More than a few people have noticed that it’s been a long time since Minnesota celebrated a major sports championship, since 1991 to be exact. In that year, the Minnesota Twins won the World Series in a historically close seven games against Atlanta, after both franchises had finished at the bottom of their respective divisions the previous season. Earlier in 1991, the Minnesota North Stars had an unexpected run to the final round but lost to Pittsburgh. Since then, no major Minnesota sports team has even competed in the final round of league playoffs.
How does this streak compare to other cities? Can we quantify the losing experience of an entire city’s fan base? A list of long streaks without a championship follows, which includes all of a city’s teams in the top four North American sports leagues (NHL, NBA, MLB, NFL).
As an example, Cleveland went 142 seasons without a championship, beginning with the 1966 NFL-AFL season through the 2015 NFL season. That streak subsequently ended with the 2016 NBA championship. I started counting with the first Super Bowl in January 1967 (more on that below), which was the championship of the 1966 NFL-AFL season, and that’s why many of the streaks in the table below start with that season.
(For cities with two teams in a sport, the last year/season of streak might seem incorrect. For example, New York’s 114-season streak ended with the Knicks’ 2026 NBA championship. However, the table shows that the last year/season of the streak was the 2026 NBA season. That refers to the Nets’ 2026 season which did not end in a championship. Same for LA in 2000.)
I’m going to show the list before anyone gets bored; afterwards I’ll explain a few things.
| City | Number of seasons | First year of streak | Season | Last year of streak | Season | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cleveland | 142 | 1966 | 4 (NFL) | 2015 | 4 (NFL) | Won next season |
| 2 | Twin Cities | 130 | 1991 | 4 (NFL) | 2026 | 2 (NBA) | Active |
| 3 | Buffalo | 123 | 1966 | 4 (NFL) | 2026 | 1 (NHL) | Active |
| 4 | San Diego | 117 | 1966 | 4 (NFL) | 2025 | 3 (MLB) | Active |
| 5 | New York | 114 | 2012 | 1 (NHL) | 2026 | 2 (NBA) | Won next season |
| 6 | Milwaukee | 98 | 1971 | 3 (MLB) | 2020 | 3 (MLB) | Won next season |
| 7 | Philadelphia | 98 | 1983 | 3 (MLB) | 2008 | 2 (NBA) | Won next season |
| 8 | Seattle | 97 | 1979 | 3 (MLB) | 2013 | 3 (MLB) | Won next season |
| 9 | Phoenix | 96 | 2001 | 4 (NFL) | 2026 | 2 (NBA) | Active |
| 10 | Chicago | 95 | 1966 | 4 (NFL) | 1985 | 3 (MLB) | Won next season |
| 11 | Atlanta | 91 | 1966 | 4 (NFL) | 1995 | 2 (NBA) | Won next season |
| 12 | Washington | 90 | 1992 | 1 (NHL) | 2017 | 4 (NFL) | Won next season |
| 13 | Atlanta | 88 | 1995 | 4 (NFL) | 2021 | 2 (NBA) | Won next season |
| 14 | Houston | 77 | 1966 | 4 (NFL) | 1993 | 4 (NFL) | Won next season |
| 15 | Detroit | 73 | 2008 | 2 (NBA) | 2026 | 2 (NBA) | Active |
| 16 | Toronto | 72 | 1994 | 1 (NHL) | 2019 | 1 (NHL) | Won next season |
| 17 | Cincinnati | 70 | 1990 | 4 (NFL) | 2025 | 4 (NFL) | Active |
| 18 | Oakland | 69 | 1990 | 2 (NBA) | 2014 | 4 (NFL) | Won next season |
| 19 | Charlotte | 67 | 1989 | 2 (NBA) | 2026 | 2 (NBA) | Active |
| 20 | Detroit | 63 | 1968 | 4 (NFL) | 1984 | 2 (NBA) | Won next season |
| 21 | Houston | 61 | 1995 | 3 (MLB) | 2017 | 2 (NBA) | Won next season |
