphia | Calgary | 1976 | 3,227.5 km |
| 10 | Red Wings | Victoria | Detroit | 1927 | 3,182.4 km |
Show all 10 moves
Who came back
A franchise that later returned to the metro it left, or a same-league franchise that arrived there afterward.
Show all 21 cases
Temporary homes
Seasons played away from home and then home again: not relocations.
True deaths
The franchise folded outright, with no heir to keep the legacy alive.
How this is measured
Won the 1925 title on the field, then had it stripped over a territorial dispute. Our records flag that championship as stolen, not lost.
- 1929 · Pottsville → Boston
The sport's first great dynasty, distinct from the modern club that borrowed the name. A government town could not match the new big-market arenas.
- 1935 · Ottawa → St. Louis
London's amateur gentlemen, winners of five of the first seven FA Cups, who chose to walk away rather than turn professional.
Relocation laundering
The lineage survives under another name; the link below leads to the heir, not the original.
How this is measured
Upstate New York's champions, who beat the Mikan Lakers to a title. The banner now hangs in California under a different name.
- 1958 · Rochester → Cincinnati
- 1973 · Cincinnati → Kansas City
- 1986 · Kansas City → Sacramento
The last team from outside the modern NHL to win the Cup, in 1925. The players were sold east and the lineage became an Original Six pillar.
- 1915 · Vancouver → Portland
- 1919 · Portland → Victoria
- 1927 · Victoria → Detroit
Living in exile
The club still exists intact; it only lost its place at the top.
How this is measured
The complete ledger
Every move the site can document, newest first. Sortable by year, league, franchise, or distance.
Show all 89 moves
89 moves shown.
Where these numbers come from
A move is a change of metro area, never a rename or a spelling variant within the same one. The big four (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB) come from the site's own metro-keyed relocation tiles (built from each workbook's Metro Area column): every metro a franchise has called home, sorted into order and walked for a change of metro, dated to the arrival year. A franchise renamed in place, such as the Boston Patriots becoming the New England Patriots or the Phoenix Cardinals becoming the Arizona Cardinals, carries no tile of its own and so produces no row here. Every other league on record (NRL, CFL, WNBA, IPL, AFL, football, rugby, NPB, T20) comes from the same relocations ledger, which is thinner for those leagues, so their share of the 89 moves here is small relative to how many relocations those sports have actually had historically. A row whose destination metro cannot be resolved is dropped rather than guessed; the build prints which and why.
Distance is the straight-line gap between metro centers, not a road or flight distance. Titles before and after a move are drawn from the franchise's own championship total, split at the point of the move, so they run out (never negative) rather than double count. The three species below (true deaths, relocation laundering, living exile) are a curated editorial taxonomy, matched here to the ledger rows for that franchise where the data supports the match.
Built by scripts/build-moves.py. Companion essay on Citizen of Nowhere.