Ranked: The best bang-for-your-buck sports teams and cities in America

Last year’s NFL champion was the Denver Broncos, but this season the Pittsburgh Steelers are the current odds-on Super Bowl favorite in Las Vegas; MLB has entered the postseason, and last year’s champion Kansas City Royals are already out; and the Cleveland Cavaliers are the reigning champions of the NBA, which starts its new season this month. But which team in each sport offers its fans the best value when they pay up to go to a game? None of those.

TickPick, a popular ticket resale site (part of what’s known as the “secondary’ market,” a la StubHub), has released a report that ranks every NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL team by cost per win (CPW). That is: when you compare the average home game ticket price to the team’s projected home wins total, which teams offer the best return on investment? (The lower the number, the better the value, in this context, because the number reflects the average price you’ll pay to see a win.) The results may surprise you-

This is the third year TickPick has done this report, but the first time it also broke down the data by city. “We wanted to try looking at it from a market perspective,” says TickPick CEO Brett Goldberg, “and it was really interesting. When you look at Chicago, across the board their cost per wins is the highest, which surprised me.” Indeed, other than the Blackhawks, who won the Stanley Cup last year, Chicago teams haven’t won a sports title in 11 years. But its ticket resale prices are the most expensive.

To be sure, every report of this type is different, so the methodology matters. TickPick uses pricing data from its own site (so the pricing data might vary if it came from, say, StubHub, SeatGeek or Vivid Seats) and for total wins it uses the Las Vegas over/under home-win projections taken just before the most recent season started. This way, it’s all an apples-to-apples comparison, rather than taking the actual record from one sport that just wrapped up, and the projected record for a sport just about to begin. So the MLB win projections come from March 31, NFL from August 22, NBA and NHL from October 4.

So, which teams offer hometown fans the best bang for their buck?

Top NFL teams for cost per home win

In football, believe it or not, it’s the Kansas City Chiefs. Based on projections pulled on Aug. 22, the Chiefs, who have an over/under home win total of 5.44, have the most affordable tickets. (That’s likely not unrelated to the city’s population.) The average ticket price is $116, and the average CPW for a Chiefs fan is $170.48. Not bad.

Rounding out the top five for best value are the Buffalo Bills ($211.17 CPW), Indianapolis Colts ($211.63), Cincinnati Bengals ($257.19) and Jacksonville Jaguars ($264.34). Notice a trend? It’s all small-market teams.

But that’s not necessarily the case in every league.

Top NBA teams for cost vs home wins

In the NBA, the No. 1 best team for CPW is the Memphis Grizzlies. Vegas has them at 24.8 projected home wins this coming season, and the team’s average ticket price at home is $93, which yields an average CPW of $153.78.

The Grizzlies are followed by the Detroit Pistons and New Orleans Pelicans, but the surprise is the LA Clippers at No. 4. Los Angeles has a reputation for exorbitantly expensive sports events, and sure enough, the LA Lakers are in dead last. (And the LA Rams are close to the bottom of the NFL list.) But the Clippers benefit from being LA’s “second” basketball team.

As TickPick’s Goldberg explains: “The Clippers are much better [on the court] than the Lakers, but they’re still in the top five in the NBA in cost per wins because it’s still very much a Lakers town. If you’ve just moved to LA and you have a family and you’re not wedded to a team yet, it’s going to be a better deal for you to go to Clippers games.”

But even when a team has the most expensive tickets, you could argue it’s a good deal if they also win often. As the Silicon Valley Business Journal writes, “Fans are scooping up Warriors tickets because even at the average secondhand price of $358 apiece, they’re far more likely to see their beloved team win than any other NBA fans, which justifies the price.”

Top MLB teams for cost vs home wins

In baseball, Los Angeles again has the best deals.

The top MLB team for CPW is the LA Angels. Vegas gave the team an over/under of 43.7 home wins before the season (they ended up with 40, pretty much right on target) and the average home ticket price was $30. That’s a CPW of $55. And the Dodgers were right nearby, at No. 3 on the list, with a CPW of $57.27, because their tickets aren’t much more expensive and they were expected to win 49.5 games at home (they won 53). At No. 2 was the Cleveland Indians (about to face the Toronto Blue Jays in the ALCS), No. 4 was the Colorado Rockies, and No. 5 was the Houston Astros.

With baseball in particular, since the regular season just ended and we know the actual final records, you might wonder if the data would be different using the real records, as opposed to preseason projections. TickPick ran both sets of numbers, and using the actual records didn’t change the results very much. The top five teams remained the same, except that the Houston Astros dropped off and the Baltimore Orioles made it in (at No. 3), which makes sense: the Astros were worse than everyone expected, the Orioles better. In addition, the Cleveland Indians jumped from No. 2 to No. 1, because they had such a strong season. The fact that so little changes when using the actual win totals instead of projected win totals is also a reminder of how accurate Vegas odds usually are.

Top NHL teams for cost vs home wins

In hockey, we again see the phenomenon of the “second team” offering the best value. No. 1 is the Anaheim Ducks, with an average home ticket price of $85, and cost per win of $122.42.

But the interesting surprise is at No. 4 with the New York Islanders, which only just moved to New York (Brooklyn’s Barclays Center) last season. New York’s primary NHL team, the Rangers, play at Madison Square Garden and came in second-to-last; their tickets are expensive. The Islanders, clearly, offer a much better deal.

Top sports markets for cost vs home team wins

If you’ve been paying attention, you might think the best city overall for home-game ticket value would be Los Angeles, since it had the No. 1 and No. 3 teams for baseball and the No. 4 team for basketball. But the high-cost Lakers and Rams brought the city way down to No. 24, among the worst for value.

The best sports city for ticket value is St. Louis. To see a Cardinals win, the average cost is $77.06, and for a Blues (hockey) win, the average cost is $165.68. That’s an average of $121.37 to see a sports team win at home in St. Louis. No. 2 was Kansas City ($141.01), No. 3 was Cincinnati ($165.15).

But to be fair, none of those cities has a team in all four major sports: NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL. If you only considered sports cities that have all four, Detroit, which is No. 4 overall ($183.01 CPW), is the true number one. It has a football team (Lions), basketball team (Pistons), baseball (Tigers) and hockey (Red Wings). The other cities with all four sports teams ranked in this order after Detroit: Phoenix (No. 9 overall); Dallas (11); Washington, DC (13); Miami (14); Oakland (17); Minneapolis (19); Philadelphia (21); LA (24); San Francisco (25); Denver (26); Boston (27); New York (29); and at dead last, Chicago.

So, eager to go see a game at a stadium you’ve never visited? Head to Missouri. And stay away from Boston, New York, LA and Chicago.

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Daniel Roberts is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering sports business and technology. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.

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