| 22 | Twin Cities | 61 | 1966 | 4 (NFL) | 1987 | 1 (NHL) | Won next season |
| 23 | Vancouver | 61 | 1971 | 1 (NHL) | 2026 | 1 (NHL) | Active |
| 24 | Boston | 60 | 1986 | 3 (MLB) | 2001 | 3 (MLB) | Won next season |
| 25 | Los Angeles | 59 | 1988 | 4 (NFL) | 2000 | 2 (NBA) | Won next season |
| 26 | Kansas City | 58 | 1985 | 4 (NFL) | 2014 | 4 (NFL) | Won next season |
| 27 | Denver | 57 | 1966 | 4 (NFL) | 1995 | 4 (NFL) | Won next season |
| 28 | Denver | 57 | 2001 | 2 (NBA) | 2015 | 3 (MLB) | Won next season |
| 29 | Nashville | 55 | 1998 | 4 (NFL) | 2026 | 1 (NHL) | Active |
| 30 | Phoenix | 54 | 1969 | 2 (NBA) | 2001 | 2 (NBA) | Won next season |
| 31 | Indianapolis | 52 | 1977 | 2 (NBA) | 2006 | 2 (NBA) | Won next season |
| 32 | New Orleans | 52 | 1967 | 4 (NFL) | 2009 | 2 (NBA) | Won next season |
Counting seasons without a championship is pretty straightforward, but it’s not completely unambiguous. Two big decisions need to be made - which leagues should we count, and which years?
I’m trying to count championships that would be of significant cultural interest in a city, for example ones that would dominate the local news for a week if a team made the finals. I don’t think other leagues such as the WNBA or MLS are at that level yet, though they might get there someday. These four are by far the most popular leagues by measures such as total attendance and revenue.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_leagues_by_revenue]
Note that as of 2025, the WNBA was 36th among world professional sports leagues by total revenue, slightly below the French 2nd tier soccer league. However, this is an improvement over several years ago when they were below the Italian 3rd tier soccer league.
The NBA and its predecessors date back to the 1940s, the NFL and NHL to around 1920, and professional baseball to the 19th century. Problem is, none of those leagues in their infancy had anything approaching the following they have today. For example, the NBA of the 1950s had franchises in places like Fort Wayne and Sheboygan, with frequent relocations, and attendance averaging a few thousand per game. The NHL was a six team league with little following outside Canada and its four U.S. cities. Football was gaining popularity by the 1950s and 60s, but had two competing leagues without a combined championship until 1967. Only baseball could inarguably claim status as a mature professional league prior to 1960.
So if I’m not counting the modern WNBA and even, say, the National Lacrosse League, I’m opposed to counting early NFL and NBA seasons also. I need to pick a starting year, which will be somewhat arbitrary, but 1967 was the year of the first Super Bowl (and solo NFL-AFL champion), and the NHL expanded to 12 teams that fall. The NBA doesn’t have an obvious transition event, but was coming along by that time. So 1967 seems about right for defining the start of the “modern” sports era.
(If you would rather count pre-1967 seasons, some of these streaks could conceivably be longer, although cities with three of the longest ones - Cleveland, San Diego, and Buffalo - all won AFL or NFL titles during the 1960s. If you don’t count the NFL but do count MLB, then for Cleveland you need to go back to the 1948 Indians, so add 18 more seasons.)
They are not counted (1994 MLB, 2005 NHL).
