I think beyond the obvious large sports stadiums, local high schools are among the worst offenders. New tax levies for 'schools' almost always pass despite much of that spent on new sports fields meant for the exclusive use of sports teams that constitute only a very small percentage of the student body population (not to mention the overall population). Meanwhile, the school will not even have safe ways for children to ride bikes to school and bus service cannot even be properly maintained.
How about Opera Houses? Why should the federal taxpayer pour millions into the Kennedy Center just so rich old congresspeople can pretend to enjoy the plotless hellscape of "Cats"?
The Kennedy Center is used frequently to host federal government events that bring in large groups of people. In that one case.
Further, spaces like the Kennedy center (or amphitheaters) play a revolving set of shows which makes it difficult for any private entity to have enough skin in the game to fund it. If the stadium was owned by the city and rented to whichever group wanted it, that would be more analogous. But right now it's the X stadium, the sports team sells the naming rights, gets the revenue from other uses, etc. Instead, put them in a position where they can be outbid for the use during a home game and I might start agreeing.
> Further, spaces like the Kennedy center (or amphitheaters) play a revolving set of shows which makes it difficult for any private entity to have enough skin in the game to fund it.
It's really difficult to fund it when you have government backed competition which doesn't answer to the market.
I'm not sure if this applies to the Kennedy Center, but it certainly applies to the mega stadiums which double as concert venues that seem to be popping up around here. It would be impossible to compete against a government owned venue which will certainly have at least a conflict of interest in the development of supporting infrastructure and other legislation.
For every dollar I give to Uncle Sam, 12 cents goes to military defense contractors like Raytheon. 0.004 cents go to the National Endowment for Art.
I know which of those two provides more value to society, and I think it's a fucking joke how art & music are not seen as things humans do like birds making a nest, but as something to commodify and court private investment with. We completely cut art and music from most curriculums in K-12 to afford budget cuts and what did we get out of them? Did you notice the extra fraction of a fraction of a penny this year on your return?
The reason private entities don't fund art is the same reason they don't fund public transit or worker pensions or guaranteed pay sick leave or... it's not profitable. I yearn for the day Americans are willing to support something regardless of how much money it makes them. Especially for a country that waxes so much poetic about its "moral majority".
As a person living outside of US I appreciate those 12 cents from you much more than 0.004. US provides at least some level of global security and I don't want this role to be taken by any other country. As for art, I always can look for other options.
I would rather your own country pay for your own defense (and join NATO for a boost) but if the USA has to be a hegemony rather than Russia or China, I can see your point.
We have enough money to do both! I like that the US military is a military superpower. And I like finding art (and healthcare, and a bunch of other things). If we stopped giving uber rich people unearned tax breaks, we could afford to do them trivially.
What global security? The military has done more harm than good and the reason no one fights back is because of how mighty it is and the IMF. Look at Afghanistan and Iraq, did it leave it better off? Or its influence in Latin America. How's it's going in Ukraine, other than selling weapons? You don't want the US to "protect" you.
Billions are spent on art. Every video game, movie, cartoon, anime, song, comic book, coffee table book, and even ad, is art. There is arguably no reason the government needs to fund art as it's already extremely well funded.
It isn't, and only someone who mostly consumes art but doesn't create it says otherwise. The possible exceptions being artists already regally compensated and upset they aren't making more (e.g. Don Henley)
Take any city of cosmopolitan reputation, and take away their public arts programs and presence, and I guarantee in a generation, they will wither out, as the prestige/tourist status and even business status will decline.
Take a city like San Jose where I live; smaller neighbors Oakland and SF have vibrant ecosystems between creatives and public works that fosters their reputations as places worth seeing. SJ has a small but active community that largely has to scrap for their own, such that its largely overlooked to the point that most of its best talent only gets known after it leaves for cities that will recognize them and provide tools an opptys for them (e.g. Cellista, Peanut Butter Wolf, etc). And even SF is pricing out creatives, such that many are booking for Oakland or out of state to continue.
The arts are poorly funded, and in the few places they do better, tends to be in old bunkers where socialites can 'invest'/launder their money and get a surname placed on a building.
> only someone who mostly consumes art but doesn't create it says otherwise.
I've created art that has collectively sold to 20-30 million people. Have several titles to my name and have hundreds of artist friends making $70k-$150k + royalties across various industries. I can look at the credits list of any movie or video game and see hundreds, sometimes thousands more. Also have friends doing patreon, etsy, and youtube making a living making art.
I always thought art was for creation’s sake not capitalism (though it could be both). And I believe unbridled creativity is the bleeding edge of innovation.
Under a pure profit motive, the whole of art will converge around the best ROI, and spaces for new ways of expressing and perceiving will become narrow.
Sure it’s easier than ever to create and disseminate art, but also harder than ever to find art that isn’t streamed or commodified down your throat.
If for no other reason, some kind of non-corporate funding is needed so that new artistic outputs can generate a signal amongst mass produced art. Maybe that’s not the govt, but it sure ain’t MassMediaPublisherProducerCorp.
Many (most?) celebrated works of art were for $$$$. Go into any museum of classical art, it's almost all art that was made because someone paid the artist to make it.
Pretty sure no one in the arts agrees with this. As a filmmaker I know I certainly don’t.
What makes you say that? I’m curious where this opinion comes from.
You seem to think the arts is a bunch of connected people getting welfare to make terrible-to-mediocre art no one actually wants, and because that doesn't get obscene amounts of funding that the arts as a whole are underfunded. Movies, music, gaming, industrial design, advertising, architecture, publishing, and more are each individually billion dollar industries with an enormous amount of diversity in what is produced. Additionally, hobbyists can go easily semi-pro (or pro) nowadays thanks to websites like Amazon (books), YouTube (movies), SoundCloud (music), Etsy (design/physical art), and Patreon (other). The problem that you are describing is that people who make art that no one wants or people who suck at getting their art to people who like it are not rich. If you make something people like it is easier than any other time in history to make a living in art.
Maybe I haven’t been around here long enough but this entire comment section is very disheartening and at least somewhat not what I expected. Seems like a lot of folks here simply think “if it isn’t particularly profitable/giving a direct ROI to investors, as well as self-sustaining, then it isn’t worth it.”
It seems like a lot of Americans are brainwashed into thinking that "public transit or worker pensions or guaranteed pay sick leave or..." are Socialist, or even worse, Communist.
They are socialist, but they should be available as well. Socialism isn't a bad word, and neither is Capitalism, both can be used in moderation. It's just the balance has swung way too far in the USA, and it's mostly controlled by corporations (and therefore is crony capitalism). The only place US citizens still have much power is in social reform and even that is being subjugated by crony appointments to the Supreme court and the Red states which are currently passing acts of oppression against LGBQT and women with nods from the Red supreme court.
I would point out, as an aside, that Opera itself is basically "an open-source community of musical-play development" — i.e. performances where the source material is in the public domain such that anyone can put on a performance of them without paying royalties.
This is unlike "musicals", which are protected by copyright, and are thus only run by the musical's rights-holder's licensed troupe(s), in a particular place (usually Broadway), with a particular interpretation of the material (the rights-holder's); where the revenues are due to high ticket prices that can be charged often only due to the artificially-created scarcity of performances of said musical due to IP law. (I.e. for many musical, nobody is going because they're fans of the particular actors/director/etc; they just wanted to see a performance of musical X, akin to what you'd get from seeing opera X. But there's only one available performance of a given musical X. Musical producers have a monopoly on performances of their musical.)
Musicals make money, by design. Opera does not make money, by design. Instead, opera houses take donations, in much the same way that you might imagine a "local open-source software development collective" might take donations.
When the people of a municipality get together and decide that they consider their local opera house a "local cultural institution" worth supporting with their tax money (usually only to prop it up in bad donation years), this does certainly make the opera house into a "government-backed" project. But in this case, the "government" here is just the mob-action of the people of the city. It's the atheist version of a church congregation agreeing that their tithes should be partly directed to some local needy cause.
While I love opera and have supported it financially in multiple places I've resided, I find it laughable that any major urban electorate in the US would actually support the Opera fiscally if that decision was left to them directly.
Nothing in a democracy happens because the majority of constituents want it to happen. The majority of constituents don't know or care enough to explicitly agree with any particular novel-and-domain-specific policy.
Instead, things happen in a democracy because vocal minorities of constituents push for it, and nobody in the rest of the constituency cares enough to push in the opposite direction.
If a policy turns out to be disliked by the majority, the expectation is that the policy will rile up another vocal minority enough that they'll be inspired to come along and advocate to change things back in the other direction. If no vocal counter-minority ever forms, the policy stays.
To be clear, this isn't a corruption of the democratic process; rather, this is what it means to have a decision be made "democratically."
I am well aware of this. I'm responding to the notion that support of institutions like the Kennedy Center has any correspondence to the desires of anything beyond an extreme minority of the population. You're lecturing the wrong person.
West End theatre in London is developed by a complex amalgamation of arts organizations, grants, &c. and personally I find the scene more inventive and exciting than broadway, as a theater-goer.
> for any private entity to have enough skin in the game to fund it.
This is exactly what capital markets are for and some capable and incentivized entrepreneur would acquire/develop such a venue and charge rental rates as applicable.
The answer to arts funding is not “capitalism” any more than military funding is. We don’t question the financial cost there because we assume there is a broader benefit beyond direct profits. Why aren’t the arts treated the same way? Do people really not see why they are worth funding, regardless of whether or not they turn a profit?
Unless I’m misunderstanding your point, you’re sort of indirectly advocating against grants for the arts. Is that accurate?
Yes, there is an issue with megastadiums that double as a concert venue. Among other things, the stadium and associated concert revenue, while built with government money, go to the sports team.
It's hard to get a large amphitheater going without government support. While I'm sure there are examples, but none spring to mind either currently or throughout history. But subsidizing live events of a revolving nature is different from subsidizing a billionaires sports team.
The flip side of it is I can't imagine going entirely private either. You would have a billion dollar asset completely beholden to the local government, which could extract what they want from you.
> You would have a billion dollar asset completely beholden to the local government, which could extract what they want from you.
That's not how anything in America works. Billion dollar skyscrapers or complexes as private enterprises exist, often in the same jurisdiction as they stadiums.
I think the difference is that football is a money making endeavor for the team owner. Opera isn't making money for anyone and needs help if it is to exist.
Giving money to football teams is not much of a step removed from putting it directly in the pockets of the already rich owners of the teams.
Actual opera fans are frothing at the mouth right now at the suggestion that Cats is opera.
But this idea that opera is stuffy high culture is the same mistake people make with Shakespeare--it's pop culture, just removed from its context. Imagine upper-class twits a century from now screening an Adam Sandler movie.
Isn't what makes Shakespeare "high culture" is its ability to stand the test of time? I'm sure there were plenty of mediocre or terrible plays from other writers at the time that no one cares about now, and are thus not "high culture". Shakespeare's stuff has been consistently read/performed for centuries, indicating that there might be something a bit more to it than the average play. Pop culture doesn't necessarily imply not high culture.
I could be wrong obviously, but I would be extremely surprised if Adam Sandler movies have centuries of longevity to them; I think even people who like his movies will acknowledge that they're not spectacular films.
Of course the "test of time" test isn't always an indicator of quality. There are plenty of old books that I had to read that I thought were terrible, and moreover there are plenty of modern music that I think is fantastic that no one else will really care about.
> I'm sure there were plenty of mediocre or terrible plays from other writers at the time that no one cares about now, and are thus not "high culture".
I don't think that is historically accurate.
From what I've read "high" vs. "low" culture changes over time, very often based on aesthetics. Brahms wrote both high and low art by the late 19th-century audience's standards. Today it's all just Brahms, who is a "classical composer", hence all "high art."
Most importantly, there is no reason at all to believe that it cannot change again in the future. E.g., Brahms goes viral and gets treated as some kind of KPop sensation. Then we get some young punk doing cosplay as a steampunk Musikwissenschaftler claiming that Hungarian Dance No. 5 no longer slaps as high as it used to.
That’s why Opera has so many long boring bits. Attendees weren’t expected to pay attention as if it were a High Mass. It was a social event, a place to see and be seen, as well as trade gossip and so on. The performance itself was somewhat analogous to the TV on in the background at a bar.
Sure, going to either an opera or the latest Marvel blockbuster is often a social event to some degree. But the idea that the entertainment itself is just background noise like a few musicians at a cocktail party is just bizarre.
That's true, but it just highlights how bizarre and arbitrary high-culture is. I don't know how to say "Hey everybody, we're all going to get laid!" in Italian while preserving Rodney Dangerfield's voice.
High culture vs low culture has always been at least partly arbitrary. I'm not an Opera fan in general, but used to love that there was a cafe in town that once a month hosted 'opera' night, where amateur and pro opera singers (some from the SJ and SF opera camps) to sing whatever they want.
Sometimes you'd get someone singing pop tunes as arias, sometimes you'd see legit arias sung in full costume, sometimes just the local belting out of Carmen in sweatpants. It felt delightfully local, accessible, and devoid of highbrow/lowbrow nonsense.
Serious question: do you think people should be forced to subsidize tennis courts for recreation? What about affordable lessons?
I am not a tennis enthusiast (actually, I hate tennis), yet I would suggest that there are good reasons to provide such funding. Encouraging participation in sport is a good thing. You don't have to agree with the particulars in order to agree with something in principle.
That said, I will agree that professional tennis (or opera, or football) should not be funded. For starters, it benefits a select few rather than society as a whole. Yes, that select few includes outside businesses who may see increased revenues or the people who may find jobs near the minimum wage and seasonal end of the spectrum. Granted, I have always been more favourable to the hope provided by social welfare (even when it doesn't work) than the cynicism of corporate subsidies (even when it does work), so don't treat my opinion as unbiased.
The serious answer is that pop culture used to be much more uniform than it is, and so of course we would subsidize it. We're living through a historical anomaly.
I'm not sure this is an anomaly. Professional sports used to be an absolutely huge phenomenon, but viewership is way, way down from it's peak around 2000. As are music and film award ceremonies. Super Bowl and Oscar watching parties were some of the first major social events after the holidays for a lot of people. With easier access to content and information, it would appear major TV events controlled by the three main broadcast corporations have lost a lot of sway. There's still a lot of people whose social calendar is wrapped around professional sports and other media events, but you just need to look at super bowl viewership numbers to see they have plateaued and declined, particularly when compared to a growing population.
Superbowl viewership started at 18 million, hit 90 million in 1994, peaked in 2015 with 114 (true east coast/west coast game) and fell way down to 100 million or less starting in 2018. Correlation isn't causation, but there has been a pretty strong uptick in streaming media, and a similar decline in professional sports viewership, which has traditionally been on broadcast TV.
I guess I misspoke; I agree completely. It's less an anomaly than a paradigm-shift. You're absolutely correct that the sports audiences aren't coming back, especially after baseball's latest stunt.
The same argument can be made about anything subsidised: sport, art, research, healthcare, ... .
Yet, a significant portion of what you experience has been indirectly affected by these subsidies. I am willing to bet that opera has had a tremendous impact on the music you listen to, to keep a direct example.
Just arguing that "I don't immediately benefit from it, so I should not be paying for it" is probably a bit extreme.
Yep. I sort of agree with the point about stadiums and certainly about the Olympic games. (I was very opposed to Boston thinking about bidding on some Olympics or other.)
But cities/states subsidize a lot of things from public transit to parks to parades to cultural venues to say nothing of schools out of taxes. To say all that should be completely privatized is, yes, an extreme position.
I suppose I am going to sort-of go against my stated opinion of funding for professional vs. amateur sport here, since I am going to claim that the Olympics aren't entirely bad. At least the lower profile winter games aren't entirely bad. (Yes, I classify the Olympics as professional sport. Even when professional athletes were denied, it it hard to deny that the training many countries offered to their athletes would qualify as professional.)
I was growing up in Calgary during the '88 Winter Games. As a child, it was pure excitement even though I wasn't particularly into sports. Somewhere in my parent's archive of my childhood are a couple of scrapbooks containing news clippings of what excited me from day to day, as well as the school's map to track the day-to-day progress of the torch relay. I don't know how I managed to snag that when a couple of hundred other kids and adults could have, but I did.
But this isn't to suggest that the excitement of the day is important. Roughly a decade later, I secured an IT job with a human performance lab at the University of Calgary. As much as I believe that professionalism in sport is contradictory to societal benefit, research related to improving physical performance is important. That was a legacy of the '88 Olympics. Sometimes outcomes are beneficial even though they are difficult to tally up.
As far as I can tell, the Vancouver games were beneficial as well. One of the outcomes was a mass transit line that reached capacity decades before anticipated. While that may sound like a negative, it does prove there is an underlying demand for reliable public transit. A more tangible benefit came from the conversion of Olympic facilities into community facilities. My recollections are of the a new False Creek community centre being used to host events to celebrate First Nations (North American Indian, for the Americans) culture and the dated Riley Park Community Centre being replaced with a modern facility. (I forget if the new facility included a pool, but the new rink was better than the old one.)
Overall, I would say that we should be funding facilities and programs that address the needs of society as a whole from a social perspective. That being said, properly planned funding of professional facilities can still serve that goal. While my example involved the Olympic Games, something similar could be said of facilities built for private interests. Provided the rent was in proportion to what is being offered and the facilities served the needs of other clients.
> I forget if the new facility included a pool, but the new rink was better than the old one.
The recent Winter Olympics in Beijing used the swimming stadium from the 2012 Summer Games for curling. I assume they just put a floor over the pool(s?) with cooling loops in it, and possibly some of the machinery in the emptied pool itself. Maybe they did it the same way in Vancouver?
I don't know where you live, but the city I live in has many public tennis courts paid for by taxes. And basketball courts, soccer fields, a few pools, public river launches, etc.
Some things are good to have, even though they don't make money. There's a fun novella that parodies the opera mindset, called Maskerade:
“Who does the accounts?”
“All of us, really,” said Salzella.
“All of you?”
“Money gets put in, money gets taken out...” said Salzella vaguely. “Is it important?”
Bucket’s jaw dropped. “Is it important?”
“Because,” Salzella went on, smoothly, “opera doesn’t make money. Opera never makes money.”
“Good grief, man! Important? What’d I ever have achieved in the cheese business, I’d like to know, if I’d said that money wasn’t important?”
Salzella smiled humorlessly. “There are people out on the stage right now, sir,” he said, “who’d say that you would probably have made better cheeses.” He sighed, and leaned over the desk. “You see,” he said, “cheese does make money. And opera doesn’t. Opera’s what you spend money on.”
“But...what do you get out of it?”
