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I've played around with these numbers for more than a decade. I've discovered that when you put an additional team in a metro area, there's a square relationship to the populations.
For example, when you considered whether the New York area should get a third team, you don't divide 21.2m by 3 to get 7.1m and conclude that New York should have get a 3rd team before San Francisco-Oakland gets its first team. Instead divide 21.2m by 9 (3 squared) to get 2.4m. Now a 3rd team around New York is more in the neighborhood of Denver, Tampa-St. Petersburg and Pittsburgh.
So if you consider the 1.7m of Milwaukee to be the minimum support level, Sacramento (1.8m), Portland OR (2.3m), Washington DC (1.9m), New Jersey (2.4m) and Riverside-San Bernardino (1.8m) can also support teams. This is on a purely population basis. Ranking by income is probably a better measure in which case Washington comes out miles ahead. The populations of cities in Canada, Puerto Rico and Mexico should be adjusted for income and exchange rate.
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