Now for an alternate take…
Here is another table showing overall performance by city over the same era. I’m borrowing a method used by Neil Paine in this fivethirtyeight.com article. It assigns each team in a given league an equal probability of winning a championship each season, and sums these probabilities over all seasons to generate an “expected” number of championships under pure parity. So in a 10-team league, each team is expected to win one championship every 10 seasons. Cities are then ranked by the difference of actual versus expected number of championships.
| City | Team Seasons | Actual Championships | Expected Championships | Difference | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Boston | 237 | 22 | 9.39 | 12.61 |
| 2 | Los Angeles | 279 | 21 | 10.78 | 10.22 |
| 3 | Pittsburgh | 176 | 13 | 6.71 | 6.29 |
| 4 | Montreal | 94 | 10 | 4.03 | 5.97 |
| 5 | New York | 423 | 22 | 16.22 | 5.78 |
| 6 | San Francisco | 130 | 9 | 4.79 | 4.21 |
| 7 | Oakland | 154 | 10 | 5.96 | 4.04 |
| 8 | Miami | 162 | 9 | 5.51 | 3.49 |
| 9 | Edmonton | 46 | 5 | 1.74 | 3.26 |
| 10 | San Antonio | 50 | 5 | 1.84 | 3.16 |
| 11 | Green Bay | 60 | 4 | 2.05 | 1.95 |
| 12 | Dallas | 191 | 8 | 6.69 | 1.31 |
| 13 | Tampa Bay | 111 | 5 | 3.72 | 1.28 |
| 14 | Kansas City | 132 | 6 | 4.86 | 1.14 |
| 15 | Raleigh | 28 | 2 | 0.93 | 1.07 |
| 16 | Baltimore | 113 | 5 | 4.25 | 0.75 |
| 17 | Denver | 178 | 7 | 6.28 | 0.72 |
| 18 | Las Vegas | 15 | 1 | 0.47 | 0.53 |
| 19 | Chicago | 295 | 12 | 11.51 | 0.49 |
| 20 | Oklahoma City | 20 | 1 | 0.67 | 0.33 |
| 21 | Newark | 78 | 3 | 2.92 | 0.08 |
| 22 | St. Louis | 161 | 6 | 6.33 | -0.33 |
| 23 | Detroit | 237 | 9 | 9.39 | -0.39 |
| 24 | Calgary | 45 | 1 | 1.69 | -0.69 |
| 25 | Quebec | 16 | 0 | 0.74 | -0.74 |
| 26 | Hartford | 18 | 0 | 0.81 | -0.81 |
| 27 | Columbus | 25 | 0 | 0.82 | -0.82 |
| 28 | Memphis | 26 | 0 | 0.87 | -0.87 |
| 29 | Jacksonville | 31 | 0 | 0.98 | -0.98 |
| 30 | Washington | 190 | 6 | 7.00 | -1.00 |
| 31 | Ottawa | 33 | 0 | 1.13 | -1.13 |
| 32 | San Jose | 34 | 0 | 1.17 | -1.17 |
| 33 | Portland | 56 | 1 | 2.18 | -1.18 |
| 34 | Anaheim | 90 | 2 | 3.21 | -1.21 |
| 35 | Philadelphia | 236 | 8 | 9.22 | -1.22 |
| 36 | Winnipeg | 32 | 0 | 1.26 | -1.26 |
| 37 | Orlando | 37 | 0 | 1.27 | -1.27 |
| 38 | Toronto | 138 | 4 | 5.44 | -1.44 |
| 39 | Sacramento | 42 | 0 | 1.47 | -1.47 |
| 40 | Cincinnati | 122 | 3 | 4.54 | -1.54 |
| 41 | Salt Lake City | 49 | 0 | 1.76 | -1.76 |
| 42 | Nashville | 55 | 0 | 1.77 | -1.77 |
| 43 | New Orleans | 86 | 1 | 2.99 | -1.99 |
| 44 | Houston | 168 | 4 | 6.13 | -2.13 |
| 45 | Indianapolis | 92 | 1 | 3.21 | -2.21 |
| 46 | Charlotte | 67 | 0 | 2.22 | -2.22 |
| 47 | Milwaukee | 113 | 2 | 4.31 | -2.31 |
| 48 | Seattle | 145 | 3 | 5.36 | -2.36 |
| 49 | Vancouver | 61 | 0 | 2.50 | -2.50 |
| 50 | San Diego | 117 | 0 | 4.34 | -4.34 |
| 51 | Phoenix | 151 | 1 | 5.39 | -4.39 |
| 52 | Buffalo | 123 | 0 | 4.78 | -4.78 |
| 53 | Atlanta | 195 | 2 | 7.32 | -5.32 |
| 54 | Cleveland | 173 | 1 | 6.37 | -5.37 |
| 55 | Twin Cities | 206 | 2 | 7.71 | -5.71 |
In a perfect parity scenario, Boston teams would have won about 9 championships in this period; they actually won 22. At the other end of the list, Cleveland, Atlanta, and the Twin Cities have been vying for the bottom spot for the past decade. Cleveland won an NBA title in 2016, and Atlanta won baseball in 2021, so in 2022, Minneapolis-St. Paul sits in the cellar at least on this metric.
