Best Sports Business Cities: 2026

Sixty years after Atlanta built a new ballpark to entice the Milwaukee Braves to move south, the city’s sports business ecosystem has become a model for other markets. World-class venues, entrepreneurial team owners, a diverse lineup of events, a blue-chip roster of sponsors and forward-thinking public officials have positioned the city as a global leader in the industry.

In the end, the data, the industry and even rival markets agree: Atlanta is No. 1.

For SBJ’s fourth annual Best Sports Business Cities™ effort, we went back to our 2023 roots and looked at the overall wins, losses and sustained successes of the 2,384 markets that are the home of at least one professional or Division I college athletic program, a permanent event or a major stakeholder; read more about our methodology.

Here’s a sample of what we tracked:

• 9,409 unique entities

• 520 construction projects

• More than 1,000 naming rights, uniform patches and on-field logos

• 1.48 billion in attendance

• 300+ sports industry B2B events

• 1,600+ sponsors

Here are the 50 Best Sports Business Cities™ for 2026:

#1 Atlanta

#2 New York City

#3 Indianapolis

#4 Charlotte

#5 Minneapolis-St. Paul

#6 Los Angeles

#7 Las Vegas

#8 Phoenix

#9 Kansas City

#10 Miami

#11 Washington, D.C.-Northern Virginia

#12 Salt Lake City

#13 Tampa

#14 Philadelphia

#15 Nashville

#16 Denver

#17 Boston

#18 Orlando

#19 Chicago

#20 Dallas

#21 Northern New Jersey

#22 Seattle

#23 Research Triangle, N.C.

#24 Arlington, Texas

#25 Houston

#26 Columbus

#27 San Diego

#28 San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, Calif.

#29 Detroit

#30 Austin

#31 San Francisco-Oakland

#32 Pittsburgh

#33 Cleveland

#34 Cincinnati

#35 Jacksonville

#36 Milwaukee

#37 St. Louis

#38 Birmingham, Ala.

#39 Colorado Springs, Colo.

#40 Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

#41 Portland

#42 Orange County, Calif.

#43 New Orleans

#44 San Antonio

#45 Greenville, S.C.

#46 Frisco, Texas

#47 Oklahoma City

#48 Louisville

#49 Fort Worth, Texas

#50 Greensboro-High Point, N.C.