Agreed. My thing is, if a sports stadium is gonna be built with public money, it should belong to the public and the team owner should have to pay rent and/or revenue share. Otherwise, why should a billionaire (or group of wealthy people) get a taxpayer-funded stadium for them to print money with?
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 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.
Well, it's a pretty simple calculus for the owners.
You're going to get people to pay for my stadium, Mr. Politician, or else losing this thing that millions of people in this city love is going to be, fairly or unfairly, blamed on you.
It's of course gross and hilariously stupid given that every professional sports team owner is a billionaire, but most of those marrow suckers didn't become billionaires by not leveraging incentives when the benefit for doing so is obvious.
I think it's more that the owners realize without this rule cities will demand some kind of civic ownership of teams before they'll be willing to shell out tax money for stadiums and such.
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.
This reminds me of the asshole billionaires who shake down cities to get a free stadium for their stupid football, basketball or whatever team and have a bunch of regular people pay for their toy.
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?
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.
What is the need for nationalization before a city should foot the bill? This isn't to say that cities should pay for a stadium, but there are definitely dynasty franchises that are guaranteed to generate income for many years. Would I build a stadium for the Rams? Not likely. Would I build a stadium for the Patriots? Immediately.
Or you could make teams pay for their own stadiums. They take the revenue so why shouldn't they? The equivalent is Amazon requiring local government to provide them with automated warehouses for them to relocate to (or remain in) that locality.
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?
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.
That, or they also know that they can offload the cost onto the cities whose governments are willing to pay for it, instead. In such cases, why would the teams spend the money themselves?
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