August 6, 2026
August 6, 2026
The Best of the Best
Love them or hate them, as a baseball fan you’re duty-bound to respect the New York Yankees. You might not want to, and sure, you can make arguments about how they only win because of their money. Or even—and I’ve really heard this one—that they should have won more than they have because of just how much money they’ve had.
But at the end of the day, you don’t win 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 World Series and counting just by being lucky or rich, and we all know it.
Those things do help, of course.
That’s nothing more than a long way of saying that the Yankees are the greatest baseball franchise in history. Of course, that’s about as insightful as asserting that Babe Ruth is the greatest baseball player of all time. It’s just self-evident. (And, if you’d like, we can go over why Ruth really is the greatest baseballer ever. It’s non-negotiable.)
The more interesting question by far is where the Yankees stack up as the greatest sports franchise in the broader pantheon of Greatest of All-Time teams across major sports leagues. (Just like the question of Babe Ruth’s inter-sport dominance is much more interesting than discussing him relative to his peers.)
Some fish are just too big for their ponds.
There are a lot of ways to look at this, but for a couple of reasons, we’ll start with one of the simplest available metrics: the number of titles a team has won proportional to the total number of seasons available in the years they competed in the league.
As a starting point, we’ll take the marquee teams from each of the four major American sports leagues, along with one representative from the major European soccer leagues, Manchester United. This is not meant to be a comprehensive survey. Rather, it is merely a sketch of the relative dominance of teams across different eras, in different sports, and even on different continents. These are not, in other words, apples-to-apples comparisons.
The number of championships is up to date through the completion of the 2014 seasons of their respective leagues.
The number following each team name is the number of titles won per year in the league. Obviously, that figure can never exceed 1.000, but the closer a team gets to that perfect score, the more dominant they are relative to their peers.
The NFL proves slightly problematic to assess, given that the Super Bowl has only been around since 1967, and until 1969 there was a separate NFL Championship Game. In that period of overlap, the Packers once won both games in a single year. Obviously, only one of these counts, so that’s how we arrive at a figure of 13 championships, which matches what the team itself claims. This is the most in NFL history, but with close to 100 seasons under their belts, their titles-per-year (TPY?) coefficient is the lowest in this grouping. This takes nothing away from the success of the Packers, but it does go to show some parity in American football. There are several teams clustered near each other, with similar numbers of championships.
The NBA is a relative neophyte among American sports leagues, but it has produced two iconic teams in the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics. We’ll take the Celtics here, though. The Lakers may have sustained their dominance over a longer era, but not only have they produced one fewer championship than their archrivals, it has taken them 10 more tries to do it. Do the Celtics get knocked for having won the bulk of their championships at a time when the NBA was not as strong top-to-bottom as it is today? Maybe. Over another 50 years or so, I would expect them to either rise or fall depending on whether they’re able to produce another era of greatness.
The Canadiens are a questionable addition to the list, if for no other reason than despite their prodigious collection of titles, they might not be the most prestigious team in their own league. That honor may go to the Detroit Red Wings, which, despite fewer title-winning seasons, certainly enjoy a higher profile among non-hockey fans (and which has experienced more recent success). It’s worth noting that hockey is an exceptionally demanding sport, and its playoffs are grueling. Should that carry some weight? Should the size of the league? Many of those Canadiens championships came in an era when the NHL had only six teams. (Of course, MLB wasn’t always 30 teams either.) All of that said, the Canadiens do own the second-largest collection of hardware on this list.
Trying to parse the ever-shifting hodgepodge of English soccer leagues over the past century and change could be a full-time job. Manchester United has won 20 titles, though, over around 113 years. What that means, though, is unclear from an American perspective. The structure of the leagues has been in flux, as have the other teams present in the league, thanks to a complex (and very cool) system of promotion and relegation. Also problematic is the fact that Liverpool has won nearly as many titles. That ties up an awful lot of championships between two teams, lending credence to the notion that English soccer is not as deep as most American leagues.
The Yankees have won, depending on when you’re reading this, around 24.5% of all World Series played. They’ve outstripped their nearest competitor by more than 2.5 to 1. They possess the greatest pantheon of stars in American sports, a big reason they’re so often cited as the greatest sports franchise in the country, if not the world. I don’t need to dwell on the dominance of the Yankees. Many people would probably prefer that I do not.
And with that, we’ve reached the end of our preliminary tour of great sports teams of the world. What have we learned? Is there one team that towers above the rest? And how do we assess a degree of difficulty for each team? To some extent, these are questions for another day. What we can certainly say, with even a cursory look around the sports world, is that the Yankees belong squarely in the conversation about the greatest sports franchise in not only baseball history but world history.
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