Each year, a different city hosts the Super Bowl, attracting people from all over the country and beyond to attend the most-watched football game of the year.
This year, the game will take place at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida. It marks the first time in NFL history that the Super Bowl will take place at the home stadium for one of the teams. A game of this magnitude taking place at Raymond James Stadium, however, is another unfortunate reminder for the public: Taxpayers have been getting screwed on NFL stadium deals for years.
Built in 1998, Raymond James Stadium cost $168.5 million to construct, and taxpayers financed it. The funding came from a 30-year, half-cent sales tax approved by Hillsborough County, Florida, voters in 1996. The purpose of the tax was to fund local infrastructure, education, and law enforcement, as well as build the new stadium. Just imagine how much nicer the roads could look in the area if that $168.5 million went to fixing potholes instead of funding corporate welfare.
It’s unfortunate that the community not only funded the construction of a football stadium but also that it did so with such a regressive tax. While people in the working class may help pay for the stadium every time they buy school supplies, candy, batteries, sporting goods, or whatever else, they don’t share in the benefits of this stadium.
Stadiums don’t boost economic growth. In fact, they take money that people would spend at other businesses in the community and give it to businesses owned by millionaires and billionaires. They’re a rip-off, and there is a myriad of studies and articles confirming that. A 2017 poll of economists by the University of Chicago found that only 2% of economists disagreed with this statement: “Providing state and local subsidies to build stadiums for professional sports teams is likely to cost the relevant taxpayers more than any local economic benefits that are generated.”
Stadiums fail to deliver on the number of jobs promised, and the jobs they create tend to be low-paying and part-time positions. In a typical year, there could be as few as 10 games at an NFL stadium: two in the preseason and eight in the regular season. Sure, there are concerts and special events at other times, but most stadiums sit vacant for the majority of the year.
The coronavirus pandemic has made the situation even worse. In 2020, there was no Minor League Baseball season. As a result, many taxpayer-funded stadiums were vacant nearly all summer. There was also no attendance at most Major League Baseball games, although limited attendance was allowed at some postseason games. And the NFL teams that had people in attendance this season were limited to about 20% to 25% capacity. Since the Super Bowl will take place in Florida, it can have 22,000 fans in attendance. That’s better for the community than zero, but limited attendance this season has made stadiums even less worthwhile than anticipated. Surely when voters approved that sales-tax hike they weren’t thinking that there could be NFL games with fewer than 25,000 attendees.
Tampa isn’t unique in having a taxpayer-funded NFL stadium, either. From 1997 to 2017, taxpayers spent nearly $7 billion building, maintaining, and repairing NFL stadiums alone, according to ESPN. That happened despite massive profits for the league. As of 2015, the average new stadium received $238 million in public funding despite teams and owners having enough money to pay for them. Following the 2019 NFL season, 32 NFL teams split about $9.5 billion in revenue sharing — about $296 million per team, according to Sportico.
If anything positive comes out of this pandemic, then hopefully it’s that people realize these stadiums are bad investments. If the owners of professional sports teams want stadiums, they can pay for them by themselves. Taxpayers usually don’t fund the venues of other businesses, so why should these be any different?
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with the Boston Globe, USA Today, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
