The Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees have one of the most historic rivalries in all of sports. What’s more, these two iconic franchises also have the best fans, according to a study conducted by two marketing professors at Emory University in Atlanta.
Manish Trispathi and Mike Lewis, co-authored a study of Major League Baseball’s fan bases. Two of the items measured were brand equity (in a measure known as “fan equity”), and growth in fan equity.
“We readily acknowledge that fan base analysis is a complex topic,” Trispathi explained in the study. “Our core metric is something we term “fan equity.” This metric is based created using a revenue-premium model of brand equity. This model is driven by the financial support shown by fans conditional on team performance and market characteristics. This approach has significant advantages in that it is based on spending behavior and not driven by short variations in winning.”
The fan equity/revenue-premium model is based on the past three years), and a trend analysis of fan equity growth examined the past 15 seasons.
Here are the Fan Equity rankings of every Major League baseball team:
1 Boston Red Sox
2. New York Yankees
3. Chicago Cubs
4. Philadelphia Phillies
5. St. Louis Cardinals
6. Minnesota Twins
7. Colorado Rockies
8. San Francisco Giants
9. Detroit Tigers
10. Toronto Blue Jays
11. Milwaukee Brewers
12. Washington Nationals
13. Los Angeles Dodgers
14. Seattle Mariners
15. Houston Astros
16. Baltimore Orioles
17. Texas Rangers
18. Cincinnati Reds
19. Kansas City Royals
20. Miami Marlins
21. Cleveland Indians
22. Pittsburgh Pirates
23. Atlanta Braves
24. Arizona Diamondbacks
25. San Diego Padres
26. Chicago White Sox
27. Los Angeles Angels
28. Oakland Athletics
29. New York Mets
30. Tampa Bay Rays
“The Red Sox and Yankees placing at the top of the list is simultaneously unsurprising and interesting,” Trispathi said. “It is unsurprising because these are two of the league’s most prominent teams, and interesting because the two teams are bitter rivals. The intense competition between these two teams provides an added factor that may be lacking for teams like the Cubs or the Phillies. At the bottom of the list, we have teams in cities with great weather (or maybe summers that are too hot) and teams that are generally regarded as number two in their markets. We know the winners and the losers, but fan bases are not static entities. As teams win, lose or market themselves, their fan equity evolves.”
What’s more, fan equity trends in the past 15 years revealed that baseball’s high-equity teams are tending to even greater levels of fan support, Trispathi explained.
In this analysis, the Yankees finished first followed by the Red Sox, Cubs, Nationals, Phillies, Dodgers, and Giants−all large market teams. The bottom of the list finds the Diamondbacks, Indians, Orioles, Padres, and Rays.