“You get opera. You put money in, you see, and opera comes out,” said Salzella wearily.
The owner is making money, but so are the players, the referees, the concession staff, parking attendants, stores and shops that sell licensed apparel, and the bars, restaurants, and other adjacent businesses. Not to mention the marketing team, strength and conditioning coaches, web developers, and others who work for the team. And although temporary, it does create new construction jobs. This is true for football, soccer, baseball, basketball, and other sports.
But this is less true when the stadium is built and then surrounded with parking lots that you have to drive to to go park your car. It's more true when the stadium is built in a neighborhood or at least a walkable area.
Recently Columbus was going to lose the much beloved Columbus Crew soccer team. We had a stadium off of I-71 that was, you guessed it, surrounded by parking lots and not much else. You couldn't grab a beer before or after the game. People couldn't go camp out at a nearby bar and while you're not in the stadium you're close by and part of the atmosphere. Fortunately the state and local business leaders rallied together to #SavetheCrew and we were able to keep the team and we're building a new stadium next to Nationwide Arena in downtown Columbus where you can walk to the stadium. Hell, you can actually bike there from the suburbs using an existing bike trail and check-in your bike. Similarly, Ohio Stadium on the campus of Ohio State University is very walkable. People go and grab brunch before the noon game, they buy apparel, etc.
So I think that yea, a football team is likely to make money for the team owner and cities and governments should be weary of this. And I also haven't read the article so maybe the benefits I mentioned are washed away somehow, but I can't imagine Columbus without Ohio State football, Bluejackets hockey, or Crew soccer. I think it makes the city a better place, even if the owner (of the latter two) makes money.
"The owner is making money, but so are the players, the referees, the concession staff, parking attendants, stores and shops that sell licensed apparel, and the bars, restaurants, and other adjacent businesses. Not to mention the marketing team, strength and conditioning coaches, web developers, and others who work for the team. And although temporary, it does create new construction jobs. This is true for football, soccer, baseball, basketball, and other sports."
You're following the 'broken window' theory of economics, focusing on how breaking a window creates a job for a handyman. Of course when put this way you know it's ridiculous - but why? It's because it ignores the thing that the handyman could have done instead which must be foregone. Everything comes instead of something else.
If we build a stadium, we necessarily do so instead of a hospital, school, houses, etc or more abstractly we might be giving up haircuts, shoes and some amount of anything else. Money spent near the stadium in a bar isn't getting spend at some other business. All of the benefits of having a stadium come at the expense of giving up something else of greater-or-equal value elsewhere.
It's just hard to see this, because the benefits are concentrated in a single, highly-visible endeavor, and the costs are diffused throughout the rest of the economy.
My understanding is the broken window theory relates to destruction and rebuilding and not opportunity cost. I don't think building a new stadium is analogous to breaking a window.
> If we build a stadium, we necessarily do so instead of a hospital, school, houses,
Maybe as a global society this is true because of absolute capital allocation, but because people have the ability to allocate their own capital in the way that they would like to it's not a mutually exclusive endeavor. Further, building a new hospital, house, or school can be uneconomical and not necessary and also has the same issues you're highlighting. Building new housing for homeless people takes money away from special needs children etc... . It depends on the details and opportunities, so I'd disagree that this is necessarily true except in a specific example that we could analyze together.
> Money spent near the stadium in a bar isn't getting spend at some other business.
It’s fine, but it means that the revenue generating projections from sports teams are reflecting the amount of diverted entertainment spending, not net new money. And the frame is often the latter, which is both wrong and deceptive.
If teams presented their cases more truthfully - this stadium won’t make any more money than other options, but the people of this city like sports, so please subsidize the rich owners- I would have less of an issue.
(Said from San Diego, where this former chargers fan is ecstatic to see the city didn’t kowtow to the team’s demands for a new stadium. They are now in LA, and I get 16 Sundays per year back into my life. )
> It’s fine, but it means that the revenue generating projections from sports teams are reflecting the amount of diverted entertainment spending, not net new money. And the frame is often the latter, which is both wrong and deceptive.
Yea I mean they probably don't depict this in the best way possible, but undoubtedly it brings in tourists and other investment, at a minimum. But I think that this could also be used as an argument against, say, an airport because now people have easy access to travel to NYC, or Florida, or California and it diverts money spent from local entertainment to those cities/attractions/etc... Instead of spending money at MoMA in NYC why don't you spend it at the Columbus Art Museum? (I do say this to illustrate a point, but I actually agree we should spend money more locally).
I really wish we could get away from "XYZ rich owners" comments though because the government subsidies all sorts of people, rich or otherwise. Also it's not just the owners but the players too. They make millions upon millions of dollars. Intel coming to Columbus with tax breaks subsidizes the rich shareholders and CEO. The federal government maintaining a shipyard in New England subsidizes wealthy dock workers and the shipyard CEO. Roads? Same thing. Hospitals? Wealthy doctors. Wealthy defense contractors making bombs that our tax dollars are paying for to defend Ukraine from Russia. And you can play this game with any public investment or economic decision.
> But I think that this could also be used as an argument against, say, an airport because now people have easy access to travel to NYC, or Florida, or California and it diverts money spent from local entertainment to those cities/attractions/etc...
You're running away into pretty esoteric apples-Vs-oranges territory there. Compare local investments against other local investments, or if you're talking about a new communications hub, an airport against, say, a railway station. (Sheesh, didn't you even see how much like a cringe-worthy attempt at diversion that came across as?)
> I really wish we could get away from "XYZ rich owners" comments though because the government subsidies all sorts of people, rich or otherwise.
And I really wish we could get away from "Oh, those poor little rich owners" comments... The difference is that poor people need -- and (therefore), in many systems of ethics, "deserve" -- subsidies. Billionaires and gigacorps, not so much.
> And you can play this game with any public investment or economic decision.
I don’t think that it’s true of airports, for example. I am not an expert in this, and have mostly focused on the baseball side of things, but the work I have seen from neutral economists are pretty clear that these taxpayer dollars are not high RoI.
Your comment boils down to “all government spending on this list of items is equally inefficient, so why not build stadiums instead of airports.” I think that ignores the fact that airports are infrastructure, whereas sports are entertainment. Personally, I don’t think the govt should spend money on entertainment when the financial beneficiaries could easily cover the costs.
Also, in baseball, the owners are the last types of people I would support. They don’t even care all that much about the product on field - there is not a structural incentive to put a better product on the field. The comparison of billionaires to millionaires is also deceptive - that is a huge chasm, and players are being paid for producing value, using the income from their labor. Owners are paid because they have odd tax breaks (did you know they can depreciate their team purchase cost, despite team values consistently beating index returns?)
Lords of the realm is a great book to get insight into MLB owners.
> Your comment boils down to “all government spending on this list of items is equally inefficient, so why not build stadiums instead of airports.” I think that ignores the fact that airports are infrastructure, whereas sports are entertainment. Personally, I don’t think the govt should spend money on entertainment when the financial beneficiaries could easily cover the costs.
Sorry, but I don't agree with this characterization. In response to your comment about bars and that a new bar at a new stadium diverting spend from previous bars this would apply to other things like commercial air travel which diverts local money to far away places.
Also civilizations have had entertainment for as long as they have existed. We need entertainment and it's quite critical to social stability and well-being as far as I know.
"My understanding is the broken window theory relates to destruction and rebuilding and not opportunity cost."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
"The parable seeks to show how opportunity costs, as well as the law of unintended consequences..."
"I don't think building a new stadium is analogous to breaking a window."
It is, in the sense that building a stadium or repairing a window both require forgoing something else that could have been done instead.
"...it's not a mutually exclusive endeavor."
It is most certainly mutually exclusive. If I person is going to spend an hour building a stadium, they will not be creating anything else with that hour or engaging in valuable leisure time.
If we pay (or tell/force) people to build a stadium - regardless of who pays (the owner, the public, a Genie) those people will have to NOT do whatever else they might have done.
> If I person is going to spend an hour building a stadium, they will not be creating anything else with that hour or engaging in valuable leisure time.
This is just talking about opportunity cost then, not the Parable of the Broken Window.
> If we pay (or tell/force) people to build a stadium - regardless of who pays (the owner, the public, a Genie) those people will have to NOT do whatever else they might have done.
Yes, there are opportunity costs to the things we do. But this applies to anything, not just new stadiums. If you choose to buy a new computer or travel for a vacation or install a new toilet you could have been doing something else with that money. The key here is that in market economies (this is everybody, US, Norway, Japan, wherever) people are independent agents and can allocate their time and resources how they see fit.
> My understanding is the broken window theory relates to destruction and rebuilding and not opportunity cost. I don't think building a new stadium is analogous to breaking a window.
Both versions exist independently. AFAIK the one intended to illustrate the fallacy of "Anything that increases GDP must be good!" is the older, by far.
The reductio-ad-absurdum version is that the glazier putting his sons or apprentices up to going out and smashing windows must be a net benefit for society...
And I also haven't read the article so maybe the benefits I mentioned are washed away somehow
The financial benefits are rarely worth the initial expense for professional sports stadiums.
Th article didn't claim governments shouldn't kick in any money, only that funding it wholly (or nearly so) via public funds is a bad use of tax revenue.
DC has two recent examples. Nationals Stadium (baseball) and Audi Field (soccer). Both in the same neighborhood downtown (southwest waterfront).
The baseballs stadium cost ~$1 billion. It was financed with bonds sold by the city and remains owned by the city. Rent to the baseball team and a portion of ticket/concession/etc are being used to pay back the bonds. As of a few years ago, it looked like the cost was basically a wash. But, that ignores opportunity costs of doing other things with that money (assuming it could be borrowed for other projects), so it's hard to say for sure if the stadium was better than other options.[1]
Audi Field's financing was quite a bit more complicated, with multiple land trades with 3rd parties, and mixed financing (the team paid a significant amount of construction costs). The team leases thee stadium for a nominal $1/year, so I have no idea how the city recoups it's investment. Part of that deal also pulled $30 million from public school funding, which seems like a big miss to me.[2]
All that said, the neighborhood where the stadiums are located was a derelict slum and industrial site before. It's massively revitalized. Does that development offset the costs of buildings/maintaining the stadiums? That's not clear. And both stadiums seem to have had a better mix of public/private financing than some of the NFL stadium deals of past decades (which are usually more expensive to start as well).
One of the things you mentioned was opportunity cost. I wonder if cities such as Columbus or other similarly sized cities actually lack opportunities and so they always latch on to projects like these? Are there intangible benefits to having an NFL stadium that aren't realized in economic cost-benefit analysis? For example, while Columbus is similarly sized to Cleveland and Cincinnati, if you watch the news or weather channel they always choose to show both of those cities instead of Columbus, the capitol (I know the likely reason is just makes more sense to display both of those). Or if I travel I always have to say Columbus, Ohio instead of just Columbus. Not the case with Cincinnati or Cleveland. Is that because the name of those two cities is so unique, or because we don't have an NFL team to get name recognition? Does that affect investment opportunities when companies are considering locating an office? Are we not front of mind because of that? I don't know either way, but I also wonder how this could be measured and if it provides any economic value.
I haven't seen any recent studies/reports about building in small markets vs large markets. I suspect the small markets end up even worse off with such deals. The stadiums are massively expensive, regardless of location, and the smaller cities would be less able to absorb/offset the impacts of those costs.
Maybe not apples to apples, but DC's annual operating budget is ~$17b vs Columbus's annual budget of $1b. This despite DC having a smaller population (~700k vs ~900k).
Yea. I think Columbus is unique too because Ohio State football is probably bigger than either of the NFL teams from a market perspective in Ohio so it's sensible that nobody is adding an NFL team here.
Also I think the Columbus population comparison isn't great (omg we're the 15th biggest city !11!) because the city has annexed places that really don't make a lot of sense. Metro population is better to use for a comparison. And then I think for D.C. in particular you have the federal government located there so it's probably just "different".
Indianapolis has a budget of around $1.3 billion [1], Columbus is $1.04 billion [2], and Cleveland has a budget of around $1.8 bn [3]
> The owner is making money, but so are the players, the referees, the concession staff, parking attendants, stores and shops that sell licensed apparel, and the bars, restaurants, and other adjacent businesses. Not to mention the marketing team, strength and conditioning coaches, web developers, and others who work for the team. And although temporary, it does create new construction jobs. This is true for football, soccer, baseball, basketball, and other sports.
There's a very simple solution to this issue.
Owner wants taxpayer money for the stadium? Taxpayer gets ownership in the franchise.
Sometimes the folks on this VC-funded tech forum sure do love to demonize making money. Half the comments in this thread are some flavor of "it's horrible that this person is making money from something that was subsidized" or "even if they make money..."
Professional sports is incredibly lucrative, and college sports are incredibly lucrative for the coaching staff and some college administrators that don't have anything to do with it. I would much prefer tax money to go toward endeavors and projects that aren't completely self-sustaining and profitable, but until localities are legally prohibited from negotiating tax breaks in this manner, it's not going to happen.
I'm replying to a post about high school sports fields. Not known for their profitability. And at least kids can go run around there when a formal practice or game isn't happening.
Not necessarily. Most of the school stadiums near me are closed during school hours. After school they are used by various teams until well after dark. Then, on weekends, they are usually rented out to local athletic leagues (youth and adult) unless the school teams need them.
They are largely unavailable to the general public unless they are willing to pay for exclusive use.
I went few times to the Kennedy Center, and as a 35-year-old software engineer, I was not a token spectator. They were people of all walks of life watching Ballet, Opera, and Symphonic Orchestra.
And you can watch Music Hall for $50 or Operas/Ballets for $100. This are not crazy prices compared to a normal concert/stadium seat.
Your example brings to mind one of the many reasons why I oppose the funding of stadiums: it is about passive entertainment rather than active participation. Much the same can be said of opera houses. If the objective is to promote the arts, then direct funding to get people involved in the arts. If you want to promote sports, then direct funding to get people involved in sports. While I appreciate that the interest of some is sustained by watching the best in the field, the sad reality is that most people will be unable to partake unless it is made accessible to them. That means focusing money upon the stage and the field, not the stands.
We could do both. We spend less than 200 million a year on the arts in the federal budget. Increasing that instead of cutting it every year might even bring back some of those "useless art courses" in K-12 that got axed. I shouldn't give more tax money to Raytheon than the cultural institutions of my country. Either cut the former for once or increase the latter
> Increasing that instead of cutting it every year might even bring back some of those "useless art courses" in K-12 that got axed.
I am all in favor of funding the arts in school, but I have to say every single art class I took in K-12 was absolutely useless. We learned neither art history, appreciation, or any technique of drawing or painting or anything of the sort, and none of my teachers (in an otherwise very good school district) honestly seemed like they would have been competent to teach drawing or painting or art history.
Basically my experience with art in school, as it was taught, was that it was an utter waste of time. I'd love to be able draw decently or have a knowledge of art history on par with say knowledge of European history.
Funding both is an interesting perspective. It is certainly practical. It is just that some people view the arts as impractical.
While that may be true from a purely economic stance, I am left to wonder how many people would want to live in a world truly devoid of the arts. I am not speaking of the stereotypical impression of the arts here. I am speaking of creative expression, whether it is linked to social discourse or not, arts here. Even though I am a bit of a fan of utilitarian and, arguably, industrial architecture, I am can also understand the human need for aesthetic and naturalistic environments.
Cats isn’t opera of course. And when you do see pop culture musicals in opera houses that part of the operation is almost certainly profitable and helping to subsidize the rest.
> that part of the operation is almost certainly profitable
Profitable against variable costs, not fixed + variable costs. Those shows are still receiving a taxpayer subsidy and in the vast majority of cities, wouldn't be performed in nearly as nice a building without it.
There’s no such thing as a single fixed cost in a heterogenous situation like this, the analysis you’re making seems based on sort of casually glancing at things and coming up with an opinion.
I work in this space, i actually rent performing arts centers of the kind you describe to put on conferences and have a decent understanding of the economics.
The vast majority of the costs for these arts organizations is the actual art. It’s the salaries for the opera and the cost of the paintings at the art museum and so on.
The actual buildings and complexes can and almost certainly are quite profitable when being used by outside parties like a touring Broadway show.
> There’s no such thing as a single fixed cost in a heterogenous situation like this
> I ... have a decent understanding of the economics
It's patently obvious there are fixed costs to a large building. Here are some fixed costs of the one I mentioned explicitly laid out:
> The Kennedy Center spends about $40 million annually to repair, renovate, operate, and maintain its buildings; these expenses are paid through federal funding.
It's clear you don't understand the economics as well as you think you do, so please don't condescend.
I’ve performed on stage at the Kennedy Center. True story.
Have you been? It’s absolutely massive, it has multiple huge theatres and could sustain several large scale touring productions running concurrently. So our hypothetical Broadway production of Cats should be allocated a portion of those building expenses. And of course only the portion of the year they’re actually there. And of course they’ll sell tickets and either rent the venue or share the ticket revenue depending on how the event is presented.
Of course the Kennedy Center isn’t profitable, it’s not intended to be it’s basically a national monument on the mall.
But my point is that when you see Cats is in town that’s not where the money is going.
Why do you think $40MM is large number? The Kennedy Center has three theaters comprising around 6,000 seats. If you sell out every seat every night of the year for $100 a ticket that’s $219,000,000. You can pay for a couple furry costumes with that. Plus you’ve got the building the rest of the day, that’s only a few hour long production in the evenings.
Popular Broadway style touring productions, rock concerts, corporate product launches or broadcast takeovers (think Apple events or Jimmy Kimmel broadcasting from BAM in Brooklyn), conferences, auto shows, fashion launches, and so on, are subsidizing the performing arts center not the other way around.
Come on, it's absolutely a large number. Especially when added to the amortized construction costs of about $30M (a kind assumption, since it cost around $700M in current dollars to build).
> If you sell out every seat every night of the year for $100 a ticket that’s $219,000,000
...but they don't. I believe program revenue peaked at around $150M, although their site is down. The supposedly nonexistent fixed costs are almost half that!
> and so on, are subsidizing the performing arts center not the other way around
This is nonsensical in context. Counterhistorical nonexistence requires no subsidy, and these private tours choose the subsidized venue because it's the best deal for them. It's not charity.
Edit: I feel like I shouldn't have to say this, but obviously they also have to pay the producer for the show! There are also variable costs!
> supposedly nonexistent fixed costs are almost half that!
Indeed. Revenue in excess of costs is the definition of profitable.
> Counterhistorical nonexistence requires no subsidy, and these private tours choose the subsidized venue because it's the best deal for them.
Sometimes they do sometimes they don’t. There are also for profit venues operating in this space and the PAC’s are for the most part operating in a market rate environment when it comes to pop culture performances and events.
