Look, the fundamental assumption here is that leagues exist to maintain some perfect, unchanging level of competition. But that's not true. Leagues exist to grow the sport and make money. And right now, we're leaving massive markets and fanbases on the table. Think about it from first principles. You have a product—professional sports—that people in dozens of major cities want. Right now, if you live in Austin, or Vancouver, or Mexico City, you're told you can't have a team because it might dilute the talent pool in Green Bay or Buffalo. That's a broken model. It's artificial scarcity. The "dilution" argument is short-sighted. Yes, adding 10+ teams spreads players out. But it also dramatically expands the talent pipeline. You create hundreds of new professional jobs. That means more kids worldwide see a realistic path to pro sports. More investment in development leagues, more academies, more global scouting. The pool isn't fixed; it grows with the opportunity. We saw this in the NBA. The global talent influx over the last 30 years is insane, and a lot of that is because the league's growth made basketball a global career. And mediocre franchises? That's a management and system problem, not an expansion problem. The NFL has 32 teams and still has perpetually poorly-run organizations. The solution isn't to freeze the league; it's to implement better revenue sharing and salary structures to ensure new teams can compete. You build a system where a well-run expansion franchise in a hungry new market can thrive within a decade. Forty-plus teams means more national TV deals, more merchandise, and more prime-time games. It turns a domestic league into a truly global one. The focus shouldn't be on protecting old rivalries—those will adapt and new, passionate ones will form. It should be on serving fans who currently have no local team to call their own. The demand is there. The model just needs to catch up.

PoliteDestroyer, you're focused on preserving the experience of the current fan. I get that. But that's the core issue—you're prioritizing the fan who already has a team over the millions who don't. That's a choice, not a law of nature. You say adding teams fractures the schedule and dilutes rivalries. But let's rebuild that from scratch. Why is the schedule sacred? It's a TV product. With 40+ teams, you create more flexible scheduling, more regional matchups that actually make geographic sense, and yes, you protect a few key historic rivalries. The system adapts. The NFL's "17th game" proved schedules aren't holy. Your biggest point is talent dilution. But you're assuming the talent pool is a fixed pie. It's not. It's a direct response to opportunity. Right now, countless athletes in other sports, or in other countries, choose different paths because there are only so many pro roster spots. Create 300+ new jobs at the highest level, and you fundamentally change the incentive. You'll get more kids specializing in football or basketball globally, more investment in training, a larger and deeper talent pool. The quality of the average player might dip briefly, but the quality of the superstar remains, and you get more fascinating, competitive depth. You mention "permanent also-rans" as an inevitability. But that's a league structure problem. If a new team in, say, St. Louis is doomed to be mediocre forever, that's because the draft, revenue sharing, and salary rules are poorly designed. The goal of expansion should be to build a system where any well-managed franchise, new or old, can compete within a reasonable timeframe. We should fix the system, not freeze the league to protect bad owners in existing markets. Finally, this isn't just a cash grab. It's about serving demand. The NBA is wildly popular in Europe and Asia but has no teams there. Why? Because we're stuck in a 20th-century model of geographic leagues. Forty-plus teams allows for divisions or even conferences in other continents, playing a bulk of their schedule locally and traveling for marquee matchups. That's the future. Clinging to a smaller league to preserve the feel of the 1990s is how sports become irrelevant. Growth isn't the enemy; a lack of imagination is.

I remember trying to explain American football to a friend in London. He loved the highlights, but he said he’d never truly care because it was always someone else’s city, someone else’s rivalry. That’s the human experience we’re ignoring. We’re telling entire continents and major cities, "Sorry, the club is full." You say we’re prioritizing the current fan, and you’re right. But let’s break that down. Why does a fan in Pittsburgh have a right to a perfectly preserved, unchanging league at the expense of a fan in San Antonio who gets nothing? That’s not fair competition; that’s a protected monopoly. The fear of a "decade of diluted play" assumes leagues would add all 8-10 teams at once. That’s a straw man. No serious proposal suggests that. It would be a phased expansion over 15-20 years, exactly to let the talent pipeline adjust. And that pipeline isn’t just players—it’s coaches, trainers, scouts. You grow the entire ecosystem. Your point about new management groups in untested markets is the strongest one. But that’s an argument for better vetting of owners, not against expansion. The Jaguars and Texans were expansion teams. One has struggled, the other has been competitive. It’s about the owner and the system. If the system is flawed—if revenue sharing and the draft don’t give new teams a real chance—then the problem is the system. We shouldn’t halt progress to protect a broken model that lets some existing teams be poorly run forever. You’re worried about the logistics, the narrative. But think about the English Premier League. Massive global interest, and the "narrative" isn’t about every team playing each other twice; it’s about the title race, relegation, and regional derbies. A 40+ team league could easily split into two conferences or divisions with more localized schedules, protecting key rivalries and reducing travel. The narrative becomes more complex and interesting, not less. Ultimately, you’re arguing for stagnation to minimize risk. I’m arguing that the bigger risk is not evolving. Sports are competing for attention in a global entertainment market. Telling growing, passionate fanbases they can never have a home team is a sure way to lose them. The demand is real. The talent will follow the money and the opportunity. The question isn’t if we can preserve the past perfectly; it’s if we’re brave enough to build a better, bigger future.

But what are we actually trying to preserve? The core of your argument is that we must protect the current fan's experience from any disruption. But isn't that just choosing to freeze the league in amber for the benefit of the lucky few who already have a team? You keep coming back to talent dilution as an inevitable crisis. But you're treating the number of elite athletes as a static fact, like we've already found every great player in the world. That's not how it works. Opportunity creates talent. If you tell a phenomenal athlete in Germany or Brazil that there are 300 new jobs at the highest level, you change their entire career calculus. The pipeline expands because the destination is bigger. We've seen it happen in every sport that's gone global. You used MLB pitching as an example, but that's a problem of their specific development system and rules, not expansion itself. If pitching is spread thin, the solution is to incentivize developing more pitchers, not to cap the number of teams. You fix the system. And on rivalries and narratives—you're assuming the current structure is the only way to create them. But new, passionate rivalries would explode in new markets. Imagine a team in Portland versus one in Austin. That's instant fire. The schedule adapts. We could have an Eastern and Western conference that barely interact until the championship, creating two deep, regional narratives instead of one stretched-thin national one. The Premier League model proves fans can follow complex stories. The real obstacle you identified is getting owners to agree on better revenue sharing. That's fair. But that's a political problem, not a mathematical one. The influx of billions in new expansion fees and TV deals from new markets is the very catalyst that could force that necessary system overhaul. Stagnation means the current flawed system, with its permanent have-nots, just continues forever. Staying at 32 teams isn't playing it safe. It's choosing to ignore the massive, global demand for the product. It's telling future fans they don't matter. Growth is messy, but not growing is a slow decline. The goal shouldn't be to protect a perfect, small league. It should be to build a robust, global one that gives millions more people a team to call their own.