Dead Sports Franchises Are Alive and Well on Twitter

The Montreal Expos haven’t played a Major League Baseball game since 2004. But on X/Twitter, the long-defunct team posts with a frequency that makes it seem like they’re currently in the hunt to win the 2025 NL East.

Behind the 55,000-follower account is Elias Makos, a Canadian radio host and former Expos PR coordinator. He is one of a handful of hobbyists who run very active and well-followed social media pages for “dead” professional sports teams, and have for decades.

After the Expos left Montreal for Washington, Makos took a job in academia and quickly found himself with some extra time to kill. “It was 2009, I was interested in social media and saw Twitter was taking off, so I thought it would be fun to make an Expos account,” he says. “I was able to get a good handle [@montreal_expos] because it was so early.”

The start was similar for Michael Glasson, owner of the X page for the Hartford Whalers, a former NHL franchise that left Connecticut for North Carolina in 1997. “When I started my account [in 2009], many teams didn’t even have a social media presence yet,” he says. “I believe for a time, the Whalers were more popular online than some active NHL teams.”

These defunct team accounts are not formally affiliated with any of their respective governing leagues, and the content that each one produces varies. Some favor sharing grainy highlight clips and “on this day”–style history posts; others lean in to memes and humor. However, they’re largely united in their primary goals, which are to celebrate their beloved fallen franchises and—more ambitiously—help revive them. 

“I view the page as forward-looking,” says Kenji Onozawa, who has run a popular Seattle SuperSonics account on X since 2009, after the team relocated to Oklahoma City in 2008. He grew up in the Pacific Northwest but moved to Tokyo just before the COVID-19 pandemic. The account offers him a way to keep in touch with the roots of his sports fandom and advocate for its future: “By staying active online, I want to remind people that Seattle is still very much a basketball town. We have the stadium, we have the fans, we have the legacy. All of those things make us a great landing spot for an NBA expansion team.”

Onozawa—who is also involved with an organized effort to bring an NBA team back to Seattle—says that while most of his account’s followers are, like himself, “middle-aged” Seattleites with a personal fondness for the Supersonics’ ’90s heyday, he believes a younger generation of fans is tapping in. “I’ll get people reaching out and saying stuff like, ‘Hey, I found your account because my dad was a Sonics fan.’”

Follower and engagement spikes are most pronounced when a defunct team has a clear news tie-in. For Onozawa and the SuperSonics, the Thunder’s NBA championship in June was ripe for opportunity. “The history of the Sonics leaving Seattle for Oklahoma City brought us back into the national discussion and drove an uptick in engagement with the account,” Onozawa tells Front Office Sports. He’s taken full advantage of the spotlight by making several posts about bringing an NBA team back to Seattle, which have garnered hundreds of thousands of views in the weeks since the Thunder’s win.

Most of the time, though, defunct team account admins have to manufacture relevance. For example, to insert the Expos into last week’s MLB All-Star conversation, Makos had a video of Moisés Alou hitting a double to put the National League over the top in the 1994 Midsummer Classic at the ready. But these kinds of posts do well, too. 

Despite admittedly feeling “bitter” or “disappointed at times” about their respective teams leaving their towns, the account admins FOS spoke with say they try to stay upbeat. This approach, they say, has allowed them to stay out of the firing line of league legal offices and any intellectual property concerns they could potentially have. 

Glasson describes his Whalers account as “official” in its bio, but, he says,“nobody’s ever asked” him to change it. Makos and Onozawa haven’t been approached by MLB or the NBA either, and all three say they have never monetized their accounts.

Franchise relocations and league expansions are notoriously fraught with all kinds of financial and political considerations, so defunct team account owners know their “bring-them-back” campaigns face an extremely uphill battle, no matter how many views or likes their posts get. 

“It’s a pipe dream at this point,” says Makos. “But nothing would make me happier than for the Expos to come back to Montreal. I’d hand over the keys to my account immediately and gladly.”