I’m just sure. I literally rented an opera house recently. PAC venues compete with hotels and for profit music venues like Livenation and AEG and event spaces for this business and and it’s generally a profitable arm of what they do.
They use the profits from pop culture and corporate stuff alongside the arts endowments, donations, and subsidies, to fund their fine arts mission.
"The Kennedy Center receives an annual
federal appropriation in recognition of the
Center’s role as the presidential memorial to
John F. Kennedy. These funds pay only for the
operation and maintenance, and capital repair
and restoration of the building and grounds,
ensuring that the living memorial to our 35th
president remains a vibrant homage to his
legacy."
None of the federal money pays for expenses related to the actual programming and operations of the Kennedy Center, it pays for the building and grounds, which has a separate purpose as the federal memorial to JFK and is also used for a variety of public events and educational functions outside of the Center's performance arts programming. The parent comment asked why the government pays for opera (it doesn't, maybe through a modest NEA grant or something), not "Why does the federal government pay for federal monuments and public spaces?"
> None of the federal money pays for expenses related to the actual programming and operations
Is this a joke? Literally the first expense listed under federal appropriation is "Operations". In theory they don't pay the producers of shows with the same money that comes from the government. But given that operations and maintenance are necessary to hold performances, and money is fungible, the distinction is meaningless.
That's not the same meaning of commercial used in the linked clip. High school sports are not a profitable activity for the organization running the team (the school), and building nicer facilities doesn't bring them significant monetary benefit.
Unfortunately, one reason high school sports get funding is that, just like college sports, it tends to be instrumental in prompting other sources of funding (eg. donations from alumni). Or at least that's the perception.
I think you may be underestimating the prevalence of the phenomenon. Try some searches like "high school sports alumni" or "high school sports donations".
Your post is literally a "whatabout". Aren't many publicly funded opera houses/theaters owned by the city and not at the same whims of football owners? A football stadium is almost exclusively designed and used for a single, privately owned entity.
It's a huge difference, not a minor one, and not one divided by class like you imply.
I'm replying to a post about high school stadiums, which are generally owned by a public school or a town. So it's a slight whatabout to the farther-jumping whatabout above me.
And I'd bet every penny I have that the average opera or theater attendee is significantly up the class scale from the average high school football game attendee.
What percentage of a new high school’s cost is the Football field?
The band, color guard, freshmen, and JV teams generally use that field as well. Many students attend games. Not to mention the fact that in many schools graduation happens on the football field.
Forget high school stadiums, I would move the whole discussion back to why society is subsidizing a game that is known to cause brain damage to children.
I think that OP is referencing new taxes for existing schools. This happened a lot in my area, where schools that were built in the 60's and 70's get major renovations often including new athletic facilities. One common large expense is a 'field house' which is like a large enclosed field. When I was in high school, there were only a few such 'field houses' with indoor tracks for winter track season. Now I can't think of a local high school without such a facility. FWIW I fully support such expenditure, field houses seem to benefit a wide array of groups within a school and make certain activities possible (e.g., indoor track and field) that aren't otherwise. But I live in the north where our high school football fields look like high school football fields, not stadiums like I believe exist at many high schools in the south. [1] I would not support a high school building a large football stadium.
And in my experience, when the teams are not using the field, the public can use it (either it's open for e.g. walking/jogging, or it can be reserved for a group event or youth football, soccer, or other community events).
> much of that spent on new sports fields meant for the exclusive use of sports teams that constitute only a very small percentage of the student body population (not to mention the overall population).
Curious where you go this idea. I don't have any evidence to back up my suspicion that this might not be correct, but wondering what yours is, too.
It’s how it is with local high schools near me. Coworker went to a HS with a brand new stadium but the students study in classrooms with ancient heaters. Said they had to routinely wear jackets and heavy clothes to survive class in the cold months.
Isn't this part of the US culture? I mean Americans are so into sports that cheerleaders and jockeys are the most popular people in schools. Encouraging schools to build stadiums for their teams appears a no brainer. Caltech are mocked because their basketball teams couldn't make it to NCAA -- a definite WTF moment for me as I don't see how basketball ever matters in a prestigious research university. Parents cheered for toiling in sports yet despise those who toil in STEM. Practicing free throw 4 thousand times a day heroic, but solving 10 math problems a day is considered a sin? To be blunt, this kind of culture is sick and contributes to the demise of the country.
The financials on this are settled. Sports stadiums are an awful financial investment. However, running a government is not all about making sound financial investments. Sometimes it is about pooling resources to provide a joint benefit to society. Other times it is about trying to price in externalities to allow the market to do its work. These two issues are not as settled as the investment angle and are almost never discussed. Sports teams provide utility to people in the region, including people who never pay a cent for a ticket or merchandise. How do you quantity that value and should the government compensate the sports team for that value? I don't know the right answer, but I would like to see some economists at least engage with that aspect of these decisions.
Also the only way to stop these gifts to private companies is likely with a new federal law banning them. It is simple game theory. These businesses will go where the profit is. Any city or state that refuses to pay will lose out until every city or state refuses to pay. The best way to force that is with a federal ban.
Lol no, a professional sports team is of little "joint benefit to society", at least not of the kind that seriously concerns the government. You may as well argue that the government should be subsidizing new Marvel movies, or Call of Duty, because those are popular forms of entertainment too.
> Also the only way to stop these gifts to private companies is likely with a new federal law banning them. It is simple game theory. These businesses will go where the profit is. Any city or state that refuses pay will lose out until every city or state refuses to pay. The best way to force that is with a federal ban.
No. You can just...refuse to subsidize them. Seems to be working fine for Seattle, where IIRC the renovated stadium for their new NHL team was privately funded.
And if they do go somewhere else, what's the downside? Seattle lost its NBA team a while back, which was a bummer for basketball fans, obviously, but otherwise what was the harm to the city or region?
Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams. They seem to suffer little for it.
For a while, the Olympics were able to basically threaten their way into huge subsidies from even developed countries, but this seems to have mostly gone away now, as everyone collectively woke up from the delusion that the Olympics were a major economic boon worth investing in. Sports team stadiums could easily go the same way.
edit:
Okay, obviously I should've picked different world cities as examples, but even taking those: Tokyo's pro sports teams don't have anywhere close to the foreign popularity that London's EPL teams do. Does that seem to hurt it?
>Lol no, a professional sports team is of little "joint benefit to society", at least not of the kind that seriously concerns the government. You may as well argue that the government should be subsidizing new Marvel movies, or Call of Duty, because those are popular forms of entertainment too.
Local governments do subsidize movie production with all sorts of funding and grants. In addition to the local population, many people travel to cities where sports matches, concerts, and other events (e.g., conventions, auto shows, etc.) are held in the stadiums. This also affects other businesses in the city that benefit from the spending done by those that travel into the cities.
>Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams. They seem to suffer little for it.
Ever heard of...
- London: Arsenal, Chelsea, or Tottenham (Soccer), Wimbledon Championships (Tennis)
- Paris: PSG (Soccer), French Open (Tennis)
Every major "high prestige world city" as you describe is a hub for multiple sports and various tournaments that invites both local and international crowds.
> many people travel to cities where sports matches, concerts, and other events (e.g., conventions, auto shows, etc.) are held in the stadiums. This also affects other businesses in the city that benefit from the spending done by those that travel into the cities.
Sure, but when slg says the financials are settled, presumably they mean stadiums are a bad investment even when all such tangible benefits are taken into account.
The question is whether there are other intangible benefits - maybe a city with a sports team is happier; or has lower obesity; or an improved cultural life reduces brain drain; or the city can afford a mass transit system and needs one, but bundling it with a stadium breaks through some political deadlock; or it's just plain that voters support the stadium.
A theory of intangible benefits would also be helpful in explaining why cities keep on bidding for the olympics, which is otherwise hard to rationalise.
> why cities keep on bidding for the olympics, which is otherwise hard to rationalise.
There was one bid for 2028 and one for 2032. Compare with 8+ bids in years past. There are fewer and fewer new cities that have never hosted before putting in bids (ostensibly due to insane construction costs/demands by the IOC). 3 out of 5 cities bidding for 2024 withdrew their bids and the other two got 2024 and 2028. 2032 seems to have gotten only one bid. What's happening is that this "intangible benefits" theory is dying as more and more of the world realizes that there are none. On the other hand the olympics and the world cup does seem like a good venue for authoritarian regimes to create spectacles.
Public interest in the Olympics also seems to be falling. IIRC the last two olympics had record low viewership. I know I didn't watch at all, and I used to watch most of the big prime time broadcast events 10 years ago. The same seems to be the case for many of my acquaintances.
I still have an interest in quite a few Olympic sports. NBC's coverage, in the US, has made watching the Olympics unbearable. Things like spending half the broadcast on background/special interest stories instead of the competition. Only showing the US athletes and usually, but not always, the podium winners. Starting an event on one channel and then moving it to a different channel halfway through. etc.
Their whole method is very bizarre to me. Even as someone who has worked in film and television for a decade, I can’t make heads or tails of their strategy. I mean there must be something they are seeing that we are not, I can’t imagine they do it over and over again like that without their reasons.
> On the other hand the olympics and the world cup does seem like a good venue for authoritarian regimes to create spectacles.
Off the top of my head: recent Olympic host countries include Russia, China, and Brazil . World Cup hosts includes Russia, Brazil, and Qatar. Yup, checks out.
P.S. Ok, Brazil being in this list is debatable, as they are a democracy ... but with Bolsonaro in power I'll lump them in this group. Yes, I realize Bolsonaro wasn't in office for the Olympics or World Cup, or for the bidding process which happened many years earlier, but he's shitty enough that I'll take the editorial liberty of retroactively smearing his stain back in time.
P.P.S. Yeah, if you want to do the same with Trump in the US I guess I can't disagree either. But the US hasn't hosted an Olympics for 20 years or a World Cup for even longer.
Quite possible that's the case, but I think it's unlikely that it outweighs the "intangible benefits" you'd get from other, more standard investments, like public transit or libraries.
> Every major "high prestige world city" as you describe is a hub for multiple sports and various tournaments that invites both local and international crowds.
Big cities tend to attract big sports, can't deny that, I just don't think the causation really works the other way, at least not strongly. How much would London or Paris suffer if they lost their big sports teams and events?
> In addition to the local population, many people travel to cities where sports matches, concerts, and other events (e.g., conventions, auto shows, etc.) are held in the stadiums.
The article directly addressed this point by saying:
While counter-intuitive, tourism does not see an increase as the result of a sporting event, as often a similar amount would be spent by that city’s residents in a different city, thus creating no real net gain.
Now this may not be true for concerts or other events held in the stadium, but in general I think the idea is that the study indicates sports events don't generate significant tourism, instead drawing a primarily local crowd.
I would also argue that most people would have no issue(or minor issues) with local governments subsidizing _Some_ of the cost of a new stadium and other forms of entertainment. I think the issue comes in when the financial cost is extraordinary (> 1 billion USD).
> The article directly addressed this point by saying..
It addressed this point for the US. It is a US centered article. Check all of the references. The data is US centric.
> While counter-intuitive, tourism does not see an increase as the result of a sporting event, as often a similar amount would be spent by that city’s residents in a different city, thus creating no real net gain.
True of the US maybe but not London or Paris.
Also, london does not fund a private team's stadium (like PSD or Tottenham), they do sometimes fund national stadiums (like Wembley).
> as often a similar amount would be spent by that city’s residents in a different city, thus creating no real net gain
I'm having my trouble getting my head around this. That seems to say that a city WOULD benefit from the stadium because people would spend their money in a different city. I'm clearly not understanding it.
For example, I'm thinking of all of the people from Maine and NH that come to Boston to watch the Bruins play hockey. Without the team, they'd most likely not go to Boston, but might go to Manchester NH, or Portland ME instead. That's definitely not zero sum for the city of Boston or state of MA.
All that said, I also agree that cities and states shouldn't be providing the majority of funding for these types of facilities.
> I'm having my trouble getting my head around this. That seems to say that a city WOULD benefit from the stadium because people would spend their money in a different city. I'm clearly not understanding it.
No, you're reading it backwards. It said:
>> tourism does NOT see an increase as the result of a sporting event
Which is a bit wrong in using the word "event". Sure, city revenues will increase from a home game -- but that evens out when local fans travel elsewhere to see an away game, and spend money there that they otherwise would have spent at home. OK, it works if you take "event" to mean a set of home + away games between two teams... But anyway, having a team that attracts some away fans and their money will logically give no net revenue increase to any one city, since presumably (and on average across all cities, as a mathematical certainty) all away fans spending money "here" are also local fans somewhere else, not spending that away-game money in their home town.
> For example, I'm thinking of all of the people from Maine and NH that come to Boston to watch the Bruins play hockey. Without the team, they'd most likely not go to Boston, but might go to Manchester NH, or Portland ME instead. That's definitely not zero sum for the city of Boston or state of MA.
A) So Bruins fans only watch home games? OK, maybe they're more travel-averse than fans of other teams in the league... But one would think most cities' fans are about equal in this respect, so on average just as much money is siphoned out of the greater Boston area for away games.
B) See that "greater Boston area" above? That's your "city", for the purposes of this discussion. That the "sports-fandom city" happens to stretch across municipalities and even states in your case is kind of irrelevant; in principle it's no different than rivalry between various districts within a city about where to put the stadium. Wherever you put it, of course the immediately surrounding area gets more of that revenue than areas further away. :: It is zero-sum for "the city of Boston" as defined by Bruins-fandom.
I think my confusion is based on what "local" means in that article. My interpretation was literally the City of Boston, vs the regional catchment area for a team's fan base. Tourism in the umich article, and the sources it cites, is region to region. i.e. Someone coming from NH to Boston wouldn't be considered tourism as that's intra-region travel.
Looking at the study the umich study notes that stadium would little effect on net regional exports, which makes sense. However, that betters supports "governments shouldn't pay for stadiums" as a conclusion than narrowly defining it as "cities". That said, the fans come for the team more than they do for the stadium, and I agree with the conclusion that governments shouldn't be paying for these things.
>>. This also affects other businesses in the city that benefit from the spending done by those that travel into the cities.
This has been dis proven TONS of time,including in the parent link. Funding of sports stadiums DOES NOT increase economic activity enough to cover the costs
> Every major "high prestige world city" as you describe is a hub for multiple sports and various tournaments that invites both local and international crowds.
My gut says you have the causal relationship here backwards. The lack of those teams wouldn't ding the city much, if at all.
> In addition to the local population, many people travel to cities where sports matches, concerts, and other events (e.g., conventions, auto shows, etc.) are held in the stadiums.
Anecdotally that also doesn’t really check out for me. I can’t name a single time me or anyone I know traveled to see a sports team unless it was something like the national championship or the Super Bowl. Maybe people see a sports team if they’re already visiting a city, but I just don’t associate “travel“ and “vacation“ with going to see a regular season game of any sport as the main objective.
> I just don’t associate “travel“ and “vacation“ with going to see a regular season game of any sport as the main objective.
Did it really say "vacation"? I think they meant "travel" as in going to another city (say, in a chartered bus packed full of fans, and which goes back home afterwards) to see your team's away game; at least that kind of travel is what brings most of the out-of-town spectators -- who are what's under discussion here, right? -- to most of the big inter-city sports events I know of.
For that kind of "travel", going to see a regular game of some sport is the main objective.
Sure but that’s a pretty narrow use case in the grand scheme of things. I’m not saying NO ONE does it, but compare it to, say, New York City. People go there for specific things not just to see big tall buildings. Certain restaurants, certain landmarks, certain parks, etc. And for the vast majority of people, yankee stadium isn’t really a consideration. Does that make sense?
Sure, makes sense. But then again, you seem to be as little of a sports fan as I am: If I were to got to NYC, I'd try to take in as much as possible of all of those things... and perhaps some kind of sportsball game while I'm at it. (Never having seen any baseball, I suspect I might try to fit that in, to see what all the hoopla is about.)
But I know people who plan trips abroad, for instance from Helsinki (Finland) to Liverpool and Manchester (UK) etc, mainly to see football. Sure, going that far they do other stuff to -- visit team museums, for instance:-) -- but the matches are the backbone the rest of the journey is scheduled around. Maybe there aren't all that much fewer of that kind of people than there are fanatic foodies? I really don't know. But yeah, of course both categories are a drop in the ocean compared to ordinary tourists.
> Local governments do subsidize movie production with all sorts of funding and grants.
Which is dumb, though I don't think the stupidity quite reaches "city spends a billion dollars for one particular team" level.
> This also affects other businesses in the city that benefit from the spending done by those that travel into the cities.
Again, the research on this is quite clear: the economic benefits there are meager at best.
> Ever heard of... - London: Arsenal, Chelsea, or Tottenham (Soccer), Wimbledon Championships (Tennis) - Paris: PSG (Soccer), French Open (Tennis)
I've heard of most of those, I guess I've just never heard of my friends or family going to see them, even though many have visited those cities (and myself as well).
Sure, but you can have an argument about how taxes are distributed, that's what democracy is about. The ROI on investing on education is arguably better than the ROI of spending it on a stadium. And more people need to understand that the benefit of stadiums and sports teams is mostly about subsidizing billionaire sports teams owners.
I mean yeah, I wish the government were a lot more frugal with my money in general. but I don't mind as much when the money is spent on things that directly keep people fed, off the streets, and possibly learning some useful skills to contribute back.
> Local governments do subsidize movie production with all sorts of funding and grants.
In yet another example of why government intervention in markets is mostly to make them worse: the politicians in charge can’t help but build and spend the citizens’ money on flashy vanity projects. Public expenses, private profits. They’ll talk it up like it’s some big “civic” investment in Prestige with all sorts of abstract benefits, rather than just being a handout to the rich — and if you challenge them, well, they will correctly tell you that everybody does it!!!
> many people travel to cities where sports matches, concerts, and other events (e.g., conventions, auto shows, etc.) are held in the stadiums. This also affects other businesses in the city that benefit from the spending done by those that travel into the cities.
So what if City X gets some revenue from away-team fans when the City X Team has a home game? That only evens out with the revenue lost when the local fans go spend their money elsewhere on away games.
Basketball and baseball are both extremely popular in many countries outside of the US and Canada.
This is typical reverse-American-exceptionalism sneering, where someone assumes that because something differs between the US and the few countries they’re familiar with (usually all in Northern and Western Europe), it must be unique to the US.
Baseball is one of the most popular sports in at least Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.
> Basketball and baseball are both extremely popular in many countries outside of the US and Canada.
Basketball, sure. But:
> Baseball is one of the most popular sports in at least Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.
