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
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.