Why the world is teeming with so many new sports leagues
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Barclays Centre usually hosts the Brooklyn Nets, a popular basketball team. But on a recent afternoon in August the arena was instead covered with 750 tonnes of carefully manicured dirt.
It was the debut outing of the New York Mavericks, a new franchise in the Professional Bull-Riding (PBR) Teams league. After an invocation was intoned and the national anthem belted, the lights dimmed and a flashy “PBR 101" video played on the gargantuan screen overhead. It is not just city folk who needed this primer.
Teams are new in bull-riding. Athletes have to cling to a bucking bull for eight long, chaotic seconds, as they do during rodeos. But instead of riding by themselves, five cowboys compete together in a “head-to-head battle" against another squad.
Viewers cheer their chosen teams through a two-hour-long match that has all the tension and drama of a good Western. This fully “sportified" version of bull-riding is popular, with about 1m viewers tuning in to each PBR Teams event on television in last year’s season. The expansion in New York signals the league’s ambitions to lure new, urban fans.
Franchise value is also growing fast: the first eight teams were sold for around $3m, but two new teams making their debut this year sold for around $23m each. The bulls are now running and kicking their way across America, including Kansas City on September 6th-8th and ending up at the Teams world championship in Las Vegas in October. PBR Teams is one of at least 26 new leagues that have sprung up in the past decade in America.
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