Where "at least" is also simultaneously "at most", AFAIK. Six is not exactly "many". And, hey, since you're writing from an American perspective, Cuba doesn't exist, so it's only five. And Venezuela? Four. Taiwan will probably be part of the PRC soon, so we're down to three... And how significant is the Dominican Republic, really, in a global perspective? So you're left with pretty much just Japan and South Korea. And are any teams from there even in the "World" Series?
So, sorry -- and yes, I'm from Northern Europe and everything -- but you guys really make this "typical reverse-American-exceptionalism sneering" all too easy all too often. :-)
Basketball is a major sport worldwide, honestly probably #3 after soccer and cricket and ahead of tennis because of its popularity in China. Baseball and ice hockey are region-specific (Japan/DR/Cuba/Venezuela for baseball and Canada/Russia/Scandinavia for ice hockey).
The Nordic countries -- Finland is not in Scandinavia. Also Czechia, Slovakia, and perhaps Germany and Switzerland should also be counted. (Surely there can't be fewer hockey players there than there are baseball players in the Dominican Republic?)
I'd be surprised if cricket was the second sport worldwide, it's not played outside the old British colonies. Granted, one of those ex-colonies is India...
Basketball is the second sport in Europe by number of participants, for sure.
It is played, almost exclusively, by said immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. So only in a handful of cities where there's a critical mass of them that are somewhat recently immigrated (and there is room for grounds).
"Played" as in a bunch of friends get together have a friendly game in the park on weekends or "played" as in a has an active pro league and a national teams that competes in major international tournaments?
Several (and by several I mean hundreds) leagues exist across various cities just in USA. They have properly organized tournaments and winners win prize money. Its not a bunch of friends who play in the park. These leagues have to maintain fields, proper playing gear and so on...
It's the second most popular team sport in most European countries, including the major ones. It's the second one even in England, despite low visibility and significant competition by sports that don't really exist elsewhere [0].
Hmm. I know someone who works in the UK basketball industry and it's very niche as an organised sport. Attendance at local events is really low. Something that sums up basketball in the UK for me is that I have a local basketball court but the kids only play football on it. There will be ethnic/regional variation though so I'm interested in the real figures.
These are the only hard figures I can find and it puts basketball behind cricket:
Something to bear in mind when comparing it as a "team sport" is that it's not quite like for like. Basketball is much more accessible like tennis - it can be played casually with a couple of friends. A lot of homes will have a hoop in the garden or driveway.
Cricket and rugby will mostly be organised teams, dedicated pitches etc. If the question was "do you play in a local sports team" then I expect basketball to not be comparable. There might be more people playing with a frisbee in a park than are members of a local rugby team but calling it "a more popular sport than rugby" would feel misleading by failing to account for different level of commitment/organisation required.
Number of participants isn't really the best gauge when we're talking about stadia. Basketball might be played in most British schools and casually by many more people in yards with a hoop, but few British people could name a single UK basketball team; our basketball league is essentially ignored by mainstream media. Rugby takes a lot more organization due to being an inherently dangerous sport especially without competent technique and refereeing, but international games see sellout crowds of 80,000 with millions more watching on TV.
Fascinating, thanks - I had no idea basketball was that popular - where I live I'd have said rugby was the obvious candidate for the second most popular team sport with other sports like shinty far behind it.
Yeah I would think it would be rugby. There's a fair few basketball courts in the UK (often combined with tennis courts) but professionally it's not on the radar at all. Less so even than ice hockey.
Rugby has minuscule participation rates outside of Britain, Ireland, and France. Which is why Italy can continue to take part in the 6 Nations despite being abysmal: because there is nobody else.
Even in England, by participation rates it edges rugby, because it's the second sport in populous inner cities.
Do you have a source for that? I've just looked into it and while the data is sparse and the list after #1 Football varies in order, basketball doesn't make an appearance at all in the articles I've seen.
It does appear that basketball is very popular outside western Europe though, so I learned something today! It makes sense, I do enjoy basketball myself and think that a lot of sports in Europe persist on the weight of tradition moreso than their fun factor.
>Ice Hockey is the only one really played outside of America
So people really believe this shit?
Brittney Griner, a mega star in the WBNA, is currently being detained in Russia on drug charges. What was she doing in Russia in the first place? She was there playing professional basketball for a Russian team. She makes a magnitude larger salary playing in Russia than she does in the WBNA.
> Of which Ice Hockey is the only one really played outside of America
This is hilariously false. Baseball is wildly popular outside of the US, in particular in Japan and the Dominican Republic. Basketball is also incredibly popular outside the US.
Just because it's not soccer and the people aren't white doesn't mean it's not popular. By that same metric baseball isn't even that popular in the US.
Soccer is the most popular sport in the world and is now arguably the 4th most popular sport in the US placing it ahead of NHL (Ice Hockey) and it is fast expanding in reach and popularity across the country. Part of the reason for this is that it is generally a very accessible sport to both play and watch as a spectator. Even for the casual attendee, it provides a fun atmosphere to experience - you don't need to be a hardcore fan to enjoy it.
The most recent expansion team, Austin FC, sold out 100% of every home game in their inaugural season with an average of 20k+ attendees in a privately-funded city-owned stadium.
Also let's not forget about the USWNT who are the most successful team in international women's soccer.
Really? I'm not into watching pro sports, but if I had to pick the most boring one it'd definitely be baseball. People barely even move, and at least in golf they manage to hit the ball somewhere basically every swing.
“Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game”
- Edward Abbey
For what it's worth (vanishingly little), I say that basketball is the most boring sport: everyone runs to one end of the court and somebody shoots and does or doesn't score, then everyone runs to the other end of the court and the same thing happens. This repeats until the last minute or so on the clock, which takes an unbounded amount of time to play because of fouls and free throws.
Yeah, a sport where you wear a sweater during the summer. For five days.
This is also the best sport to show in an office, because people don't watch anything but the wickets. I used to work on a trading floor where they showed it all day on a screen, no problem.
The sport is not my cup of tea but I recently listened to a (sadly paywalled) episode of the TrashFuture podcast which gave me a newfound respect for Cricket. There's a ~10 minute preview of it here: https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/preview-britainolog...
Oh speaking of tea, a thing non-Cricket-knowers might enjoy is that a cricket match will traditionally stop for "tea" during the game. Players will go into a pavilion, have some cakes and sandwiches then resume play a little later.
Professional cycling. 4+ hour races, where 3.5 hours are people "just riding along" (granted at speeds that us mortals can only dream about). The sprints and the climbs are exciting, but everything in between is seriously boring for anybody who isn't a cycling geek (I am, my wife is not; she likes the 20 minute highlight reel, I spend most of July on the couch watching the Tour).
That's the whole 'charm' of American Football. Every player is hyper specialized to do exactly one thing (I guess you can say American Football follows the Unix philosophy in that point). I mean they have two entirely different sets of players dedicated to kicking with each one specializing in a particular type of kick.
The only one that's not played outside the US is the American Football.
Basketball is second (to football) in quite a lot of European countries, and in some like Lithuania, likely the #1. So is Ice Hockey. Baseball is massive in Asia as well.
American football is also played in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and even Europe a little bit. Certainly not as popular as other sports outside the US, though.
Well, sorta. That statement is sufficiently true, but technically incorrect; it'd be a stretch to call Canadian and American football different sports entirely, but the differences, even if minor, are multitudinous enough to merit consideration.
I have met precisely one German fan of American Football. He rooted for the Stuttgart Stallions[1] who I had never heard of before. So, it’s definitely niche, but there are European leagues. Somewhat amusingly to me they call it “Football” as Americans do.
Without "likely", I'm fairly sure it's n.1 in the Baltic region as a whole. It used to be n.1 in Yugoslavia too but I think football has since claimed that spot.
American Football is played outside the US and is growing in popularity. Watching NFL games in bars in Mexico City is a lot of fun, and I'm not much of a sports fan.
Ice hockey is mostly a Canadian and northern European sport, the US last became world champions in 1960. Even the Czech republic is ahead of the US in rankings.
>Does winning the Olympics in 1980 not count as world champion?
Olympics (used to) disallow professional athletes in some team competitions. The US basketball dream team of '92 was so fabled b/c it was the 1st time to allow NBA players to partake. So in that regard Olympics don't really count as 'world champion' in pretty much any team sport event. 1980 hockey was no exception and featured "amateurs".
> 1980 hockey was no exception and featured "amateurs".
Where the definition of "amateurs" differed wildly depending on which side of the Iron Curtain you were from... Up to about 1985 the ice hockey World Championship was mostly about who would come second after the Soviet Union (usually Czechoslovakia). The Soviet Union's national team was largely identical to CSKA MOCKBA[1], whose players were all officers[2] who probably didn't do much else while on the clock than play, practice, or exercise for playing hockey.
___
[1]: Club Sport Krasnaja Armija, the Red Army Sports Club Moskva (Moscow)
[2]: Long-time goalkeeper Vyacheslav Tretyak ended up a full colonel, IIRC.
But AIUI many -- perhaps most? -- other sports than ice hockey skip the WC in Olympic years and count the Olympic champion(s) as world champion(s) for those years.
Although the government did fund the Olympic stadium in London, and then converted it and leased it to West Ham on ludicrously generous terms, which effectively works out as funding a private team's stadium:
It's weird that London 2012 did reasonably well trying to avoid Olympic white elephants with facilities that could be downsized, use of existing sites etc., but really messed up what to do with the main stadium itself.
I think the only other major team stadium involving government stuff in the UK was the Coventry Building Society Arena (previously the Ricoh Arena) that used to be partly owned by Coventry City Council alongside a charity. But that was more notable for a long rent dispute between Coventry City FC and the stadium owners and various threats to move / build new stadiums etc., so was presumably less of a gift to the team financially. It's now owned by the Wasps rugby team, who also ended up in some sort of rent dispute with Coventry City FC leading to them playing at Birmginham City's ground for a couple of years.
You may as well argue that the government should be subsidizing new Marvel movies
The US government actually does subsidize Marvel movies pretty heavily by giving them free/extremely cheap access to military equipment and personnel. Peace movements pretty heavily criticize these movies for this reason. See for example: https://www.cbr.com/captain-marvel-mcu-military-relationship...
That seems quite a bit different, it's a marketing/PR move that probably doesn't actually cost the government very much. Not sure I'm for that kind of thing, but it's pretty radically different from a single city spending a hundreds of millions on a stadium that they'll see little benefit from.
Marketing is a good framing here. It prompts questions like: How strong is the relationship between Fenway Park and the way that the city of Boston markets itself as a place to continue to live/work/play and pay tax revenue?
Fenway Park is actually a bit of an outlier. Wrigley Field also counts. Both of these stadiums are in dense urban neighborhoods and not surrounded exclusively by acres of surface parking lots.
Publicly financing a stadium in that setting might actually be a net positive (plenty of other factors) because all of the spectators are walking through the neighborhood with all the shops, restaurants and bars just to get to the stadium.
Baseball teams play 81 games per year in their stadium. American football teams play 8. That is also a huge difference. There are many stadiums that host both hockey and basketball and thus have 60-70 games per year - plus concerts and other events on top of that. Utilization matters! I don't know if they do anything in winter at Fenway Park, but at Wrigley Field there is a neighborhood ice rink in the winter time. The skate rental/lockers/bathrooms, warming station, concessions, and even Zamboni storage are all inside the stadium. Here's some rambling video showing what "hanging out at the stadium" looks like even when no sport is happening:
https://youtu.be/-pgnR7FqkDo
Ooohh I think you’re on to something with utilization. From what I can tell in London, Arsenal stadium also has pretty high utilization. High utilization means that the “market” of people seeking food & urban amenities is higher.
If cities were getting huge economic benefits from their subsidies to pro sports teams, I probably wouldn't be complaining. It's the fact that they get little to no benefit from enormous investments that make the subsidies here dumb.
Seems like the crux of the argument here is in who gets to decide what's a smart municipal investment. I agree with you that sports is a dumb investment.
Thats not a subsidy, it's advertising. The best way to make a highly
incompetent and ineffective organization (like the military) look good
is by imagining it is good.
The studies on cities spending big on stadiums have been clear that the economic benefits are marginal at best, while the spending is big.
I dunno how big the benefits for the military are here, but they're probably not spending very much on letting movie makers borrow uniforms or use shots of F-35's in the background or whatever.
How many days since one of their clubs was front page international news? Chelsea football club was near the front in New Zealand this week, I don’t follow football at all and I recall it.
> How many days since one of their clubs was front page international news? Chelsea football club was near the front in New Zealand this week
London-based club Chelsea has been front page news in the UK this week because its Russian owner (Roman Abramovich) has been targeted by sanctions imposed as a result of the invasion of Ukraine, throwing the future of the club (and its massively expensive players) into doubt. Some casual googling shows that this story has been covered by Fox News, Deutsche Welle in Germany, Italy 24 News and others
Chelsea, Tottenham, Arsenal and at keat Paris Saint Germain are regularly big -- perhaps not front-page, but big -- news over much of at least Europe even without controversies about an oligarch owner being sanctioned.
I admit, I have a hard time believing that there are many people who would've never heard of London or Paris if not for their pro sports teams. There are absolutely some cities where I can believe it, like Liverpool or Manchester, but London and Paris?
The double negative is making my head hurt and it’s late - to confirm, you are saying:
People would have heard of London or Paris with or without their sports teams. Would you say the same of Manchester or Liverpool if their teams didn’t exist?
Can you think of any city that this applies to? Maybe a few English Premier League teams are as or more famous than the cities themselves, but there's a problem here. There is a near-zero chance of any of those teams threatening to move and using the stadium as a bargaining chip. I can think of a couple of moves that have happened in my lifetime - Meadowbank Thistle moving to Livingston (I'd be surprised if 5 people on this site were familiar with this) and Wimbledon moving to Milton Keynes (a move so deeply unpopular the bulk of their fans immediately formed a new team which now competes in the same league as the "old" one). This issue is pretty unique to the US leagues due to their "franchise" system.
> Maybe a few English Premier League teams are as or more famous than the cities themselves
Not more, but independently of the cities. At least when the actual city isn't in the team's name: I had heard if Chelsea, Arsenal, and Tottenham long before I realised they're all from London. (Likewise, [Västra] Frölunda being from Göteborg.) And I'm still not quite sure about Crystal Palace and the Queen's Park Rangers... (Only recently I pieced together that Crystal Palace are probably named for the famous wrought-iron-and-glass building at the ~1850s World Exhibition, but I can't recall where that was. Probably also London?)
> Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams.
Not that I disagree with the general gist, I had to facepalm at that!
I think the general risk is that a rival politician will promise to bring back sports teams, with some dodgy financial setup that conceals the true cost, and the electorate will gobble it up
I can’t speak for Paris, but London is a major sporting destination.
British sports are completely orthogonal to American sports, so it seems a bit disingenuous to say that ‘no one visits London for sport’ from an American perspective. No Brit will go to the US to watch MLS. Americans care less about Soccer, Rugby and Cricket, but much of the rest of the world does.
London-based Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham are the 7th, 8th and 10th most valuable soccer teams worldwide. Chelsea won the champions league last year. All three teams play in Europe (almost) every year.
Wembley Stadium is the publicly funded national soccer stadium, and hosted the recent Euros final. It is a regular host of European club competition finals, including the Champions League.
Lords is the home of cricket. It hosted the World Cup final a few years ago, and is a mandatory stop on international tours. It almost causes diplomatic incidents if a tour of England skips Lords. London also has The Oval, traditional host to the last test of the summer. Accordingly, many famous test series have been won there.
Wimbledon is the most prestigious and historic tennis tournament in the world. It’s staunch traditionalism is polarising online, but it’s perpetually sold out, and ‘ground passes’ (a ticket to all the smaller courts) have queues for days. I’m an annual queue-er, I’ve met people from all continents.
Your argument appears to be that you, personally, don't care much for the sports being played in those cities (and neither do your friends), and therefore those cities are making a mistake supporting said sports financially. Can you really not see the flaw in that?
I think you're undermining the rest of your argument (which I personally think is pretty decent) by defending the "sports in London/Paris/etc doesn't matter" angle so hard across multiple subthreads.
Well the argument was actually in the article
we are discussing here, which says it is a bad financial investment.
I actually believe that even on a back of the envelope calculation it's hard to imagine how one can come up with this being a net positive. Let's argue that a stadium brings in 1M visitors a year (which is a high number) . If a stadium costs 1B then the city (through taxes etc) needs to make around 100 per person for it to be a good investment (10% return). And we haven't even considered the costs of externalities, like large traffic jams during games, cleanup etc.. I find it difficult to imagine that this works.
I’m sure that globally London and probably Paris (probably a bit more debatable) are much better know for their professional sports teams than any city in the US.
I tried googling more directly for global popularity/famousness, but couldn't find any hard data.
And of course there's the issue of "has well known sports teams" vs "well known for their sports team". The former you could probably get data on somewhere, but the latter, I doubt it.
Travel outside the USA and every kid you meet has heard of Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham. If I were French or Spanish rather than British, these kids would say PSG or Real Madrid instead.
The fans don't have as much money as Americans, but there are 10-15x as many followers on Facebook.
But I would argue England is well known for its sports teams rather than London. (There's also Manchester, Liverpool etc.)
> Travel outside the USA and every kid you meet has heard of Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham. If I were French or Spanish rather than British, these kids would say PSG or Real Madrid instead.
I think what you mean by "travel outside the USA" might be "travel in Europe". I'd bet that you'd get more recognition of the Lakers in, say, China than any of those Premier League teams.
> But I would argue England is well known for its sports teams rather than London. (There's also Manchester, Liverpool etc.)
That's fair, those two cities are probably known for their football teams moreso than anything else.
No, I meant the entire world except the USA, Canada and probably Japan -- although I haven't been to Japan.
I may be out of date for China, I haven't been there for over 10 years.
My place of birth (in my passport) is an English city with a football team named after it. Outside Europe, in places with not so many tourists, it is very common for staff in hotels to recognize this and make some comment on it. Kids (and adults) who talk to me in the street will also comment on it — on the city's team if I say where I'm from, or with Manchester, Chelsea etc if I just say England/Britain.
I look up the names of the famous players before I travel to Africa or South America, so I don't seem like some ignorant idiot when hotel staff (or in one case, a border guard) open my passport and say "Thomas Partey! What a goal!".
Bear in mind the best European football teams often have a lot of foreign players. Chelsea currently have players from Spain, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Brazil, France, Croatia, Belgium, USA, England (only 8/26), Senegal, Mococco and France. Arsenal add Ghana, Norway, Portugal, Japan, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Switzerland. Tottenham Argentina, Ireland, Korea, Colombia, Sweden, Uruguay.
