Hosting a Super Bowl won’t boost your city’s economy

Although thousands of football fans will travel to the San Francisco Bay Area this weekend for Super Bowl 50, the city’s economy won’t see much of a boost, according to sports economists.

Like most cities that host the Super Bowl, the San Francisco metropolitan area is already a huge economy. The city’s GDP is about $412 billion, as of 2014. To boost the economy by just 1 percent, the Super Bowl would have to have a $4 billion effect on the economy.

PwC analysis says Super Bowl 50 will only have a $220 million economic benefit, CBS reports. If that’s true, the Super Bowl will boost San Francisco’s economy by a practically unnoticeable 0.05 percent over the course of the year.

The PwC research focused only on direct spending, so there may be some indirect spending that boosts the region’s economy even more. Still, some sports economists say direct spending estimates are too rosy. “They are still high, but they aren’t in the same ballpark as some of these other ridiculous numbers,” Victor Matheson, a sports economist at the College of the Holy Cross, told CBS. “It’s not like economists are against the Super Bowl. We’re just against this claim that it’s a growth engine.”

Simply put, the cities that get to host a Super Bowl are so large that the Super Bowl’s proportional economic impact is minimal. The only cities that might get a serious economic boost are so small the NFL is unlikely to grant them the right to host the Super Bowl. “It would have a big impact relative to the economy of Green Bay, Wis., but not so when you’re talking about Miami or Phoenix or Dallas-Fort Worth,” Raymond Sauer, an economics professor at Clemson who founded The Sports Economist website, told the Washington Examiner last year in an interview about Super Bowl XLIX’s economic impact.

For the most part, the tourism impact of a Super Bowl will just displace other tourists. Those who would have visited San Francisco this weekend if it weren’t for the Super Bowl probably moved their vacation two weeks earlier or later to avoid skyrocketing hotel prices. Or perhaps they stuck with this weekend but chose a different city instead.

Research published in 2004 looked at Super Bowls from 1970-2001 and found income gains were only 25 percent of the NFL’s claims. It also found a 23 percent probability of the Super Bowl having a negative economic impact. Glendale, Ariz., lost money on the 2008 and 2015 Super Bowls, for example.

What’s worse, Santa Clara, the Bay Area city where Levi’s Stadium is located, took out an $850 million loan to build the stadium. Even if the $220 million economic benefit projections were accurate, it would take about four Super Bowls for the economic benefit to outweigh the cost of the loan. But $220 million for the economy means quite a bit less in tax revenue for the city.

Little or no economic benefit doesn’t mean hosting the Super Bowl is a total loss. There is a certain prestige to living in a city capable of hosting the most-watched event in American television history. “There is some evidence that the presence of a team or the presence of a special event makes people feel good about themselves, makes residents feel happy,” Temple University Professor Michael Leeds, the President of the North American Association of Sports Economics, told the Examiner for a previous story.

Just don’t expect that to boost the economy.

Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.

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