His list is grouped by state; mine is grouped by city. I was more interested in individual cities than lumping, say, all of California’s cities together. The other difference is the one I discussed above, that I only count back to 1967.
(Paine did publish rankings by cities in this article prior to the 2018 Super Bowl in an attempt to show that Philadelphia was the worst-performing city of the modern era, which he defined to begin in 1984. That happened to be the year after the 76ers won the NBA title, and in fact Philadelphia teams won four titles from 1974-1983. So it really depends on the cutoff.)
There is no single accepted way of doing this ranking. Different assumptions and methods will lead to different rankings. For example, one could take the ratio of actual to expected championships instead of the difference; that would cause cities with fewer seasons to percolate to the extremes of the list. My preferred system is that 1 title in 200 seasons is worse than 0 in 20, which favors the difference method.
Bill James has a system called the Loser Score. He’s a baseball monogamist and thus his article only covers baseball, but it’s neat and original.
Yet another option is to weight seasons over time, which I explore below. I give the most recent season a weight of 100%, but discount previous seasons at a linear rate of 2% per year. So a season that was 25 years ago is given half the weight as the current season, and any season that was 50 or more years ago is given no weight. The ranking sorted by weighted difference is below. Because of discounting, I cannot think of a natural interpretation of the “weighted difference” numbers (they are inevitably smaller in absolute magnitude than the raw differences), but it’s interesting to see the ranking.
Some of Boston’s many titles were the Celtics in the 60s and 70s, and the Bruins had a couple in the early 70s. Those are effectively wiped out, but Boston and LA still occupy the top two spots. Look how far Montreal falls; they had eight hockey championships from 1968-1979, which earn them miniscule points in the weighted system. New York has actually had a really bad decade following the 2011 Giants’ title - with two teams in every sport, they fell fast. And at the bottom, well, if this is the closest your city has come to a championship in the last 20 years, I hope you find satisfication in other areas of life.
| City | Team Seasons | Actual Championships | Expected Championships | Difference | Time-Weighted Difference | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Boston | 237 | 22 | 9.39 | 12.61 | 6.29 |
| 2 | Los Angeles | 279 | 21 | 10.78 | 10.22 | 6.12 |