Many people are aware when if a player from their country plays for a famous European team. They often also play for their national team, or used to.
(I have no interest in football myself, which is partly why it's so noticeable to me when people ask me about it so much.)
>I think what you mean by "travel outside the USA" might be "travel in Europe". I'd bet that you'd get more recognition of the Lakers in, say, China than any of those Premier League teams.
Hard disagree on this one. It is in fact "outside the USA" because globally (not just in Europe), English Premier League teams like Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham, etc. are extremely popular, especially in China.
> The National Basketball Association (NBA) has been named the most popular sports league in China in a recent survey undertaken by Ampere Analysis.
> Soccer’s English Premier League and Uefa Champions League ranked second and third respectively, in the report that conducted research with Chinese internet users.
So, the EPL is indeed popular there...but not as popular as the NBA.
Being the most popular sport league is not the same as being the most popular sport. Out of ten league positions, basket has #1 and #10. Soccer has #2, #3, #4, #6, #7 and #9.
Yeah but that wasn't the original statement, the argument was that a Chinese person would be more likely to recognize the LA Lakers than a London pro soccer team. So popularity of the NBA specifically is quite relevant.
Also, you see people wearing NY Yankees hats globally. Some of them don't even seem to know anything about baseball and just think it is some sort of NY merch. But still there are absolutely American sports teams that have recognizable brands more globally.
I get what you're saying, but you might not be realising that the top teams from the EPL _also_ play in the UCL. It's a "super league" made up of the top European soccer teams from the domestic leagues. There must surely be some kind of cumulative recognition effect from playing in both leagues.
I'm Spanish, and wherever I've been in Africa, South America or Asia, everybody ask me if I support Real Madrid or FC Barcelona, soccer teams of the main cities here. And the number 1 visited museum in Madrid is not the Prado, which is one of the 5 top art museums in the World, but Real Madrid museum in their stadium.
I bumped into kids in villages in the middle of no where with no internet and few TVs in the Himalayas and Central Africa that could list all the premier league teams. It's hard to imagine how popular football is worldwide for an American.
> > It's hard to imagine how popular football is worldwide for an American.
> It's really not that hard.
Depends what you mean by football. The GP, for example, apparently meant actual foot-ball football, not American hand-egg. Does that change your assessment?
Liverpool is definitely more known for The Beatles than its football team.
I'm also going to have to disagree on the Europe point.
South America, Mexico and Africa in particular are obsessed with football, and Russia, China and some parts of SEA are also huge football fans. Many of these will be well aware of the top British and Spanish football teams. On the other hand, basketball is also very popular in Asia so I don't know exactly how that would break.
> I think what you mean by "travel outside the USA" might be "travel in Europe". I'd bet that you'd get more recognition of the Lakers in, say, China than any of those Premier League teams.
You are still forgetting a few continents. I know from experience that Central and South America complexity stop for Champions League finals.
I it’s quite possible that Liverpool is known more for The Beatles than football.
Yeah it's more popular than Arsenal Football Club ... but that's one club. There are twenty in the English Premier League. And that's a single (albeit huge) league within the English league system, which is one of about four countries in Europe alone who you could probably say the same about.
Is it more popular than Arsenal though? I think the problem here is that following a league versus following a team are different actions. I am well aware of the Dallas Cowboys and watch quite a few of their games, but I would never follow their official social media accounts, because I fucking hate them. I suppose it depends how we define popularity, but the original question was about being well-known.
Yeah this is just a discussion based on the assumption that instagram accurately reflects popularity/renown, it's entirely possible that is not actually true
I think that’s partly because most US teams are run like business (i.e. their owners want them to be profitable) whereas European football is largely a competition between Russian and Gulf oligarchs on who can spend more money. This is especially the case in England, e.g. the two Spanish clubs near the top of the list are not privately owned.
It's worth bearing in mind that while they certainly make a lot of money, sports teams in Europe aren't primarily run as profit-making entities (they are sporting entities before all else). To the point that the national government stepped in to block a recent move by premier league clubs to form a new pan-european league which would have generated more money, but would have undermined the spirit of fair competition between teams by removing promotion and demotion between leagues.
Another example that occurred to me: I understand that American sports actually have regular breaks specifically to facilitate adverts. Whereas football (soccer) matches have two uninterrupted halves with a single 15 minute break in between.
It'd be difficult to directly measure "well known because of sports team", which I agree is a completely different question, but I think there are a few proxies you could use to try to address the question. If you normalize whatever measure of sports team popularity by other measures of a city's prominence/global reach it might turn up something. Just thinking on the US scale if you took each team's popularity and divided it by the size of the associated city (population), the Green Bay Packers would probably come out on top of US pro sports, which seems accurate.
That has more to do with relegation in European football than anything else. A bottom tier NFL team is at least 2 billion because you know they will be in the league in 20 years. A bottom tier EPL team is likely worth a few hundred billion as it will cost money to stay in the Premier League. The fact that there are football teams so high on the list should tell you of the global brand value they have.
By the time of writing this, it looks like Barnsley has replaced the Dallas Cowboys as most valuable sports team. I suppose some Barnsley F.C. fan has had some fun with Wikipedia.
I know tons of people who have visited many US cities and not one of them went to see one of that cities major sports teams. On the other hand I know several people who don't live in the UK yet travel to London or Liverpool at least once a year to watch their favorite football team play. What does that prove?
Fair, my thought process was more around "how many people wouldn't know about London if their sports teams disappeared?" And my intuition was, "not many, because London is a global city for lots of reasons," but it's possible I was wrong about that and some people only know about London because of their EPL teams. The thought feels very odd to me.
Obviously nobody 'only' knows London because of their sports team. But that is different from saying that London doesn't have many globally well known teams or that there aren't a fair number people that travel to London from all over Europe primarily to watch those teams play.
There are so many reasons to visit cities like London or Paris that individually each reason only makes up a small number of visitors percentage wise. I don't personally know anyone who came to London to see the Queen but it seems lots of people do.
Living here and experiencing the carnage common after football matches, I can promise you that a shit load of international and domestic tourists come to watch football.
That depends on your family and friends of course, but I live fairly close to Arsenal stadium, and I promise you people travel from all-over to see games there.
It is true though, those cities have big teams but aren't known because of the teams existing. I'd wager many more people know about Paris the city than PSG the club.
I don't even like football, but I find that in the UK, football is so intrinsic to our culture that some aspects of it should be considered almost like infrastructure. Governments pay for roads, why not for sports stadiums?
For example, it would be totally unacceptable to large parts of the country for Manchester United to go bankrupt and be sold off in parts as would happen in a normal business. I don't even really care and I think I'd find it outrageous too. The political sphere here is well aware of the value communities place on their FCs and protecting that system is commonly a part of political debate.
I feel like treating sports as a regular business is questionable. If we wouldn't allow a business to fail, it's not a real business, and looking at what literally just happened with Chelsea, it's clear we won't allow it to fail in the same way as a normal business.
I agree with your basic point. Businesses (the sports teams are) should fund themselves, apart from common things paid for by taxes like roads, bridge and such infrastructure. But London/Paris are well known for their sports teams. London alone as Tottenham, Chelsea, Arsenal which are big Premier league teams. Others lesser known Watford, westham, Crystal Palace are all basically London teams. Besides all? of PL teams are city based, Manchester City/Utd, Liverpool, Leeds, Leicester etc.
Originally I wrote "particularly known" before removing the "particularly", maybe I should've left it in.
Yes, the impact isn't zero, but I feel like the answer to the question of "How many people know about London" would change relatively little if you removed the pro sports teams.
But yeah I probably should've picked better examples. I think Tokyo works fine, Japan's pro baseball league doesn't have nearly the same global popularity as the EPL. Maybe Berlin? I lived in Munich and don't remember Berlin's football team, if they have one, really coming up much.
I would argue that London is actuallyba very good example. I would wager that a significant portion of non UK soccer fans would not even know that all these teams are in London (let's not even talk about non soccer fans). So yes the OP was correct London is not known for their sports teams. I think Manchester is probably an example of a city that is known mainly for its sports team.
It is ok if you don't like sports (which is obvious from your comments about Tokyo, London, and Paris which all have notably big sports cultures), but you don't have to pretend that other people don't find value in it.
A city with a sports team benefits in numerous intangible ways. These teams serve as marketing for a city, both internationally and externally. It is a marker of quality for a city, a stamp of approval. They help contribute to a public identity of a city. There is value in having a communal identity. It unites people and helps them work together on more serious problems.
People also love following the local sports team. Yes, this is entertainment similar to other forms, but it can often be free. You don't need to buy tickets to a game to enjoy it. For example, every soldout NFL game is broadcast for free over-the-air in their local market. Marvel movies don't premier for free on the TV in my home.
> It is ok if you don't like sports (which is obvious from your comments about Tokyo, London, and Paris which all have notably big sports cultures)
It's amazing how twisted adult mindsets about sports are. Notice how not caring about watching pro sports teams is, in your mind, "not liking sports." As if the primary function of "sports" is to be watched, rather than, y'know, played.
> It is a marker of quality for a city, a stamp of approval.
I really don't think so. It's more likely that causation works the other way: cities that are successful tend to attract sports teams to take advantage of the local market.
Take Seattle: lost its NBA team, lost its NHL team until very recently. Was just found to be the most desirable city for new college grads anyway. Nobody's been thinking that Seattle sucks because they only had two of the four major US pro sports present in the region.
We are talking about the context of publicly funded professional sports stadiums. Unless you are a professional athlete, we are talking about watching and not participating in sports.
Seriously, this is what you are focusing on in my comments? I tried to engage with you in a constructive conversation about this issue, but I guess forget that because I wasn't 100% explicit that when talking about funding professional sports stadiums that we are talking about watching rather than participating in sports.
I don't like adding more noise to the comments, but since you seem to have a serious question as to why:
> It is ok if you don't like sports (which is obvious from your comments about Tokyo, London, and Paris which all have notably big sports cultures), but you don't have to pretend that other people don't find value in it.
Your comment would have been sooo much better if it hadn't started with a personal insult.
I am also not convinced about your argument there. I have no idea about what teams or even what kinds of sports teams those cities have, yet to me those cities are famous. I see little connection with a city's fame and sports in general except for rare circumstances. I may know for some cities that there also are sports teams, but I doubt those cities' fame was much changed by having them. I'm sure there's one or the other anecdote where a city became significantly more famous because of some team, but I doubt that this is even close to significant. For example, I think the German founder of SAP sponsored a local soccer team which let them buy a lot of to players, and with it he made an unknown town (and an unknown local team) kind of famous. That's not exactly the norm. Usually even such magnates prefer already well-known cities for their pet teams.
I wouldn't consider "It is ok if you don't like sports" to be an insult and I certainly didn't intend it that way. I apologize if that came off too hostile. It was simply meant as a recognition of the obvious, that this person did not see any value in professional sports.
I'm not saying Tokyo, London, and Paris are famous only because of sports. That would be ridiculous. I am saying that sports is a part of their cultural identity. It provides unity to those cities. It helps attract people to those cities. Those cities are also historic. This effect is more prominent in cities with less history. For example, Buffalo and Rochester are two metro areas in New York of roughly equal size. I would bet that many Americans could tell you a lot more about Buffalo than Rochester and that is likely because of Buffalo's two professional sports teams.
This is definitely true to an extent, and sports absolutely help with recognition. However, as native Rochesterian, and unashamed Bills and Sabres fan, with close ties to Buffalo, although the population numbers are similar, now, Buffalo was once a much larger city than Rochester, and still feels significantly larger. This probably accounts for some of Buffalo being a much more recognizable place than Rochester, too.
You responded with multiple points. I responded with multiple points. Then you responded with only the comment about watching/playing sports. You then edited in the point about Seattle after I already responded. Now you are acting like I am the one focusing too much on this semantics issue. This is genuinely weird behavior and I'm done with it.
I edited it in immediately after posting the comment, I tend to review what I initially wrote after replying and then extend or refactor the comment. But you're still not responding to it.
> Nobody's been thinking that Seattle sucks because they only had two of the four major US pro sports present in the region.
A part of the reason why I live where I live is good access to live sports I'm interested in. Even within the city where I currently live, I chose the area in the city based on good transit options to the stadiums or decently close geographic distances. While it wouldn't be a deal breaker to move to a place where I don't have access to those live sports, it would be a part of the considerations on my move. And then its not even just the sports but also all the other events which go on at such stadiums and venues.
I wouldn't say Seattle sucks because they didn't have an NHL team, but it absolutely would have impacted my math on moving at least some amount and would have affected where I would have decided to live in Seattle or the surrounding area. Now that they are soon to have an NHL team again, I'm more likely to find it agreeable to move there. I wouldn't even consider myself a major sports fanatic.
London has Chelsea, Arsenal, West Ham, Tottenham in the premier league. People come from all
around to watch them play. I say this as someone who cares little about football.
Of course world cities like Tokyo, London or Paris are known for all sorts of things other than sports, that's why they are world cities.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure German cities like Dortmund and Leverkusen are primarily known because of their soccer teams (at least among those who are into soccer, and that is a lot).
That's actually a decent point, though I think it's debatable whether this is actually useful.
There are probably otherwise-sad US cities with decent pro sports teams that help bring name recognition...but does that actually translate into anything productive? The data on economic benefits seems to indicate the answer is 'no'.
I probably couldn't find Green Bay on a map, yet I know the name thanks to their very famous and successful sports team. But as you say, I still have no interest in visiting.
That may be true for you, but I know people who have been there purely because it has the sports team. Otherwise there is almost no reason to visit a Wisconsin town so far off of I94, even on a road trip.
And they visit, have a couple of beers, and leave. This influx is accounting for in the analysis of "is it worth it?" and the answer is a resounding "no". Well, it's a "no" for most large, dense cities, Green Bay could be interesting because it's not in a dense city. Green Bay is also a particularly bad example for this conversation, being a non-profit community owned team and all.
London has 4X top flight football (soccer) clubs that are known the world over: Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, West Ham.
Paris has Paris St Germain, who currently own two of the most recent top international players on the world stage.
Both cities also have lots of too-tier clubs from other sports, e.g. rugby.
These cities do have plenty of other attractions beside sports though to attract tourists and investment, so without these teams the cities would likely be fine.
> Lol no, a professional sports team is of little "joint benefit to society", at least not of the kind that seriously concerns the government.
As already the old Romans knew: panem et circenses is what you need to keep your population from uprising - aka, providing them with food and entertainment.
> You may as well argue that the government should be subsidizing new Marvel movies, or Call of Duty, because those are popular forms of entertainment too.
Movies, including blockbusters such as the MCU, are already subsidized. As for games - the European Union subsidizes developers since 2014[1], Germany runs an additional program since 2019 [2].
> For a while, the Olympics were able to basically threaten their way into huge subsidies from even developed countries, but this seems to have mostly gone away now, as everyone collectively woke up from the delusion that the Olympics were a major economic boon worth investing in.
The subsidies for Olympic Games and FIFA World Cups were for a very long time mostly housing, public transport and the stadiums that were sustainably usable for many decades (just look at my home city of Munich if you want to see an example). Only after corruption took over decisionmaking and sponsors demanded special laws (e.g. in Brazil with beer [3]), liberal democracies decided to not participate in the racket, and so dictators bought their way in.
I’m aware that some movies and games are subsidized, but most people here are probably against those too, especially when it’s big budget efforts. That’s part of why I chose the examples I did — people are more likely to object to subsidies for things that are already hugely successful and profitable on their own, than, say, little indie efforts.
Right, we can all agree American Football is boring and interrupted too often. Seriously, though, if you are not into sports even slightly, why do you persist on making so many comments and statements about the popularity of sports and teams.
American Football is boring and interrupted too often
I used to be on a torrent site that released edited versions of NFL games where they cut out all breaks, interruptions and uninteresting instant replays. The games were all under an hour and actually really fun and exciting to watch.
Nah, I find it the most exciting of the popular pro sports. Most boring is baseball.
> Seriously, though, if you are not into sports even slightly, why do you persist on making so many comments and statements about the popularity of sports and teams.
Why not? It's an interesting discussion, even if I'm not into watching pro sports.
I can't imagine how boring and bereft of life cities would be if rational HN nerds ran them. Trees? Parks? Where's the return on them? We don't need them!
The trees and parks are available to everyone to enjoy though and can be used for many different things, almost surely to appeal to everyone in some way.
A sports team and a stadium have a very narrow appeal and is inaccessible to a large segment of the population either due to disinterest or lack of funds.
I get your gist here but I think it's pretty easy to make a distinction between these things. Even the most hardened Libertarian would agree that public spaces like parks are a net good.
> Lol no, a professional sports team is of little "joint benefit to society", at least not of the kind that seriously concerns the government.
Distracting and pacifying the populace with athletic spectacle is a trick governments have used for longer than history has existed. Major league sports are just the latest iteration in a long line of bread and circuses.
> Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams. They seem to suffer little for it.
There are counter examples as well. The New York Yankees? The Dallas Cowboys? Toronto Maple Leafs? Take away the sports franchises from those cities and it would definitely be a huge economic and cultural hit to those cities.
It’s all about the money. American cities make money on sports teams, so would rather have them than not. It isn’t a social benefit but an economic one consisting of tax revenue and knock on effects for businesses around the stadium. They aren’t throwing money away on a stadium, they are investing $100 million now to make $30 million more a year in tax revenue for 10 years.
But what I really want to know is who pays $200 for a sports ticket and $20 for a beer? There is money to be made hand over fist, but I just don’t understand why that is true at all. I’d rather not have these sports teams either if only for the traffic they generate on game days. But if you want to blame someone, blame the customers for this stuff, not the local government that is just giving them what they want.
Also, Tokyo is a really bad example of you are failing against prestige boondoggles. How many sky trees and Tokyo towers does the world really need?
Tokyo Skytree was privately funded and I believe Tokyo Tower was as well. Both of them serve the function of increasing sightlines for broadcasting to reduce the number of towers needed throughout the city. This serves as a public good in a city where space is at such a premium. Not to say there wasn't additional expense added into the skytree for the prestige factor, it really didn't need to be that tall.
Well I agree with your point but not the supporting argument. The thing about world cities is that they are world cities because everything can be found there, they are simply that large and diverse, and losing any one thing would not make them less important. Someplace like NYC isn't on the map because the Giants are there. Now it's also true that there are only a handful of cities that don't need to care about having a sports team (but have them anyway).
