Chicago Cubs Remain Team With Longest Championship Drought

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 20, 9:10AM EDT

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Maybe the Chicago Cubs will make it to the World Series this year, and maybe the team will win it. The chances are improbable. The Cubs are down two games to none in the National League Championship Series. If the Cubs are eliminated, it will continue the longest championship drought among teams in the four American major professional sports: MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL.

According to an analysis by 24/7 Wall St.:

No team in professional sports has gone longer since a championship victory than the Chicago Cubs. The last time the Cubs won the World Series was over a century ago in 1908. Chicago’s other Major League Baseball team, the White Sox, won its third World Series in 2005.

Many Cubs fans and commentators offer a supernatural explanation for the team’s championship drought. The commonly held belief is that the team was cursed after a man and his pet goat were forced to leave Wrigley Field during a 1945 World Series game. The Cubs did not win a single game in that series and have not made another World Series appearance since.

The methodology for the work:

To identify the teams with the longest playoff droughts, 24/7 Wall St. considered NHL hockey, NBA basketball, MLB baseball, and NFL football teams that have won at least one major championship. Of that group, the 10 teams for which the most time has elapsed since winning again are experiencing the longest championship droughts. To be considered, a franchise needed to have won a championship under the current team name in the current city. Franchise win-loss records, championship wins, and historical player information were obtained from team and league websites, as well as ESPN.com. The total number of listed championship wins for a team are considered only from, and not prior to, the modern era of each league.

There is always next year.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.