An Unnecessarily Thorough Review of the U.S.’s Most Successful Sporting Cities
Or, Why Los Angeles is the True Sports Capital of the United States
Note: The numbers in this article are up to date through May 2025.
“Sure, winning isn’t everything,” football coach Red Sanders would say. “It’s the only thing.”
And not just winning games. But winning hardware.
It is not uncommon for the biggest stars in a league — especially those who have never hoisted a trophy — to bolt to teams that will win them one.
“I feel like it’s going to give me the best opportunity to win and to win for multiple years,” said a then–championship-less LeBron James in 2010 during The Decision, his televised announcement revealing that he would start his second NBA chapter in Miami. “And not only just to win in the regular season or just to win five games in a row or three games in a row. I want to be able to win championships.”
James lifted the Larry O’Brien trophy twice in his four seasons in south Florida. And after nine seasons in Oklahoma City, Kevin Durant left for the Warriors, where he immediately won two titles.
But earning championships means a lot to cities and their fans, too. Philadelphia prepared for 1 million people to turn out for the parade honoring the Eagles winning this year’s Super Bowl. The City of Chicago claimed that five million people had turned out to celebrate the Cubs’ first World Series title in 108 years. On the first commercial break after a championship game’s final whistle blows or buzzer sounds, we see ads for merchandise celebrating the winners.
Despite the Cleveland Cavaliers dropping the last three games of the 2015 NBA Finals — and with them, the title — to the Golden State Warriors, “still, people showed up in Cleveland, in the arena, outside the arena,” Hanif Abdurraqib writes of the Cavs’ 2016 Finals run in There’s Always This Year. “People in their homes in Cleveland sat on the edges of beds or couches. Cleveland is a city that is overwhelmed by a desire to believe in something beyond what people outside of the place have ascribed to it.”
But when the Cavaliers won it all in 2016, ending the Cleveland Curse, the city was “garlanded with flowers.”
“Golden clouds of smoke puffing into its summer sky,” Abdurraqib writes, “wrestling with the humid air blown in from the lake, a cursed lake, though not today.”
As an omnivorous sports fan who grew up in and near Los Angeles, I was blessed with plenty of championships — a three-peat for the Lakers, three in four years for the Galaxy, consecutive titles for the Sparks, two in three years for the Kings — all won for a region that produces an inordinate share of major league and Olympic athletes.
Surely LA was the most successful sports city in the U.S.
With the Dodgers’ iron grip on the National League West Division, El Tráfico being the country’s greatest soccer rivalry, and Angel City becoming the most valuable women’s sports club in the world, the desire to be the best city became personal.
Plenty of folks have compiled the list I sought. Most, however, only dealt with the “Big Four” — the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL. Some included defunct leagues’ titles. Virtually all ignored women’s sports.
So I pulled out an old notebook and pencil, opened a new spreadsheet, and got to work.
To figure this out, I first had to decide which sports leagues to even count, and I settled on the seven that garner by far the most attention: the National Basketball Association, Women’s National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, National Women’s Soccer League, National Hockey League, and National Football League (specifically, in the Super Bowl era).
While there have been other top-tier pro leagues in these sports’ pasts, these have staying power. I also had to set some rules: Where do I place teams, like the Minnesota Lynx or Texas Rangers, who represent more than just a city? (Answer: Minneapolis and Dallas.) Do championships stay in their city when an owner moves the team elsewhere? (Yes.) Do championships go to a team’s physical home or their name’s home? (San Francisco will get the 49ers’ titles, not Santa Clara.)
As I tallied the numbers on weekend down time and during work breaks, more caveats and ideas for breaking down the numbers came to mind. But I get ahead of myself.
To my chagrin, New York City — with a population over twice as big as that of Los Angeles — came out on top.
And by a fair amount, with 53 total championships across those seven leagues. Thanks to my beloved Lakers’ archrivals, Boston actually took the silver with 40. Los Angeles came a rather disappointing third, with 33 titles.
Especially after digging into these leagues’ histories, this makes sense. The northeastern U.S., which includes the historically and culturally significant New York and Boston, had a huge lead on the rest of the country in terms of people, resources, markets, and clout. College sports, which preceded the professional, got started at northeastern universities. In the 1900 census — the closest count to my research’s first championship, the 1903 World Series — New York had nearly 3.5 million people. Los Angeles had barely passed 100,000.
