Maine’s Largest City Destroyed in List of Best Sports Towns

A new study is giving Portland, Maine, the business about its sports fandom. And that's not a good thing.

Wallethub.com, a popular personal finance website, has published its annual report on the best sports cities in America. Maine's largest city can be found near the bottom of the rankings.

Portland ranks as the 324th best sports city. That's out of a list of 397cities that were used in Wallethub.com's survey. This is absolutely bonkers that Portland, a city with three (soon to be four) professional sports teams can be found. On top of that ranking is the fact that Portland finished 187th out of 230 small cities. That's straight insanity.

Maine had a total score of 1.54. That's not great, Bob. The score was broken down into five categories: football, basketball, baseball, soccer, and hockey fandoms. The site used Gallop polling and other factors to determine the scores and rankings. Clearly, those Gallop numbers didn't fare well for the Forest City.

Portland finished unranked in EVERY category with the exception of baseball (Go Sea Dogs!), where it had a balmy ranking of 213th. Apparently, nobody cheers for many sports around here, even though there's literally an NBA G-League team and ECHL franchise in town. Plus, this town has become soccer crazy, which has helped lead to a new pro team coming in 2025. And I haven't even mentioned how crazy folks are for Boston sports around here.

Listen, I'm not trying to rank Portland in the top 25, but it is one of the BEST minor league sports cities in America. How on Earth is Princess Ann, Maryland, and Rock Hill, South Carolina, ahead of Portland? That's just silly.

In general, the whole list is shocking. The number one sports city (for some reason) is Los Angeles. That's right, the city here fans don't show up on time, sit on their hands the entire game, and just hope they look good if they end up on television.

Hopefully the 2024 report is a little more friendly and respectful to a city that might love its lobster, but also adores its sports.

Rock Hill, South Carolina? Is that even a real place?

You can check out the entire list here.