You guys are hilarious. I have never seen a bigger bunch of fools than those who claim that their team treats them better than another. Unless you have an incurable cancer or are an underpriveledged youth, exactly NONE of your teams do or have ever done anything for you! You pay them money, and they get to live lavish lifestyles leveraging your naivete that they care about you.
Fandom is what each individual makes of it. That you think the Yorks or the Maras give a flying fuck about you is the height of gullibility. "My team will never leave the town they started in" as you look to the side and have that instant of thought that, hey waitaminute...they could leave and maybe already have actually left and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Then the whole house of cards you build your superiority complex comes crashing down, yet you'll find another reason to make yourselves feel better by looking down at other fans. You put your owners on a pedestal, "yeah, me and Mr. Mara are tight. I've been rooting for him and his team for decades. He cares about me."
LOL, my team is one of the oldest in the NFL and is based in the wealthiest media market in the entire world. They just built their new stadium with zero public dollars, I reckon they aren't going anywhere.
Obviously anyone who thinks a random individual is cared for by a large business entity is absurd, but certainly team owners can and should care about their fan base in general, because that is in fact their revenue stream. The Green Bay Packers are actually bloody non-profit corporation owned by by the public.
Maybe you do not understand team sports. The whole point of team sports entertainment is that you want to see your team win in an athletic competition that you care about, usually because you love the game itself. You spend money on this entertainment under the assumption that your chosen team will provide you with a competitive entertainment product you want to watch.
Regions with Teams that are typically just bad performers for extended periods, like the Bucs or the Falcons, need to rely more on love of the game combined with regional pride to get a subscriber base, and for people from a certain area that love the game, that is usually enough to get them on board, although typically in lower volume and at cheaper rates than teams who can win for their fan base.
Then you get to a team like the Cardinals, who were not very good and then left their region. You have to figure there probably are not any damn Cards fans in Chicago or St Louis. This is why the L.A. Chargers are going to die as a franchise. The Rams will be forgiven for returning, because they win.
Then you have the perplexing case of the Raiders, which brings us to the current topic. They have no ability to develop a winning football product and seem to have spent decades actively sabotaging their own success through ownership meddling that was outside standard Pro Team operations. They have wildly disrespected the region on multiple occasions as an organization, yet still, the fan base likes to show up and make noise about the team.
That is the question, and based on the above case, I don't think it is a strange one.