Led by the Yankees, New York was powered by its 20th-century success in baseball. The Celtics’ NBA-record 18 championships, plus a healthy dose of hockey and baseball success and the Patriots’ dynasty, boosted Boston. And led by the Lakers, Los Angeles relied on a fairly balanced track record across most sports to reach its 33 championships.
Since most of the seven leagues, especially the NHL, feature at least one team from our northern neighbor, I included Canadian cities in my analysis. Thanks to their NHL-record 26 titles, the Canadiens singlehandedly launched Montreal into fourth place.
Chicago and Detroit tie for fifth with 21 each. Rounding out the top 10 are Toronto (17, thanks mostly to hockey), Pittsburgh (16, thanks to a near-perfect balance of football, baseball, and hockey), Philadelphia (15), and St. Louis (14), most of whose titles came from the pre-1970s Cardinals.
In all, 49 cities have won championships across these seven leagues.
Those top 10, however, aren’t terribly surprising, as they all in parts of the two countries that, like New York and Boston, were up and running culturally and economically and demographically when major-league sports took off.
But the east’s early advantages felt like its own caveat. Many of the country’s biggest cities are now in the west. Los Angeles’ first title only came in 1959, Houston’s in 1994, Phoenix’s in 2001. In baseball, the Giants and Dodgers moved to California. The small city of Victoria, British Columbia won the Stanley Cup in 1925 before its Cougars folded the following year. Syracuse and Rochester won NBA titles, but how many people today know they had teams in the first place? And a few of today’s top-tier leagues — the WNBA, NWSL, and MLS — didn’t even exist when I was born.
Soon after starting, I wanted to know which cities were the best in today’s sporting paradigm. And that made me feel a bit better.
Los Angeles is handily the most successful city of the 21st century. Almost two-thirds of its 33 titles — 21 — have come in the new millennium, with at least three each from the Lakers, Galaxy, and Sparks. (Once Angel City wins an NWSL title, LA will have a trophy in all seven leagues, a feat only New York and Washington, DC have pulled off.)
Boston again comes second, with nearly half its 13 titles in the 2000s coming from the Patriots.
The surprise bronze is a multi-talented Kansas City, with eight 2000s wins across four sports and led, of course, by the NFL’s current dynasty, the Chiefs.
Rounding out this leaderboard are New York (a mere seven); Chicago, Detroit, and Seattle (six each); and Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, Denver, Miami, and Tampa (five each).
Now, we’re seeing success in western cities and others that actually get good sunshine.
While this list feels more relevant to the present sports world, there’s still the fact that the biggest cities naturally fare much better.
So I took all these cities’ populations and divided them by the number of championships they’ve won — basically, how many residents have to share each championship. Sure, teams don’t stock their rosters with locals, but I thought this number could give an idea of which cities punch above their weight.
Boston finally comes out on top here, its 40 titles coming out to one for every 16,000 Bostonians. Pittsburgh came second with one for every 19,000 Pittsburghers. And St. Louis finished third, with one for every 20,000 Saint Louisans.
But, of course, cities’ populations change. Nine of St. Louis’ 14 championships, for instance, came prior to 1970, before many Sun Belt cities took off people- and sports-wise. All-time trophies versus present population may not feel as satisfactory as, say, 21st-century trophies versus present populations.
Turns out, these same cities come out on top here, too: St. Louis has a 21st-century title for every 40,000 residents, Boston has one for every 50,000 people, and Pittsburgh has one for every 61,000.
And I went further down the rabbit hole in a few other ways. Why stop at cities?
New York may be the best city, but it accounts for virtually all of New York state’s success. The Empire State’s three other cities to win a title — Buffalo in the NWSL and Syracuse and Rochester in the NBA — no longer have those teams.
And so it’s California that owns the region title — barely. Its 57 championships are thanks to six cities: Los Angeles (33), Oakland (10), San Francisco (nine), San José (two), Anaheim (two), and Sacramento (one). It helps to be the most populous state.
And still: New York City baseball has been so strong (35 World Series) that the state still owns 56 titles.
Then there’s Canada. With way fewer teams across these leagues than the U.S., I counted it as a single region, and that region came third at 55 titles. Seven Canadian cities have won trophies, including 51 Stanley Cups. (Only Toronto has won anything outside hockey.)