| 3 | San Francisco | 130 | 9 | 4.79 | 4.21 | 2.46 |
| 4 | San Antonio | 50 | 5 | 1.84 | 3.16 | 2.08 |
| 5 | Kansas City | 132 | 6 | 4.86 | 1.14 | 2.06 |
| 6 | Miami | 162 | 9 | 5.51 | 3.49 | 1.90 |
| 7 | Pittsburgh | 176 | 13 | 6.71 | 6.29 | 1.83 |
| 8 | Chicago | 295 | 12 | 11.51 | 0.49 | 1.75 |
| 9 | Tampa Bay | 111 | 5 | 3.72 | 1.28 | 1.54 |
| 10 | Denver | 178 | 7 | 6.28 | 0.72 | 1.30 |
| 11 | Raleigh | 28 | 2 | 0.93 | 1.07 | 0.93 |
| 12 | Oakland | 154 | 10 | 5.96 | 4.04 | 0.84 |
| 13 | St. Louis | 161 | 6 | 6.33 | -0.33 | 0.64 |
| 14 | Las Vegas | 15 | 1 | 0.47 | 0.53 | 0.50 |
| 15 | Oklahoma City | 20 | 1 | 0.67 | 0.33 | 0.44 |
| 16 | Green Bay | 60 | 4 | 2.05 | 1.95 | 0.30 |
| 17 | Edmonton | 46 | 5 | 1.74 | 3.26 | 0.21 |
| 18 | New York | 423 | 22 | 16.22 | 5.78 | 0.16 |
| 19 | Newark | 78 | 3 | 2.92 | 0.08 | 0.08 |
| 20 | Houston | 168 | 4 | 6.13 | -2.13 | 0.04 |
| 21 | Dallas | 191 | 8 | 6.69 | 1.31 | -0.02 |
| 22 | Detroit | 237 | 9 | 9.39 | -0.39 | -0.13 |
| 23 | Baltimore | 113 | 5 | 4.25 | 0.75 | -0.15 |
| 24 | Quebec | 16 | 0 | 0.74 | -0.74 | -0.17 |
| 25 | Hartford | 18 | 0 | 0.81 | -0.81 | -0.20 |
| 26 | Seattle | 145 | 3 | 5.36 | -2.36 | -0.39 |
| 27 | Anaheim | 90 | 2 | 3.21 | -1.21 | -0.42 |
| 28 | Montreal | 94 | 10 | 4.03 | 5.97 | -0.51 |
| 29 | Calgary | 45 | 1 | 1.69 | -0.69 | -0.60 |
| 30 | Winnipeg | 32 | 0 | 1.26 | -1.26 | -0.60 |
| 31 | Columbus | 25 | 0 | 0.82 | -0.82 | -0.62 |
| 32 | Memphis | 26 | 0 | 0.87 | -0.87 | -0.65 |
| 33 | Washington | 190 | 6 | 7.00 | -1.00 | -0.67 |
| 34 | Jacksonville | 31 | 0 | 0.98 | -0.98 | -0.68 |
| 35 | Philadelphia | 236 | 8 | 9.22 | -1.22 | -0.71 |
| 36 | New Orleans | 86 | 1 | 2.99 | -1.99 | -0.72 |
| 37 | Ottawa | 33 | 0 | 1.13 | -1.13 | -0.74 |
| 38 | San Jose | 34 | 0 | 1.17 | -1.17 | -0.76 |
| 39 | Orlando | 37 | 0 | 1.27 | -1.27 | -0.80 |
| 40 | Milwaukee | 113 | 2 | 4.31 | -2.31 | -0.84 |
| 41 | Portland | 56 | 1 | 2.18 | -1.18 | -0.86 |
| 42 | Sacramento | 42 | 0 | 1.47 | -1.47 | -0.87 |
| 43 | Toronto | 138 | 4 | 5.44 | -1.44 | -0.90 |
| 44 | Salt Lake City | 49 | 0 | 1.76 | -1.76 | -0.94 |
| 45 | Vancouver | 61 | 0 | 2.50 | -2.50 | -0.97 |
| 46 | Indianapolis | 92 | 1 | 3.21 | -2.21 | -1.05 |
| 47 | Nashville | 55 | 0 | 1.77 | -1.77 | -1.29 |
| 48 | Cincinnati | 122 | 3 | 4.54 | -1.54 | -1.36 |
| 49 | San Diego | 117 | 0 | 4.34 | -4.34 | -1.45 |
| 50 | Atlanta | 195 | 2 | 7.32 | -5.32 | -1.46 |
| 51 | Charlotte | 67 | 0 | 2.22 | -2.22 | -1.46 |
| 52 | Buffalo | 123 | 0 | 4.78 | -4.78 | -1.69 |
| 53 | Cleveland | 173 | 1 | 6.37 | -5.37 | -1.72 |
| 54 | Phoenix | 151 | 1 | 5.39 | -4.39 | -2.43 |
| 55 | Twin Cities | 206 | 2 | 7.71 | -5.71 | -2.68 |