Detroit is the best city for hockey fans, 8th best sports city in nation

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When it comes to sports fans, Detroiters are all-in for their teams.

The website WalletHub that puts out a variety of reports related to personal finance and lifestyle shared Thursday that Detroit’s in the top 10 cities in America for the best sports fans, clocking in at number eight.

They used a variety of metrics to come to their rankings of the best cities for fans. The comparison ran across 423 cities and 50 key metrics related to the five largest sports in the U.S.: football, basketball, baseball, hockey and soccer.

According to WalletHub, their data set ranges from “performance level of the city’s team(s)” to “average ticket price per game” to “number of sports bars.” They weighted the sports as such:

Football Ranking (Overall) — Total Weight: 49 Percent

Basketball Ranking (Overall) — Total Weight: 31 Percent

Baseball Ranking (Overall) — Total Weight: 28 Percent

Hockey Ranking (Overall) — Total Weight: 15 Percent

Soccer Ranking (Overall) — Total Weight: 9 Percent

When it comes to Detroit, our hockey rating is number 1 — and that shouldn’t be surprising, considering the cache of Hockeytown. For baseball, our rank is 11, 28 in basketball, 61st in football, and 78th in soccer.

In Michigan of notable mention was East Lansing, coming in ranked number 5 best city in the nation for football. Sorry, Ann Arbor, you didn’t make the top ten.

What makes a good sports city?

“Tradition. Passionate but good-natured fans. A well placed and welcoming arena that is an entertainment center and management team that hosts an array of events for the local community,” said Jonathan R. Wynn, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Massachusetts Amherst. “We use a term in sociology, “place character” to describe how the cultural and symbolic goods of a region can be packaged together into a coherent package, or ‘set’ that makes claims of uniqueness in order to attract tourists, consumers, and — as I found in my own research on festivals — corporate relocation.”

As for the rest of the national rankings, the top ten cities were Denver, Colorado; St. Louis, MI; then Detroit; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia, PA; Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; Pittsburgh, PA; Boston, MA; and capping off the list in the top spot was New York, NY.

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