Rounding out the top 10 here are Massachusetts (40), Pennsylvania (31), Missouri (24), Texas (23), Michigan (21), Illinois (21), and Florida (14). Unsurprisingly, these 10 regions include the six most populous U.S. states.
And as before, I wanted to see which regions are succeeding the most compared to their populations. Here, Washington, DC benefits from not being anything more than a city; its 13 championships equate to one for every 52,000 Washingtonians. With Boston’s insistence on always being one of the best, Massachusetts comes second, with one for every 179,000 Massholes. And Missourians have one for every 260,000 of them. Coming last is Louisiana, whose 4.6 million residents all share the Saints’ Super Bowl XLIV victory.
Meanwhile, one of the clearest trends was that cities, like some of their teams, often have golden eras.
Take away New York City’s pre-1970 baseball titles, and it falls to third all-time. Only a fifth of Philadelphia’s 15 championships were won since I was born in 1993. Oakland won five championships across three sports in the 1970s. Ottawa won all four of its banners in the 1920s, while Tampa, Columbus, and Las Vegas are peaking this decade.
And along with each city’s best decade, we can look at each decade’s best city.
Chicago won a plurality of the few titles available in the first decade of the 20th century. Boston grabbed a plurality in the 1910s. Then it was all about the Big Apple, which won the most titles in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The Celtics’ incredible nine titles in the 1960s gave Boston that decade’s crown, and the Canadiens won the 1970s for Montreal.
Since then, it’s (almost) been one, prolonged golden age for Los Angeles, which won the most titles in the 1980s, 2000s, and 2010s, and leads in our present decade. LA’s huge stumble came in the 1990s, when it somehow managed to win nothing at all. It was Chicago and the Michael Jordan–led Bulls that won that 10-year span.
And a new record may be in store. Halfway through the 2020s, Los Angeles has six championships; if it wins four more before 2030, it will top Boston’s all-time high of nine in one decade (a task made all the easier by LA having teams in three leagues that didn’t exist in Bill Russell’s time).
Beyond simply ranking cities and states and decades, the project turned up some interesting nuggets.
To get the sad one out of the way: Four title-winning cities — Oakland and the aforementioned Rochester, Syracuse, and Victoria — no longer have any teams in our seven leagues. It underscores in particular the sad state of Oakland, a proud sports city of 10 championships won by the departed Raiders (Las Vegas), Warriors (San Francisco), and Athletics (Las Vegas by way of Sacramento). San Francisco owes its one NBA title to the Warriors’ jump across the Bay. Oakland, at least, is beginning to rebound with new, community-driven, lower-level pro teams like the Roots, Soul, and Ballers who vow to stay in The Town.
A happier finding was that several cities’ most successful teams are women’s teams.
Even though the five men’s leagues account for some 400 chances for national championships, and the NWSL and WNBA combine for 40 and counting, the most successful team in Houston, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Raleigh, Sacramento, Orlando, and Buffalo are all women’s teams. Nearly all these cities are outside the Northeast and Midwest — they’re relative up-and-comers in terms of national influence and significance. (Houston, by the way, is the U.S.’s fourth-largest city, making the dissolution of the Comets — four-time WNBA champs — an utter shame.)
Speaking of Houston, I found Texas as a whole to be an interesting case.
It’s the second-largest state by population, and even though it didn’t rise in prominence early on the way New York and Boston and Chicago did, I still expected it to be high on the championships list — and only improving over time.
But the Lone Star State is seventh on the list of regions with the most championships. Three Texas cities have won titles, but they all peaked in the 1990s and 2000s.
The Rockets and Cowboys kicked things off, with the former winning the two NBA titles between the Bulls’ 1990s threepeats, and the latter running roughshod over the middle of the decade’s Super Bowls. The Comets took over basketball dominance by winning the first four WNBA titles in the late 1990s into 2000. The Spurs took the torch from there, winning three NBA finals in five years in the 2000s. But Texas hasn’t had all that many since.
Its fading — or past success — could be a coincidence. But a state frequently touted as on the rise demographically and economically has failed to follow the trajectory of its biggest rival out west, California, which is often viewed as losing out in these categories to Texas.
(The cherry on top, if we were to belabor the point, may have been one of the most remarkable and unexpected — many would say one-sided — trades in American sports history: the Dallas Mavericks’ sending their generational talent Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers earlier this year.)
Texas, however, has not faded as badly as Canada.