Maybe the more apt example is Green Bay, a city that would otherwise be a total unknown. Mid-tier cities like Indianapolis as well. There's a number of other cities like Liverpool that are known for the Beatles and a sports team. For those cities, you can see why the mayor might think it's worthwhile to help out the local sports team. Nonetheless, it's still likely the case that it's really a waste of money.
At least in the US the actual infrastructure has been failing for decades. Infrastructure actually pays out with a multiplier for years after the investment and upkeep. I’d like to see cities expend billions there before any burning of money on stadiums.
Yes. But a possible reason why it is relatively well received anyway is:
1) There are no new facts likely to come out any time soon & the situation is unlikely to change.
2) This is a question of public spending.
3) Joining dots, someone is being taxed to fund other people literally just entertaining themselves.
Eg, say I don't like team sports and there are some homeless people living nearby. Why should I be paying taxes for an uneconomic football stadium? The people who use the stadium can pay for it. If they can't afford it, it shouldn't be built. There are real problems in the world that are more important than people distracting themselves.
And from that perspective, downright contempt for pro-public-spending-on-stadiums seems a plausible position.
> Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams.
Not disagreeing with your overall argument, but London is the home of several Premier League clubs, with Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham having global followings.
Paris has PSG, which is infamous for spending seemingly limitless money to bring in superstars like Messi, Neymar, Mbappe and others. Their ownership by a Qatari sovereign wealth fund is the subject of constant conversation among those who follow football.
Tokyo I will grant you. They have the baseball Tokyo Giants, but I don't think they are closely followed outside of Japan.
> No. You can just...refuse to subsidize them. Seems to be working fine for Seattle, where IIRC the renovated stadium for their new NHL team was privately funded.
This also works for the Green Bay Packers (American Football). To raise money for an upgrade / expansion of their stadium, they just issued more ownership certificates, and the fans of the team bought them. GB has a unique ownership model compared to the rest of the NFL though.
> You may as well argue that the government should be subsidizing new Marvel movies, or Call of Duty, because those are popular forms of entertainment too.
The state of Rhode Island burned a huge amount of cash on by funding a loan for a video game company. That didn't pan out.
> Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams. They seem to suffer little for it.
You are kidding yourself if London and Paris are not known for sports. Baseball is big in Tokyo. Have you been to State de France? You think Wembly stadium, Arsenal, Chelsea, and Tottenham aren’t a global brands and icons?
> Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams. They seem to suffer little for it. For a while, the Olympics were able to basically threaten their way into huge subsidies from even developed countries, but this seems to have mostly gone away now
I cannot recall where I read this but isn’t there a connection between a professional sports team and reduced crime? I believe there was a study showing it decreasing when a team was formed and increasing when a city lost its team.
> Lol no, a professional sports team is of little "joint benefit to society", at least not of the kind that seriously concerns the government. You may as well argue that the government should be subsidizing new Marvel movies, or Call of Duty, because those are popular forms of entertainment too.
can't believe what i'm reading. go read some cold war history, or even pre-WW2 history.
I should've picked different cities. Well, Tokyo's probably fine, I don't think Japan's baseball league has the foreign popularity that Europe's football leagues do.
My point was supposed to be less about major world cities having famous teams and more about the impact of those teams on said cities. Okay, Tokyo doesn't have world-recognized sports teams the way London does. Does that seem to hurt it?
If you're going to make the argument "There's other benefit to the society that also need to be considered" then you also have to consider the negatives of a stadium. There's a lot of negative aspects that follow building a stadium, too.
I can't on the top of my head show any figures, but a classmate of mine that lived in the suburb with a stadium, a place everyone considered "the ghetto" because of crime rate, said it wasn't as bad as people said it to be; with the notable exception, and he was very clear about this:
when there's a football match going on in the new stadium close by, every family in the vicinity knew not to let their kids out (or go out on the night) because the city got too unsafe to walk around because of supporters/drunk hooligans trashing places and being violent. (risk of getting robbed, raped, assaulted went notably up every time there was a match that stretched in to the night)
The stadium to the locals felt like a net-negative. Bars and night life owners where happy, but to ordinary citizen it meant more crime, trashed streets, vandalized walls/shops + the immeasurable effect of the stereotype that got attached ("high concentration of immigrants = high crime rate")
I live close to a smaller stadium and recently rode past it while a game was being played. The number of police deployed there was insane, I estimate a ratio of 1 police per 10 visitors. The first thought that went through my head was that this could not possibly be worth it. Paying wages of the police alone has to absolutely dwarf ticket costs.
But I guess it's worth it when you factor in that without security, football fans might trash the place and mess other people up like you describe.
In my country those stadiums are just a money transfer schemes from public pockets via local government to local pockets. They have no problem building "temporary" stadiums while the old ones are "renovated" for hundreds of millions of dollars of tax payer's money. You cannot normally even visit the stadiums when there's no match being played. As you said, they usually need hundreds of riot police present each time because there is almost always vandalism and fighting. Those stadiums are not used for anything else. For example, I cannot ask the soccer team if I could use the pitch for say a day because I want to organize a drone racing competition. I would be laughed out of the room. As the other posters said, they just take my money and give it to some other persons who are living very luxurious. I know, Ferraris are expensive.
However, I understand that those sport events are like a safety valve on a pressure cooker. It lets those aggressive members of the community to vent so they don't realize how fucked they are in their daily lives. It something like a pacifier for those people. It is bread and circuses, and the bread is getting smaller and smaller.
That said, if the local government is spending money on (pretty much private) stadiums, then I would postulate that they have too much money and the taxes are too high.
I used to live near a stadium and can echo that. Depended on what it was used for too. If it was a concert it usually made the neighborhood fun and lively. If it was for a hockey game then the neighborhood was awful.
american top level sports teams are part of a multi-multi-billion industry.
this isn't getting together to build a library, it's a direct transfer of tax money to private companies that can or should easily afford to pay for it themselves.
Stadiums exist in the rest of the world, and multi billion corporations can still be a benefit to society. I don't agree with funding huge mega stadiums for a single team. But it's ridiculous to pretend sports teams, even big ones, can't provide a huge service for a community.
It's hard to overstate just how important big teams like say, Chelsea or Barca are for a huge chunk of not just the people who live in their home cities but also across the world. How do you quantify that in terms of cost? It will obviously never happen but let's say barca wanted to leave Barcelona, do you think the city shouldn't do anything about it because it helps billionaires?
Tons of Arts museums, especially those for contemporary/avant garde arts are usually displaying private collections and in practice only benefit a very small minority of usually rich people. Operas and orchestras too. Shouldnt we just stop funding those too then? Where do we draw the line?
> just how important big teams like say, Chelsea or Barca are for a huge chunk of not just the people who live in their home cities but also across the world.
Here "important to" is equivalent to "liked/entertained by", as a form of entertainment. The question here is what forms of entertainment should tax payers pay for and your comparison with art museums, operas and orchestras is apt.
> let's say barca wanted to leave Barcelona, do you think the city shouldn't do anything about it because it helps billionaires?
If barca were extorting the city of Barcelona by demanding they pay 10s or 100s of millions to upgrade Camp Nou, then the city should tell the team to go to hell. This exact scenario has played out in multiple cities in the US and with the IOC and city bids.
If I don’t pay the taxes to fund the stadium, men with guns will literally come to my house (this happened when I did my taxes incorrectly) to tell me to pay. I think the line should be drawn somewhere before that and everyone calls me crazy.
This is just how society works. We all work together to build things people want, you won't like everything we build, but you still contribute because you're getting plenty of stuff you do like.
IMO we probably would be better off not funding any of it. Entertainment talent would be better allocated according to ticket sales than political prestige.
> Any city or state that refuses to pay will lose out until every city or state refuses to pay.
They may lose out on the chance to fork over millions (or billions) to a bunch of already crazily wealthy team owners, and maybe that means the stadium doesn't get built, or maybe it means that team leaves and market forces are such that if its a big enough city is makes economic sense for a new team to come in an build their own stadium (maybe not as glorious, but good enough to host games and sell tickets). Those millions (or billions) not gifted to the old team owner might be then spent on improving infrastructure or making better schools and parks and things that make a city nice to live making it even better off then before.
Remember when Amazon wanted all those perks from NYC to put offices there and then everyone was like 'no effing way' and so they backed down. Amazon still opened offices in NYC because it freakin' NYC. They never needed the incentives.
> I don't see a value of having sports teams other than entertainment
At least in Europe, most teams have children organizations, and a lot of kids train. The sports provide motivation for the young kids to exercise and practice, watching high level plays is quite useful to learn tactics as well.
>how many sporting events have you been to in the last three months
It's COVID times, c'mon. Most events have no audience.
This is not generally true of big-money pro sports in the US. I'm unaware of any child leagues for the NFL (American / gridiron football), MLB (baseball), NBA (basketball), or NHL (hockey).
Pro soccer might have something, but it's also a rounding error in the American pro sports landscape.
Many US cities have children leagues for soccer, baseball, hockey, basketball, and sometimes football, in addition to the sports offerings at middle and high schools, though not affiliated with the professional leagues as far as I know. In a Pennsylvania city I worked for the recreation department which maintained soccer and baseball fields for children's leagues. The city near me now in Mississippi has soccer, baseball, and softball leagues for children. When I was in Texas, and also in Maryland, children would play ice hockey in leagues. I think it's harder for football because high schools already dominate the children league landscape, and also act as feeders for college football, but there are still some unaffiliated leagues for children around.
Kid leagues EXIST but they are not generally (or ever?) sponsored by the pro leagues. They're municipal, or private/parent funded, or whatever.
Gridiron football exists as Pop Warner or pee-wee leagues before the school systems take over in middle or high school. Little Leagues for baseball are typically shoestring operations sponsored by local businesses.
How is this relevant to the pro sports bring value through children's leagues discussion though? It appears these kids leagues exist completely independent of the professional teams, and would continue to do so even if the pro team left.
> I don't see a value of having sports teams other than entertainment
Entertainment is valuable!
Personally, I think the government spends money in a way that is foolish at best. If the money’s going to be wasted, at least spend it on something I like.
Lots of governments do subsidize the creation of entertainment media. Ever notice how a lot of US TV shows end up with a logo stating "made in Georgia"?
Believe it or not, you don’t have to extend every thought you disagree with to a nonsensical conclusion. “Oh you bake cookies in the oven because it is hot? By that logic you should bake cookies on the surface of the sun.”
The idea that the product is disconnected from the state is laughable at this point. I mean, we have military jet flyovers and gargantuan flags. But that's football--baseball, America's old pastime, relies on big families, open spaces, and too many games to be effective propaganda these days.
> You can't simply ask taxpayers to pay for your entertainment.
Of course you can ask! You can ask for any nonsensical thing you want! But, I'll grant you that it should ultimately be up to the voters to give the answer.
Also didn't Amazon get huge tax breaks to build FCs around the country?
Funding stadiums is about none of those three things.
Running a government is also about winning reelection, which means raising money, which means not pissing off the richest people in your area who also have a giant built-in loudspeaker in the form of the current stadium, team, etc.
At this point, publicly-funded stadiums largely amount to bribery. We'll let you keep your cushy elected position if you give us a few hundred million in public money and help us keep up the facade that this was for the public good.
I just wonder what the benefit really is to subsidizing billionaire's and multi-millionaire's private gladiators.
I've always felt there was just too much money (and DoD involvement) in it for "we can take your people to the limits of human capability... purely for entertainment!" to make sense. Do they sell their private advances in sports medicine to defence contractors? Are they some kind of advertisement for super soldiers? If not, what's the gimmick?
> The financials on this are settled. Sports stadiums are an awful financial investment.
Depends on what side you are. On the receiving side or on the spending side. If you're in the Stadium's management, or you're a player for the team, you're about to get rich, and you can buy your next yacht or your 7th Ferrari. Ask me how I know. This also goes if you're a construction contractor, or a local politician(s) who signed off the project.
This is the side benefit of the "pooling the money" and usually the only benefit.
If they've build the stadium with their own money; I would be more than happy for them. Also the local population would be that much richer.
> Also the only way to stop these gifts to private companies is likely with a new federal law banning them.
Or a way to punish politicians who sign contracts like this.
One of the issues that is that a mayor or whatever can be elected to a single term then indefinitely sign away the keys to the city.
Either punish the people responsible, or give governments inherent "fuck you" clauses that allows them to back out of terrible contracts or bonds without penalty. Yeah, it makes lending more expensive. But the current system has massive loopholes that are being exploited.
> Sports teams provide utility to people in the region, including people who never pay a cent for a ticket or merchandise
Even if we assume that to be true, you have to also look at the costs: providing the required transportation infrastructure, policing sports fans, cleaning up after them (including vandalism) etc. Making matters worse, the "utility" sports teams bring is limited to a few businesses (hotels, restaurants, pubs, shops selling merchandise etc.), while the costs are paid by the taxpayer, i.e. all residents.
Sports and sporting events are a net harm to me. I don't attend, the traffic costs me, and I'm taxed for it. So team owners can get bent and start buying their own stadiums.
We live in a society. The question that the government asks when deciding whether to do an intervention isn't "will this benefit spacemanmatt?" it's "will this benefit our community?" I'm sure the government does things that you like and others don't care for.
Even the 33% who strongly enjoy isn't a small minority. If a team decides to leave because the local city won't build them a stadium, it's very reasonable to think a majority of the local residents will be upset.
So you want a federal ban on all tax breaks? Government will always subsidize jobs and housing plus they will also prioritize external revenue sources like travel and tourism. Stadiums and convention centers and the like bring money into the city. Instead of taxing only city residents, you get to tax people who don't live there. Sure the owners are rich and don't need the kickbacks however part of politics is giving the public what they want. This is no different than Amazon looking for a handout for HQ2. This is no different than the (now cancelled) Foxconn nonsense in Wisconsin. Lots of existing factories have asked for massive tax breaks or they will outsource to Mexico, etc. This is all the same game.
I think we are looking at this the wrong way. I think cities should build and pay for these stadiums. However, it should come with express community benefit. During the off-season, it is a great place to do blood drives, have social service fairs, have people register to vote, have people vote (at a place that is built for high volume), run job training programs, run food drives/pantries, etc. Both the city and the players should be demanding this as part of the deal.
The problem with this is that you're effectively forcing people who hate sports stadium to pay for them, not to mention those living nearby who are going to be affected by the noise, traffic jam and pollution caused by the stadium.
Why not let the teams crowdfund and build their own stadium like any other risky venture without capital?
They're not going to do that though. Sports leagues are a cartel, supply is extremely limited. Every city wants a pro team. It's too easy to get cities to compete against each other without federal guidelines.
The federal government could help by removing the tax exemption municipal bonds enjoy should they be used for a stadium. It's not an all encompassing change that would stop all of the corporate giveaways but it would be a start.
That's what these economic studies look at - is it worth paying for the stadium in order to prop up those businesses? The answer appears to be overwhelmingly "no".
While it may be true that sports teams provide some kind of emotional or non-monetary value to a city, the question is should a government use threats of violence to collect money to pay for it? One must always remember that government, specifically local governments, pay for things with compulsorily taxation, i.e if you do not pay government sends people will guns to force you to pay.
I dont think sports teams should be treated as "critical infrastructure" and while you might be able to make the ethical case for Police, Fire, etc I am not sure how one would make an ethical case to use violence to fund a sports stadium
So not only do you ave a financial problem with stadiums, you have an ethical one as well
At the end of the day, Sports is not a proper function of government
What really upsets me about public stadiums is when the locals can't even watch the game. Take the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. That stadium is 100% publicly funded by the taxpayers.
Since 2011 the Rose Bowl game on Jan 1 has been on ESPN. So two colleges, the majority of which have been public schools, play in a public stadium and the locals can't even watch for free.
I think at the very least they need to make a law that says all events that take place in a publicly funded stadium need to be broadcast on a free local channel that reaches all of the taxpayers who paid for the stadium.
I'm not sure if it's still the case but from what I understand the NFL used to prohibit local games from being shown in the local area to encourage ticket sales.
I grew up watching the Patriots in the 80/90's when they sucked. Every game was blacked out because they didn't sellout.
It's such a short sighted policy. Every kid I grew up with was a Raiders, Dallas, SF fan because they couldn't be a Patriots fan.
What a great way to alienate millions so you can sell 60000 tickets. Every thing these leagues due is tied to an rooted in stupid television contracts that are getting more and more irrelevant.
Every local NFL game except monday night is now available for free over the air with an antenna or on Amazon for thursday games. That's probably because they're so popular and the big networks want to maximize ad money though.
> Every local NFL game except monday night is now available for free over the air with an antenna or on Amazon for thursday games
The only channels I can receive from my house are PBS and Univision. 15 years ago I could receive NBC, ABC, and FOX. FOX never converted to ATSC; NBC converted, but at laughably low power -- if you live on top of a hill and have a high-gain antenna you can pull NBC in with only occasional dropouts. I'm not sure what happened to ABC.
I don't have cable, but for those who do, it was for at least 3 years impossible to watch the local baseball team on cable, because the team's channel was part-owned by one cable company, but our town has a different cable company. Unsurprisingly they struggled to come to a licensing agreement.
> I think at the very least they need to make a law that says all events that take place in a publicly funded stadium need to be broadcast on a free local channel that reaches all of the taxpayers who paid for the stadium.
This would inevitably result in everyone seeing it for free. If you send it, we can capture it, and redistribute it.
I think you vastly overestimate people's ability to consume pirated streams.
First off, all of these events are already being broadcast on ESPN. So if people were going to steal the stream, they're already doing it.
And secondly, I know some very competent engineers who have no idea how to get pirated content, nor any desire to learn, despite being perfectly able to do so. And then there are they laypeople who not only don't want to learn but probably aren't even capable of doing it if they did learn.
They just don't want to spend any mental space on it. If they can pay to watch they will, and if they can't they won't.
It seems that public officials are more fond of projects like stadiums than voters. Last November, voters in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Denver, Colorado; and Augusta, Georgia all voted against ballot initiatives to fund stadiums that would increase their tax bills. Meanwhile, the elected officials in each of these places seemed to have been fully behind these projects.[0]
In the Buffalo Bills example from the OP article, it sounds like they're attempting to negotiate directly with the governor. Smart, I suppose, since if the other examples are any indication, the elected official will be more receptive towards giving them money than the taxpayers.
>In the Buffalo Bills example from the OP article, it sounds like they're attempting to negotiate directly with the governor. Smart, I suppose, since if the other examples are any indication, the elected official will be more receptive towards giving them money than the taxpayers.
Keep in mind that the Governor of New York[0] is from Buffalo. I'd imagine that might make a difference.
