Who Killed the Montreal Expos? faces the ugliest truth in professional sports: relocation feels like a civic death. The Netflix documentary opens on the raw wound that still lingers in Quebec and then works backward through the money, politics, and misplaced priorities that turned the Montreal Expos into the Washington Nationals in 2005. It sketches the particular economics of Major League Baseball, where payrolls rise with local revenue and there is no salary cap to even the field, and shows how that system punishes a franchise without a modern public-funded stadium or a deep-pocketed owner willing to spend.
The film’s most compelling material involves Jeffrey Loria and David Samson. Their on-camera presence, archival clips, and testimony from those who dealt with them paint a consistently unflattering picture of ownership that promised facilities and stability to Montreal, then failed to deliver, then repeated the cycle elsewhere. The movie is not interested in granting them much sympathy, and it is more persuasive as a portrait of mismanagement than as a whodunit. When it sticks to boardrooms, balance sheets, and city politics, the case is clear enough.
Heart comes from the baseball itself. Seeing Hall of Famers Pedro Martínez, Vladimir Guerrero, and Larry Walker talk through the rise and demise of the Expos is bittersweet. Their interviews, along with footage of packed summer nights and a fanbase that wanted to believe, restore the feeling that this was not a doomed market but a team undercut by ownership and infrastructure. For longtime MLB fans the beats will be familiar, yet the film still lands as a time capsule of squandered potential rather than a revelation with brand new facts.
Formally, the documentary is clean and watchable, built for Netflix consumption, and efficient at laying out the chessboard. It is also a little safe. The narrative rarely surprises if you already know the outline, and the filmmakers do not dig as deeply into league office decisions or the broader media-rights landscape as they could. What remains is a sturdy overview that captures why losing the Expos still stings and why fans often feel powerless when billionaires start angling for public money.
READ MORE MOVIE REVIEWS: The Luckiest Man in America, The Baltimorons, HIM
As an explainer of how a franchise slips away, Who Killed the Montreal Expos? is effective and frustrating in equal measure. It will make Expos loyalists angry all over again, give Washington Nationals fans a sense of the cost of their origin story, and remind everyone else how fragile a team can be when ownership and city hall stop pulling in the same direction.
Score: 6/10
Who Killed the Montreal Expos? (2025)
- Director: Jean-François Poisson
- Genre: Documentary, Sports
- Runtime: 90 minutes
- Rated: PG-13
- Release Date: October 21, 2025
- Movies Like Who Killed the Montreal Expos?: The Redeem Team, BS High, Moneyball
Where to Watch Who Killed the Montreal Expos? (2025)
See all options for Who Killed the Montreal Expos? (2025)
