Salt Lake City continues to be a leading contender to land a Major League Baseball expansion franchise.
ESPN baseball insider Jeff Passan recently noted the Utah capital has by far the most advanced potential bid and is the closest scenario to a turnkey operation. Despite a smaller media market than its main competitors, he noted the city has three other significant factors going for it: a strong ownership group, locked-in stadium funding and a site to build the stadium.
And if Utahns had their druthers, they would take a big league baseball team over any other pro sport, including football.
A new Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll found 43% of registered voters in the state would most like to see MLB join the state’s pro sports landscape, followed by the NFL at 35%. The state is already home to two of the country’s Big Four sports leagues with the NBA’s Utah Jazz and NHL’s Utah Mammoth.
The survey found a significant drop-off after that with the WNBA at 14%; NASCAR or a motorsports event at 13% and an additional college bowl or playoff game at 12%. Nearly one-fifth don’t want to see any of those sports in Utah. Poll respondents were asked to select up to two choices.
A coalition of prominent Utahns led by the Larry H. Miller Company launched Big League Utah in 2023 to pitch Salt Lake City as a place for baseball. The company has a shovel-ready stadium site on the city’s west side and a $900 million commitment from the state through a rental car tax increase to fund half the construction cost.
“For generations, Utahns have embraced baseball — cheering on the Salt Lake Bees at home and traveling to iconic ballparks to see their favorite major league teams. We are energized by the national buzz and local excitement for MLB. This enthusiasm is more evidence that Utah is ready for a home game,” Miller Company CEO Steve Starks told the Deseret News in a statement.
The new survey found more than half of baby boomers and nearly half of millennials would most like to see major league baseball in Salt Lake City. Only a third of Gen Xers and Gen Zers prefer pro baseball. Retired folks were higher on baseball than any other demographic in the survey at 57%.
A March 2026 Deseret News/Hinckley Institute poll showed nearly 7 in 10 Utahns would welcome a big league team to the Beehive State.
Perhaps because of the work being done to get an expansion team, baseball turned the tables on football in the latest Deseret News/Hinckley Institute poll. In a 2023 survey, the NFL edged out MLB as the pro sport Utahns most wanted to see. Interestingly, the NHL finished a distant third in that poll taken the year before what is now the Mammoth arrived.
Could Salt Lake City support an NFL team?
Salt Lake City checks several boxes — growth trajectory, fan passion, location and increasingly sophisticated sports infrastructure. But it falls short on the two things the NFL highly values: a deep corporate base to fill luxury revenue and a credible path to a 65,000-seat stadium.
A pro football team in Utah has been a pie-in-the-sky idea going back several decades. Unlike baseball, there has been no organized campaign to bring the NFL to town.
In 2005, now-retired Deseret New columnist Brad Rock wrote about Brownsville, Texas, posturing for an NFL team. He noted that a story in the Brownsville Herald named Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, San Antonio, Toronto and Los Angeles as other possible sites. (Los Angeles now has the Rams and Chargers but didn’t have an NFL team at the time.)
A decade later, amid talk of moving the Utah State Prison from the Point of Mountain, former 2002 Salt Lake Olympics bid leader Tom Welch suggested replacing it with an NFL and/or MLB stadium.
“Well, when I think of Seattle I think about their football team. When I think about Denver, I think about the Broncos. When I think about Phoenix, it’s the Cardinals. And I think about their baseball teams. These are the major cities we compete against in attracting new businesses to Utah. They all have professional football and baseball. We don’t. And, you know, we ought to be looking for major league football and baseball to be a part of our future,” he told Deseret News columnist Lee Benson.
In 2021, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox went all in on the notion of pro football in the state.
“I don’t know if there’s a limit on how hard I would push to get an NFL team here in Utah,” Cox said in response to a question about the league during a news conference.
“I know a lot of people are excited to have the Raiders in Vegas. We’ve been working closely with the Raiders to help them expand and do more with Utah, so there’s a natural connection there,” the governor said.
“If there’s an opportunity for an NFL franchise here in the state of Utah, we would be all over that,” Cox said. “We are the state of sport.”
And just last year, Touchdown Wire ranked Salt Lake City third behind St. Louis and Toronto among five cities that “deserve the NFL’s next expansion team.”
According to the new poll, nearly half of Gen Zers want to see an NFL team in Utah, while less than a quarter of baby boomers expressed a desire for pro football.
Women’s basketball, auto racing and bowl games
Utahns over the years have experienced some of the other sports listed in the survey.
Salt Lake City was home to one of the eight original WNBA franchises. The Utah Starzz played at the Delta Center from 1997 to 2002. The team had a losing record in its first three seasons, but made the playoffs its last two years, reaching the Western Conference Finals in 2002.
Larry H. Miller sold the club and it moved to San Antonio ahead of the 2003 season. It relocated to Las Vegas in 2018.
Utah has never hosted a NASCAR Cup Series race but has had a presence with lower-tier regional and developmental series races.
The Utah Motorsports Campus, originally the Miller Motorsports Park, is scheduled to reopen the racetrack after $5 million in upgrades Friday under a new brand. It will introduce plans for a multi-million-dollar project designed to position the 511-acre campus as a destination for motorsports, racing, high-performance innovation and entertainment.
As for a college football bowl game, the state was home to the Top of Mountains Bowl featuring junior college teams, often Snow College, for eight years, ending in 2011.
In 2008, an proposal to create the Rocky Mountain Bowl at the University of Utah’s Rice-Eccles Stadium had local support and Mountain West Conference backing but didn’t gain enough traction to get off the ground.