People in Buffalo aren't happy about this, but the Bills are a BIG part of this city's identity. The Bills owner (an oil billionaire, by the way) is threatening take the team to another city if the state doesn't help pay for the stadium.
When the Rams chose Inglewood as their new home, my apartment complex roared like thunder. It's like we had just won the Superbowl. There was literally fireworks exploding at my door and everyone was happy.
Few billion dollars later, construction everywhere, and the Rams are playing their first game. There are only two families remaining out of the 30 that lived here. Rent went up and everyone had to move out east, to a worst neighborhood.
Sure we have a stadium now. But the neighborhood has been completely gentrified.
do you suppose the residents were consulted in the same way they might be if ther were attempting to build in pac heights or west village or the hills?
Given how ecstatic the residents were, I'd think that such consultation would make little difference (ie. they already approve of the project).
>When the Rams chose Inglewood as their new home, my apartment complex roared like thunder. It's like we had just won the Superbowl. There was literally fireworks exploding at my door and everyone was happy.
In Germany local municipalities for example pay for renovations of churches.
The case I knew from my hometown was that the Church (as in country organization) payed one third. The congregation hat to pay one third as well and the secular municipality also had to pay one third.
In Munich the "Allianz Arena" (named after a big insurance company) for the FC Bayern was also substantially supported by the tax payer. More than one third of the estimated costs were planned to be payed by the government. As they cannot subsidize directly that was mostly the cost of the infrastructure like streets, power, water and so on. The richest socker club in Germany argued that the tax payer has to finance it, as the city would profit from the visitors.
If I remember correctly, BMW got 150 million subsidiaries (from the EU and Germany) for building a new production site near Leipzig as it was seen as helping the development of the former GDR states after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Seems like a regular thing at any scale for any organization/company with enough lobbying power and influence.
> The case I knew from my hometown was that the Church (as in country organization) payed one third. The congregation hat to pay one third as well and the secular municipality also had to pay one third.
The lack of institutional separation of church and state within Germany surprised me when I lived there. The populace isn't particularly religious on a personal level, but they tolerate a surprising amount of religious interference or intertwining with state institutions. IIRC there are church schools/daycares that are publicly funded as well, and of course the state cooperates with churches for religious taxation (yes, really -- if you're a member of one of those churches, you can't opt out short of leaving that church, they take the money directly out of your paycheck).
Which ends up funny if you migrate there. I've heard so many stories other Poles going there, declaring they are atheists so they won't pay taxes, and then being surprised when they come back only to their their local priests laughing them out of door when they want service XD
Huh, that's interesting to me. Didn't realize you had to be a member to attend services. My experience has been that churches are generally quite open to visitors.
In Sweden at least, if you leave the church you don't get to have your wedding, funeral or baptism there. If you're a member then it's all free. You can of course still attend the Sunday services, but I don't know about taking communion or other rituals.
I'm not sure if this was the case in Munich, I could be off on the details but if remember correctly the city built it for 2 clubs (Bayern and 1680) and the rented it to both clubs. Later when 1860 yielded because they couldn't pay , Bayern bought all the shares. Also both the Autobahn (Äusserer Ring) and Mittlerer Ring(North) were restructure at this time for other reasons(traffic)so cost cannot directly be added to the stadium. So yeah I think this staduim was supported by public money, but I think it really is hard to put a number behind this.
Many years ago, the San Francisco Giants were looking for a new stadium to replace the decrepit Candlestick Park. They settled on some land in the south bay on the outskirts of my town. Local town officials approved a plan that would implement a utility tax on residents that would pay a portion of the costs. However, it required the approval of the voters. In the next election, the approval vote appeared on the ballot where, to my pleasant surprise, it was massively rejected, 70% to 30%. Ultimately, the Giants built a fine, new stadium with their own funding on land provided by San Francisco. For us, it was fortunate we had the opportunity to vote on it unlike so many other cities where they're given no choice. (See Seattle, Dallas, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Glendale, New Orleans, Chicago, ...)
On the other hand, having the stadium built in SF was arguably the primary catalyst in the transformation of SOMA from an underused-warehouse district to the new tech epicenter of the world, stealing Silicon Valley's fire in a way previously thought impossible.
If the stadium had been built in the south bay, SF might today be saying, "Whew, we really dodged a bullet there", and meanwhile Twitter and Dropbox and Uber and Airbnb would all be headquartered in Santa Clara county and giving them all their employees' tax revenue.
Well we have a comparison here, right? Levi's Stadium, where the 49ers play, was built in the South Bay. I wouldn't say that Levi's Stadium sparked a major transformation in the area even after being open nearly 8 years now. Usually the opinion is that Levi's is (relatively) in the middle of nowhere.
I'm not arguing that you can plop a stadium down anywhere and be assured of an entire industry swooping in to cluster around it; I'm arguing that in some situations (particularly the transit-rich urban shells of former industrial/pier/warehouse areas) a stadium can be the catalyst that breaks through the chicken-and-egg barrier and unleashes the neighborhood's latent potential.
The area around Levi's Stadium didn't really have much latent potential waiting to be unleashed.
I never said tech companies want to be near baseball stadiums.
Rather (like in Baltimore and San Diego), the new stadium revitalized a neighborhood whose original reason for being had mostly dried up, bringing enough business to support the (re)emergence of nearby restaurants and other amenities, and those investments in the neighborhood made it an attractive place to have offices that eventually became the new primary source of support for the restaurants, condos, hotel, etc.
The stadium was what broke the neighborhood out of the chicken-and-egg quandary.
They shouldn't exist. They cost money, they don't generate the revenue to recoup that cost, they don't drive economic activity to recoup the cost. No one should pay for them- except the people who directly enjoy using them
It's best thought of as the city providing a huge subsidy to lure the team (or keep the team from leaving). In this vein it's akin to the tax credits and other kickbacks that companies like Microsoft or Ford get when they move to "lower tier" cities.
The exact nature of the transaction is different, but the net result is that it's part of the "package" that cities use to lure in a sports team in the same way they lure in businesses.
I'd never argue for my tax money being spent on such frivolous things, but if you think about this from an "up and coming" city perspective - especially in a place where professional sports are popular with the locals - you can understand why they might be willing to accept a loss leader on the hopes of some kind of nebulous "real city" cred that comes with having a team in town.
Because the sports team needs the infrastructure in order to operate.
IE, you can't build a stadium without upgrading the roads (and rail) to allow people to get there. Don't forget about parking if the stadium is going into a densely-populated area! The stadium also needs water, sewer, electricity, and maybe gas.
That being said, I suspect that a city helping with infrastructure, and the team paying for the stadium, is probably a good compromise.
I'm not opposed to this. Robert Kraft financed Gillette Stadium privately and the state/city contributed to fund infrastructure upgrades. So as an example...
While Gillette Stadium accepted $72 million in public funding for construction, or 17 percent of the project’s total cost, Heinz Field, the Steelers’ home, cost taxpayers $171.6 million, or 61 percent of the project’s total cost.
...the problem lies in most instances the teams blackmail local government into excessive funding for stadium only project. They are not asking to just have roads, sewers and other infra covered by the tax payers.
Another things about Gillete is they built a multi-use commercial park around the stadium to actually drive more of that revenue and growth these deals typically promise but don't deliver.
NFL teams demanding things is pretty much what's entirely soured me on professional sports. I grew up near St. Louis and the city has been screwed over not once (Rams) but twice (football Cardinals) in my lifetime by NFL teams.
They enrich the owners and drain the locals. I lived in downtown St. Louis when the Cards were in the World Series (2011) and the benefit to local restaurants + bars was minimal. There'd be a flood of traffic to get to the stadium, and another flood out - very little spillover to local bars and restaurants around the stadium. (Not none, but not the rosy picture painted when they talk about driving business to local establishments, either.)
Did you see the NFL's settlement with the Rams over that move? It was something like $1 billion. You may have been screwed with the football Cardinals but I think St. Louis got a nice return on investment from that settlement with the Rams.
Isn't that basically what they built in Vegas? The MSG Sphere. I've been building holographic performance tools for over 10 years and no one really knows who the fuck I am but I intend to be the first qualified act to rock that bitch till the wheels fall off. You're more than welcome to meet me there and we can do a battle of the bands style thing but it's also capture the flag for some weird as distributed systems.
I've got analog bass that'll make you cry and enough compute power to model some pretty weird shit. I'm not sure if I'm a world class hacker, but I think the venue should be looking more at folks who win demoscene compos than top 40 acts. Maybe get top 40 acts to work with demoscene cats.
I'm also not as good as those folks but I'm fine with tipping my hand here and see if anyone else is thinking the same thing. I've got a plan and the tools! Lets go.
And let one company control it? Even a company right down the street?
No, you need a physical space.
This is why it is so important to have public funding for the Hackerdome. We need a place where two teams of hackers can compete to see who is the best, and who should go down in shame.
And we can do it all under standardized conditions.
This is too important to leave to the private market. Vote YES now!
I agree, make it stop. It's insane. Sacramento CA seems like its still reeling from building the Kings basketball stadium and its effectively made an entire district of town inaccessible and unaffordable for any of the small businesses that make this town vibrant. Minor league sports cost enough to support and teams support local pride and healthier fan followings imho.
Ive been dying for covid to be over forever so I can start going to triple A baseball games. Id rather watch semi-normal humans play than a bunch of millionaires.
I'm not a libertarian, far from it, but as someone who doesn't give the first #### about watching sports, this really does seem to me to be an area that should be left to market forces. These sports teams are businesses, they have customers, massive income streams etc. If they can't afford the facilities they need, then they need to restructure the business. The taxpayer should not be on the hook, as it's not a municipal service, it's just entertainment for a subset of the population.
I find it weird this happens in the US, where there is such an emphasis on not providing things other countries may see as a state function (healthcare, public transport...). It's not just the US of course, but it seems to be most apparent there.
I'm probably a smidge more pro sports than you. I don't go to many games (other than if my child is playing), but I do go to some.
But like, cities do all sorts of things that aren't economically sound. Who am I to say what they should do? If the taxpayers/voters/etc want to spend their money on a stadium, that's fine, as long as they know it's unlikely to make economic sense. Large stadiums are a prestige project, and those often don't make a lot of economic sense (and sometimes don't meet any of their other goals, either).
A voter and a taxpayer?
I mean, sure, like everything (hopefully) it's subject to democratic forces and what the local people want. But there's endless debate over what the state should and shouldn't get involved in. I and my vote, (not that I am eligible right now, as a recent migrant) think this falls on the "shouldn't" side, where community facilities, public transport etc fall more on the "should" side.
> as long as they know it's unlikely to make economic sense
I guess that's the thing - is it made abundantly clear that these things are likely to be a net negative? That those of us not into sports are going to be footing the bill equally and not benefiting from and side-effects? Perhaps it should be more so.
Provide infra for amateur sports teams, youth and adult?
I wish this was demanded more when cities pay for stadiums. I mean the rink where our pro hockey team plays is used all the time by local youth hockey and figure skating teams. The stadium where our pro football team plays is basically always empty outside of those few hours a few times a year when there is an actual game.
I mean, I'm not sure how much of those are within the bounds of city council.
Around here, we've got a parks district for sport infrastructure. And a county transit authority for transport. Health care would be probably through the county health department. And the schools are through the school board.
So, the city couldn't do any of those things even if it wanted to. Of course, my city also is way too small for a pro sports arena, which is part of why I selected to live here.
Looks more like they are less good at hiding it or don't need to. In the town's around here the cities usually bail out the sport teams after they go bankrupt (and thus don't) or put the stadiums into massive infrastructure plans so it gets murky how much was spent on it with public funds. Fortunately the trend seems to go towards letting the football (original, not the US version) clubs drown in their own mess more and more but it's far from over.
It's quite different. Outside of the US, football ( the original, not US version) is often a community thing, and clubs are bound to their localities. They won't just move to a more profitable location, they're a part of the community. In some countries stadiums are often municipal ( even in Italy, whose top flight is a top 5 one), so the city gets revenue directly.
Also it isn't even in the same ballpark between bailing out a club that's in debt and getting the club in return, and building new a stadium for a billion or more USD, and getting hope in return.
While I understand the community idea, it's still a small minority what you are talking about (at least here, I can't speak for elsewhere like Italy). For the revenue part: most revenue is generated by club sponsoring and not ticket sales. There are a few stadiums which can break even due to renting it out to whomever wants it, againt the will of the clubs from what I precieve.
Then again you might be correct it is a common net positive, but I haven't seen any studies comparing it to the cost of not having one and/or provinding other means of entertainment so it might actually be offset if the population "using" it, directly or indirectly, is large enough.
Panem et circences is still a thing.
Note since bailing out is not actually a good term to describe it: with bailing out the city (almost) never gets the club. It al kinds of messy but generally it's a rent free loan or some other cost negative solution like buying the stadium but renting it out for free... In my opinion sinking money into a bottomless pit is the same if done after or before the fact.
For what it's worth, both association football (from whence, 'assoc' -> 'soccer') and gridiron football (which American and Canadian football are variants of) emerged at about the same time, during the mid-19th century. It would incorrect to refer to soccer as the 'original' for this reason, although they, along with a few other sports such as rugby and Australian football, descend from games that were played in this period in which the rules were still not yet set in stone.
Stadiums in the US are often technically owned by the government. This is a dodge to get them out of paying property taxes on a billion dollar (or now multi-billion dollar) facility. The government then rents the stadium back to the team for a token fee. It also transfers certain liabilities to the government, making operations less expensive for the sports team.
There are not just spare parcels floating around zoned for stadiums (or hospitals, or university campuses, or whatever). Creating one of these things is always an act of government.
That’s not to say the government should also have to pay, but the idea of sports teams acting like any other consumer of commercial real estate is clearly off.
Sure, and my point was much more about funding than it was about land use. Yes, any project of that size is going to require not just a location, but infrastructure, transport etc etc. So perhaps you're right and it can never be a purely commercial project.
To my mind the sports team would also have to pay for the infrastructure improvements etc and knock-on costs too. But then I really have little time for professional sports!
Their counterpoint would be: why should they invest 100% of the capital in a stadium that bringing tens of thousands of middle
class credit card holders to the city’s commercial district when — after you subtract the money spent at Mel’s Bar over the road — they only take 95% of the revenue?
The real issue is touched on by the article. No mayor or town council member wants to go down as the person who "lost the team". Even if losing that team is an economic boon to the city, it's incredibly unpopular. Many things good for society are unpopular with society.
We’re more susceptible to the narrative in which these stadiums used to get funding (now days more so is my meaning). Goes something like this:
- You have poor shitty neighborhoods
- Subsidize building of a stadium in said shithole, and watch the dollars come in.
- You’ll have increased commerce and development of surrounding area with ample employment for said shitty neighborhood residents.
We don’t need recent history to post mortem this, they figured out it actually doesn’t improve the region much a long time ago.
———
The only thing that reasonably works is gentrification, but, well, you know … that’s racist. How do you solve it? I don’t know, white people seem to have the money. We have to start much higher up to root cause analyze this, and while I’m annoyed by wokeness, root causing this kind of more or less leads us to ‘why the fuck are there so many white people with money’?.
Anyways, stadiums. It’s just a bug way down the ladder.
Have fun going to Yankee Stadium in the middle of the fucking South Bronx. Utopian shit never works.
I just don’t think that’s realistic. We have all this commotion over dissolving student debt, but amongst minorities, they are saddled with all kinds of other debts.
Dissolve that. Give credit score amnesty. Those house loans will be flying off the shelves if we ever did that.
But nah, let’s focus on the guys that majored in Trombone or Classics at a private school for 25k a year.
It’s technically cheaper for tax payers since credit defaults are usually sold to collections for pennies on the dollar. That seems way more affordable, and gives a proper tabula rasa (versus a 1000 stimulus check). We’ll just subsidize the collections payments which usually settle for way less anyway, and just free people up. We should technically do the same for student debt. Have these dumbass schools send the debt to collections, and we’ll pay the stupid 10 cents on the dollar. Fuck off and never over charge again. Why would we actually pay off the full ridiculous amount?
We (Hungary) are spending huge amounts of public money on building stadiums everywhere (dozens and dozens of them). On the linked picture you can see a large-ish stadium built in a small town with a population of 2000 people. The marked place is the house of our prime minister :D He likes soccer.
Plenty of mention of different sports, but the post and references cited seem to focus on examples from the NFL. So I suggest the title should be Cities shouldn’t pay for new NFL stadiums. The NFL is over the top from an opulence perspective and isn’t international, so I don’t think it should be used as a baseline for anything.
I am interested to know the actual net effect of FIFA World Cup 2026 for example, but the post doesn’t seem to focus much on basketball, hockey, soccer, or baseball.
One is the problem that governments make investments, and private firms are the primary beneficiaries. This exists broadly. In some instances, it feels fine. Governments are supposed to make investments that benefit the economy. Roads, ports, fiber, etc.
This gets sticky when it's a select group, monopoly or cabal that gets most of the benefit. Many national or regional postal systems currently have this dilemma. Postal systems need major public investment to keep up with modern e-commerce. AMZN & BABA, the world richest firms, are the main beneficiaries.
The point at which people seem to stop and challenge is often when things get explicit. Sports stadiums are that. Team owners make explicit demands, or threaten local polities. That gets people upset.
Imo, the only way to deal with these is returning "hardball" tactics. Make hard demands, like control of key assets (eg the team's brand/IP) in return for investments. Threaten financial ruin of owners' investments back. Legislate away contractual lock-ins.
No one likes to be strongarmed. That's why people are so infuriated by "give us money or we take your team."
What cities need to invest in is a large exclusive trough where an elite can come to squeal and gobble their slops. Call it the "Pork Barrel Dome" and charge regular people to come and watch the rich satisfy themselves. Have publicly run gambling rings to make book on which participant will inhale the most in a limited amount of time just to keep things "interesting".
I find it baffling how much is spent on NFL stadiums for just 8 home games a year. That's just over 1 game per day for a week every year. And the stadiums take up prime real estate. Also, some teams are forced to play out of the country for one of their games and lose a home game.
They're currently hosting the Houston Rodeo and have pretty big concerts every night for the next few days after already having events every night for the few days before. There's literally a massive rodeo going on on the grounds around it and in it. Then there's a large auto auction, then a lot of other shows going on. There's 21 days of events going on in the next 46 days, meaning something is going on in that stadium ~46% of the time in the next month and a half.
Take a look at how full the calendar is for American Airlines Center, the stadium where the Dallas Stars (NHL) and Dallas Mavericks (NBA) play.
As a european football fan it is easy to forget how few games there is in regular season NFL. At the same time NHL, MLB and NBA have a crazy amount of games in a season. I just assumed the NFL had a similar-ish amount of games but that few games a season sound like a waste. Especially since franchises can just move away the stadiums don’t have a feeling of ”home”.