To be sure, the country is at a distinct disadvantage, with only 12 teams across the seven leagues. But despite having 7 teams in the NHL, a Canadian city has not won the Stanley Cup since 1993. Only Toronto has produced any non-hockey championships (four), with only two of those coming in the 21st century.
Back before the extreme professionalization of sports, it probably made little sense to build a hockey arena where it wasn’t cold and no one had experience with the sport. As money, resources, and attention were injected into hockey (as with all these pro sports), facilities and opportunities in warmer climes became much more doable (and lucrative). The southwestern U.S. now has as many teams as Canada, and those teams have combined for eight Stanley Cups since Montreal’s 1993 victory. Florida has won four in that span.
A final fun nugget was seeing that the Lakers are the most successful team in two cities: Los Angeles, obviously, but also Minneapolis, where the club won five titles in six years before moving out west in 1960.
All of these patterns may bode well for the biggest cities in the U.S. to have never brought home a title. San Diego, Jacksonville, and Austin have nearly one million or more than a million people each and are located in—you guessed it — California, Florida, and Texas.
The influence of the western (and other sunnier parts of the) U.S. continues to grow, and I expect we’ll continue to see more championships in places like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Tampa.
But to add some quantitative heft to this idea, I divided the (American) cities’ championships between the four U.S. census regions: Northeast, Midwest, South, and West.
Unsurprisingly, the Northeast — home to old bluebloods like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia — comes out on top with 128 titles. The Midwest — featuring its own bluebloods like Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis that are further out from the northeastern cultural heart of 100-year-old America — has 97. The West has 85, and the South 66.
But when we look at only the last quarter-century, the West dominates. Two-thirds of its all-time titles — 56 — are from the 21st century. The South and Midwest both have 35 titles this century, but 53 percent of the South’s all-time titles are from 2000 onwards, while only 36 percent of the Midwest’s are. The Northeast now comes in last with 31 championships since 2000 — just less than a quarter of all its titles.
Women’s sports will continue to grow in importance, too.
The WNBA and NWSL are growing significantly faster in both popularity and number of teams than the men’s leagues.
MLB hasn’t expanded since 1998; the NFL since 2002; the NBA since 2004. The NHL added three teams since 2017 (all in the west). Only MLS, the least popular of the five, has grown rapidly, going from 20 to 30 clubs since 2015.
But women’s basketball and soccer, which saw the folding of plenty of teams over their shorter existences, have taken off: The WNBA has added San Francisco this year and will add Portland and Toronto next year. (And, reportedly, Cleveland in 2028.) That will be a 33-percent increase in clubs in four years.
And in 2020, the NWSL had nine teams. In 2026, it will have 16 as it welcomes Boston and Denver. The four most-recent teams to begin play in the league are out west: Los Angeles, San Diego, San José, and Salt Lake City.
Next year alone will welcome four new women’s teams — something that has not happened in the five men’s leagues combined since MLS itself was founded in the 1990s with 10 teams. No doubt the number of cities whose most successful teams are women’s teams will only grow.
So where might teams in these seven leagues pop up next?
The eight biggest cities in the U.S. without a team — and nine of the top 10 — are west of the Mississippi, implying the continued growth and significance of parts of the country that weren’t all that big and significant when sports leagues and sports markets were first established. (One may fairly wonder, however, if Fort Worth, Mesa, and Long Beach are all too close to Dallas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, respectively, to earn a team.)
While Los Angeles is only third in the standings, I’m no longer disappointed. It won the 2000s and the 2010s and leads the 2020s. Halfway through this decade, it has already amassed two-thirds the titles Boston won in its record-setting, nine-championship 1960s.
The Lakers, Clippers, and Kings made this year’s playoffs; the reigning-champ Dodgers are again the World Series favorite; the Rams and Chargers made the most recent playoffs; Galaxy won the last MLS cup; and Angel City and LAFC are in the top half of the standings. (And, you know, there’s also the Angels.)
It’s the city of Kobe Bryant, Magic Johnson, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Of Candace Parker and Lisa Leslie. Of Shohei Ohtani and Sandy Koufax.
It’s even hosting the next Olympics. Again.
Logistically, “this is going to be one tough canoe slalom,” wrote Los Angeles Times sports columnist Bill Plaschke as Paris handed off the torch last year.
And yet.
“This is the city of champions,” he added, “a city whose sporting soul is rooted in resilience, a city whose fans urge greatness and whose stars supply magic.”
