Groundshare


Groundshare is the principle of sharing a stadium between two local sport teams. This is usually done for the purpose of reducing the costs of either construction of two separate facilities and related maintenance.

Types of groundshare

Intersport Groundshares

Given sufficient compatibility between facility requirements, two teams that do not play the same sport may share a ground or a stadium. North American indoor arenas commonly feature basketball and ice hockey teams sharing the facility during their common fall-to-spring season; a layer of insulation and a basketball floor can easily be laid over or removed from the hockey rink, and dasherboards disassembled or reconfigured, in a matter of hours. Historically baseball and American football teams often shared a large general-purpose outdoor or domed stadium, particularly during the multi-purpose stadium era of the 1960s-1990s, despite the dissimilarity of their fields. This practice fell out of fashion in the 1990s as baseball teams constructed highly specialized stadia in which football fields fit awkwardly if at all. Football teams in turn built more specifically rectangular stadia, often with a floor slightly wider than American football requirements to comfortably accommodate domestic or international soccer as American spectator interest in that sport grew.
A variation on the groundshare concept exists commonly within the NBA and the NHL. As the requirements for a regulation NHL hockey rink and a regulation NBA basketball court do not differ significantly, in the majority of cases where a metropolitan area has both an NBA and an NHL franchise, the teams share the same arena.

Intrasport Groundshares

This is two teams that play the same sport share the same ground. These may be two non-competing teams who play at different levels, such as Bury F.C., renting Gigg Lane to F.C. United of Manchester in England.

Intraleague Groundshare

This is where two teams in the same league share the same ground, such as the New York Giants and New York Jets sharing MetLife Stadium. Starting in the 2020 season, the Los Angeles Chargers and Los Angeles Rams will share SoFi Stadium, in Inglewood.
In the American NBA, only two franchises share one arena: both the Los Angeles Lakers and the Los Angeles Clippers share Staples Center.

Examples of groundsharing

Intraleague groundshares