It's exceedingly rare for an NFL stadium to be used exclusively for NFL games. If you look at the schedule for e.g. the Buccaneers stadium[1] in Tampa - which the city owns and leases to the team - you'll see that it regularly hosts concerts, monster truck shows, college football games, etc.
I know my local NFL stadium sees plenty of use outside of football season. Probably around 50 or so events a year even though no one wants to be outside 4 months of the year.
It’s also like the first topic covered in Urban Studies 101 for like 20 years. Weirdly, most of America needs to just take a basic Urban Studies course to fix half our culture issues.
I remember a quote from an economist on hearing about a stadium project (or racetrack, or casino, for that matter -- I think it was either Baltimore or Atlantic City) --
"If the economic benefits of the proposed development turn out to be as the mayor suggests, he would be the first mayor in the history of such projects to be correctly predict the effects."
The beneficiaries of these projects never end up being who the backers say they will be. And the beneficiaries who they actually are designed for are never the ones being touted.
If economic benefit for the city were the motivation, let the developers put up their money to pay the difference if the economic benefits don't turn out to be as they projected.
I'm a technical student at a regional-sized state college. A significant amount of money is charged to each student to pay for athletic scholarships, fund the sports teams to travel, spend time in exotic locations, and train in good facilities with paid coaches and physical trainers. I have a hard time squaring this expense as necessary for my education. Especially for a state school.
I've been an athlete and enjoyed being on travel teams, and those experiences helped me develop as a person, so I'm not saying sports arent useful training, but I have a hard time justifying the whole student body paying for those kids to run around.
Cities should not pay for many, many things. Sports are not some special irrational thing that humans do to the exclusion of all the other random things public entities fund.
Cities need to invest in community sport and facilities for community sport. Yes there is also an infrastructure or building aspect to this but not giant stadiums.
That is families, kids, tens playing (add sport of your choice).
Cities should support those clubs that do this kind of work which is often shouldered by volunteers.
Once it gets to stadiums that are used by clubs with payed players. It is a business and the business should pay for it.
> Teams will often threaten to leave their respective city trying to leverage new and expensive facilities in other places from their current cities.
We've seen this happen time and time again.
I wonder how viable government regulation around this would be, to effectively ban the concept of moving a sports club by making the barriers to moving so high that no one would ever want to do it unless the team was in genuine financial distress.
There have occasionally been (completely wishful) proposals in the U.S. to have a team's IP (the name, logos, record, etc, basically the whole team's 'identity') belong to a city or a public corporation representing the region they draw their fanbase from.
Not a sports fan, but it's strange how much local sports contribute to local culture in large western cities, seems to bring abundant entertainment to sports fans in my life that it's better to bias towards having stadiums than not. Having lived in multiple large Asian cities without developed major sport franchises, I do feel like life is different without it.
The bizarre thing about the US is that as far as indviduals are concerned "socialism" and government assistance are dirty words, but not when it relates for corporations.
So benefits that are absolutely standard like universal healthcare, employment protection, minimum holidays, parental leave etc. are very limited.
Meanwhile the government builds stadiums for commercial sports businesses, runs airports and harbours so that commercial airlines and shipping lines can use them, implements strict protectionist legislation even in industries which operate fine in other 1st world countries without such legislation, and local authorities offer massive tax breaks to try and attract companies.
Stadiums are a in the end just a marketing instrument for 2nd and 3rd tier cities to brand themselves and stay in the national or international news.
The alternative is spending money on image campaigns and other fluff marketing. Once you realize that every time a city is (positively) mentionen in news, it is "earned media", the whole calcuation shifts a lot around.
brand themselves and stay in the national or international news.
But to what end? Thanks to sport I know of lots of US cities like Green Bay, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Kansas City etc. that I might not otherwise ever have given any thought. But what is the next step after that? I'm certainly not going to holiday there because they have a pretty good (or used to be good) team I've heard of.
In the end once cities cover the basics have not that many opportunities to stay in the news with a somewhat positive impression.
The name recognition is not going to be the core decision point for someone to spend holidays there or relocate there.
But if you are relocating to a city and have three to choose from where non stands out in particular you might assume that the one with the stronger sports team is more vibrant or dynamic than the others.
It’s up to the people of a city how much they want to spend and on what.
Sports happen to be very popular with a large group of people who aren’t interested in the rest of what a city spends on. You can have those people watching sports or you can have them complaining about the rest of the spending because they didn’t get their piece of the pie.
On the most recent election day in America, voters precisely decided not to pay for stadiums.
> Voters in Denver, Colorado, approved ballot measures on Tuesday authorizing the city government to issue bonds to spruce up parks, renovate homeless shelters, and upgrade public transit.
> They rejected just one portion of Mayor Michael Hancock's five-part, $450 million bond proposal: the one that would have directed $190 million of that borrowing toward the construction of a new multi-use stadium near the city's hip River North neighborhood. While the first four parts of Hancock's proposal won support from at least 60 percent of voters, 58 percent rejected the stadium subsidy, according to The Denver Post's election tracker.
> ...
> Meanwhile, 65 percent of voters in Augusta, Georgia, rejected a similar bond issue that would have seen the city take on debt to fund the construction of a $235 million stadium for a yet-to-be-determined future occupant (possibly a minor league hockey team). The cost of the new stadium was projected to add about $100 to the average property tax bill in the city—all to create "a handful of new permanent jobs," according to The Augusta Chronicle. Who wouldn't vote for that?
> But voters in Augusta might not have the final say on whether their wallets get raided for the project. Brad Usry, vice chairman of the county authority that would run the new stadium, told the Chronicle last month that a "no" vote would "only delay the project so the authority can find other means of funding it."
> So voters were asked to give their approval for the stadium project, but rejecting it apparently doesn't count? Cool democracy you have there, Augusta.
How many cities allow their citizens to vote on these subsidies for stadiums? If they're so popular, they should easily pass. Problem is, when it comes time to negotiate the deal, both the owner of the team and the city politicians are sitting on the same side of the table and there's no one sitting on the other side representing the people. Sometimes the mayor/county commissioner gets voted out in the next election but by then, the local government is locked into a deal that lasts 30+ years. It was never up to the people of the city.
Seems like the issue is the fig leaf of stadium financing being about jobs and new small businesses and all that good stuff.
It would be nice if there was more transparency ("Buffalo will pay for the stadium because we know you live the Bills one million times more than all your elected officials put together") or if cities banded together against paying these bribes but that's life.
I did really like the ideas for federal level reforms, but one component the author missed is that a stadium has workforce with a fairly unique composition. If you replace it with an office park or museum will they need dozens of hot dog and beer vendors, a massive athletic training staff, a landscaping staff, outdoor lighting technicians, etc? These are working class or middle class people who will be scrambling for a limited job pool. Getting rid of 100 janitors and adding 100 web developers has a cost to it, because it will require 200 people to either move or retrain.
Somewhat agreed. A city can want lots of things few people use. I'm sure the plenty of people don't take advantage of Central Park or Golden Gate Park yet they are paid for by the government.
Further, stadiums are often used for more than just sports. They're a venue for concerts, fireworks shows, and many other things.
Central Park and Golden Gate Park are open to the public every day and don't require you to pay to get in. If I could walk in to a taxpayer funded stadium to play a game with some friends for free or nearly free (as I can with small neighborhood sports fields) then maybe I'd have a slightly different opinion of them.
Why doesn't the city buy lavish buildings for other wildly profitable businesses? Professional sports don't need our tax money, they merely want it. If sports enthusiasts want to contribute money to the football stadium fund, they are free to.
Because if a sports stadium was, you know, profitable then there would be businesses tripping over themselves to build them with private money. Instead, it becomes a big lobbying game where a bunch of bigshots all skim money from everybody.
The Chargers were a great bad example with idiocies like not televising a game locally if the tickets didn't sell out and the city having to backstop some number of tickets. San Diego finally managed to kick them to the curb and good riddance.
I no fan of Los Angeles, but I'm sorry that Dean Spanos and his cronies infested LA after we kicked him out.
Because it's a poor use of public funds to directly subsidize private profit of one particular company/team.
Major sports organizations and franchises are rich enough to handle their own expenses, they don't actually need public help. They'll take it if they can get it, of course, because why wouldn't they? It's free money! But we're under no obligation to give it to them.
the latest episode of the economist "checks and balance" US politics podcast touches on what cities in decline can do to try to turn things around:
> Since the founding of America, its people and its economy have moved steadily westwards and, later, southwards. Recently, people and businesses have flocked to Sun Belt states, while cities in America’s old industrial heartland are struggling. What makes American cities boom and bust?
they give the example of Pittsburgh investing in "Eds and Meds" -- education and healthcare -- to regrow the city's economy after the decline of steel manufacturing
I completely agree with this statement, but the core behind this argument is about the essence of taxation as a whole: nobody should be forced, with violence or threat of violence, to pay for something he doesn't want to consume.
It doesn't matter if it's a stadium, a hospital or a subway.
In Cincinnati we got conned into this. We now have poor people paying for a stadium. People are still bitching about the fiasco 20 years later and a lot of people actively avoid living in the county so they do not have to pay the "stadium" taxes. It is a really bad deal.
This is happening in Northern Virginia right now. The state is going to create a control structure for a private city, provide unlimited debt funding, and lose significant tax revenues for decades to come. And for what? Bad football and more temporary food service/retail jobs?
I would guess, as I said, that towns simply compete for the business by making them an attractive offer. For example even when selling the ground for the warehouse towns could give Amazon a cheaper price while hoping for more future income in taxes. Presumably that would apply to other companies as well.
The bit about "paying to destroy mainstreet" is of course nonsense. Amazon's business would exist either way.
My sense is that a large fraction of the population has a deep emotional need for "manly men" sports teams which they can easily identify with (whether local professional teams, teams at the college they attended, or maybe teams local to where they grew up). Greedy team owners know this, and also that a few phrases like "economic benefits" and "or we'll move to $new_city" serve both to sway the gullible (who buy the economic arguments) and to push the insecurity / fear buttons in the people with emotional needs for a local team.
If ~nobody is mentioning, let alone discussing, the actual priorities of a large fraction of the voters, then rational public policy outcomes may prove rather rare.
No reason it shouldn't...and say so right up front - "Our fine citizens wanted a new playground in this neighborhood, so the City spending $playground_cost and building one for them!".
The combination of brazen lies about costs, and deep "nobody mentions that" motivations are the big problem with the stadiums.
I can see the city paying for the stadium so that they can use it for a variety of events and purposes. They need to start charging the large revenue generating sports more.
The stadiums are rarely profitable. If there is no public funding, then stadiums would exist only in very few places. As far as I know majority of the stadiums in Europe are also own by municipalities.
Also are cities really investing in something better?
Oakland lost both Raiders and Warriors. It seems like Oakland spend that money on pension benefits of city employees. And they started laying off teachers. If you ask me: if you cannot spend money on schools (or anything useful) build a stadium.
But this is politic: stadiums are easy target but do know that city will probably mismanage the money any way.
Sure - but as a taxpayer of Oakland what one can do? I was with them when they said “no money for Raiders”. They mismanaged the money anyhow and one cannot elect anybody else because they need to be democrats.
I’m just explaining how dynamic goes here: the cities will be still be funding stadiums because electorate will not trust them when they say “we will spend on x”.
Seattle still doesn't have a basketball team because they refused to pay for a stadium. That's exactly why teams are able to extort cities over stadium funding.
Cities paying to attract sports teams is simply democracy. A lot of people like watching sports and having local professional sports teams. But the number of professional sports teams is limited. Not every city can be an NFL city, and many people are proud that their city is an NFL city. In a city like Los Angeles or San Francisco it might not be so important, but in a smaller city, for a Cincinnati politician to take an anti-Bengals stance would be political suicide. It is never primarily about the "jobs created".
Ridiculous. Refusing to pay out public money for private profit isn't "anti-" anything. If Disney demands you give them a billion dollars to make a movie about your city, refusing that demand doesn't make you "anti-Disney." It just makes you sane.
I don't think that that is true anymore. It used to be, but sports is competing for eyeballs with all the other entertainment out there.
Yeah, sure, sports had a large audience when people did not have games, instant messaging, social sites, Netflix, AmzPrime, Hulu and more in the palm of their hands.
Basically, sports is in competition with all the other forms of entertainment. I'm looking around my circle of friends, family and acquaintances, and the only ones who are interested are:
1. Those with children on some team in school, and then they're only interested in that particular sport, and only when their children's teams are playing.
2. The older folk who were supporters all their lives, and will continue being supporters.
3. The people betting on matches.
I know of only one family that actually is into sport, and regularly follows all the soccer and/or cricket matches that come around. The others have cancelled their sat-tv and just use netflix, amz-prime and the internet for entertainment.
> I don't think that that is true anymore. It used to be, but sports is competing for eyeballs with all the other entertainment out there.
In 2021, 95 of the top 100 most-watched TV broadcasts in the US were sports. More people watched the Raiders play on Thanksgiving than watched the presidential inauguration.
But we aren't comparing presidential inaugurations with the superbowl, we're comparing stadium visitors with the draw of netflix, social media, games, etc.
Sure, the final event of a season always has a large number of viewers (1 in 3, according to your stats), just like any other special event, but
a) We aren't looking at only the outliers (I would guess an average soapie episode has more viewers than an average match)
b) A single sporting event that has $FOO million viewers does not mean that $FOO million people are following the sport. My experience is that there are large media campaigns to get people to tune in for the large events. They tune out again once the event is over.
> I would guess an average soapie episode has more viewers than an average match
Very few of these are special events; most of the games on this list are roughly the equivalent of, like, an Everton-Burnley match on a random Tuesday in February. Imagine if that match drew more viewers than the Eurovision final - that is the level of dominance that sports have over the American entertainment landscape.
There’s a reason Amazon is paying the NFL $1 billion per year for a single weekly game package.
> we're comparing stadium visitors with the draw of netflix, social media, games, etc.
Even on this basis, it’s clear that sports are still thriving. Once this NBA season is over, total attendance for the 2021-22 MLB, NFL, and NBA seasons is likely going to be ~90 million. Obviously many people go more than once, but still: 90 million people through the gates in one year, and that doesn’t even include the NHL or college football.
It’s also worth pointing out that two of the top five and three of the top 15 best-selling video games in 2021 were sports games licensed by those three leagues.
The NFL is undoubtedly the most popular entertainment in the US. Honestly it might even be more popular than it was pre internet giving us unlimited entertainment options if you look at the value of their tv deals. Having 95 of the 100 most viewed events really shows the dominance of sports. Almost all of those 95 events are not the finals, most aren't even playoffs. They're just regular games that beat every other category in terms of popularity.
One need only look in my own backyard and the ongoing struggle between the Pegula's (https://www.psentertainment.com/) billions and the post Ralph Wilson era in ownership of the NFL team in Buffalo, NY - the Buffalo Bills. They are located out in Orchard Park ("OP" in these parts), NY and before Wilson died, he negotiated a long term non-move clause in the Bills from OP to keep his legacy intact for as long as he could.
Fast forward 10 (ish) years to 2022 the floated value of a new stadium is looking to be between 1.4-1.8B to mirror the other stadiums build in the state in NYC (can't off hand remember which ones are new). The average is about 1.6% paid out of local / state taxes, while it seems (perception) that the state is willing to pay an unprecedented 25-50% of the new stadium from local coffers.
I'm not sure if anyone has looked around, but in the last two years I think the population dropped by 300K in NYS and Upstate (everything East of Rochester) and Western New York (everything Rochester and west) has been dying slowly.
I think Buffalo has seen a mediocre rise back to glory under the "Billion to Buffalo" under Cuomo's governance, but tons of that left the state with Tesla's Riverbend plant and honestly real failure to deliver on its promises. The rest went to our startup and industrial technology companies with sprinkles into our medical institutions (our real meat and po-tats around these parts).
The problem is - we have no money. Taxes are high (without blaming a party, but a culture problem in NYS) and social programs are abused. Billions in the pocket of the wealthy need to be spent and the local pockets need to contribute to their profits vs. being blead for them.
Really hate living in a state that just hates business like we do here, but .. this what you get. Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo will all eventually fail on some level because of the continued regime's need to keep the status going.
Someone really needs to speak truth to power, or its going to crush our country economically as capitalism is more oligarch feeling than Representative Democracy.
Light grey text on a white background? I was interested in the content but cannot force my eyes to endure the strain of reading the article due to its inaccessibility.
This is one of those issues where I have a clear logical stance but an opposite emotional stance. I've tried so hard to be against /any/ kind of stadium subsidies. At the college level, at the national level, at the high school level. I've tried. Honestly, I don't watch sports, I don't care about sports, I wish teachers got paid more, I wish students had more programs, I wish we had more money for infrastructure and so on and so on. I've tried with every fiber of my being to be against these stadiums being subsidized. And I read some of their citations, like this one: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sports-jobs-taxes-are-new...
And I couldn't agree more with a lot of it. I think the "What Can Be Done?" section is really good. I think there should be federal incentives for forcing cities to work together on their contracts with these sports teams to make their deals more fair. I don't know how that would work?
But, for example, one of the downsides listed in the article is that most of the jobs created by the stadium are low-paying jobs. Not just the construction work itself but maintaining the stadium. Janitors, cashiers, mechanics, etc. But that's not an issue /with the stadium itself/ that's an issue with ALL of the country itself. It's not like the stadium not being there is going to give janitors higher paying jobs. Whether they work low-paying and hardly livable jobs for the stadium or for a contractor that has deals with Google doesn't make a difference. It's al ow paying job that can't sustain a living wage. That's not on the stadium. That's not on the city making a deal with NFL. That's an irrelevant point. If you want to make those 10,000 stadium jobs better for the community, don't choose to NOT put a stadium there. Choose to increase the quality of life for the residents of the city.
But, I think what taints my perspective more than anything is being from Chicago and having lived in Texas. I know of people that are proud of being Chicagoans, that love going to Wrigleyville, that love being from the North/South based on what team they follow. I know of people in Texas that are proud of their town because of how good their football team was. I know of people who went to A&M because of its sports teams. I know of people who travel there specifically to watch a game. I've seen content from their Fightin' Texas Aggie Band that's made me feel inspired.
I think part of it IS economic and I know I'm biased towards success stories. But I do think there absolutely is an emotional component to it. And if you think a government shouldn't be making emotional decisions, that's totally fine. I don't disagree with you at all. I wish I could agree with you harder, actually. I just can't put myself completely in the camp of "cities should not pay for new stadiums."
