When Super Bowl LIII is played on Sunday at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, just remember who paid for the stadium.
The state-of-the-art facility cost $1.6 billion to construct, and $700 million of it came from Georgia taxpayers, a stadium which mainly benefits the Atlanta Falcons. Although it is far from the only sports stadium built with taxpayer money, the host stadium of this year’s Super Bowl is just another reminder of how badly taxpayers get screwed by funding stadiums.
This has gone on for decades. Nearly $7 billion of taxpayer money has gone to building, maintaining, and repairing NFL stadiums alone since 1997, and most recently $750 million from the state of Nevada to build the Oakland Raiders a new stadium for when they move to Las Vegas for the 2020 season (there has been talk of the state increasing their hotel taxes to pay for it). As of 2015, the Charles Koch Institute reported that new stadiums were, on average, receiving $238 million apiece in public funding despite the teams themselves being profitable enough to afford them.
Following the 2017 NFL season, teams split around $8 billion in revenue sharing, or about $255 million per team, for that season alone. These massive profits are nothing new for the NFL and do not even include the millions teams bring in from ticket sales and revenue earned in the stadium.
That is great for the billionaire team owners and the politicians who can give themselves a round of applause and brag that they bribed a team to move to or continue playing in their respective city or state. However, the constituents don’t benefit at all; they are, for the most part, worse off economically.
Just look at the mess St. Louis has been left with since the Rams moved back to Los Angeles. In 1995, The Dome at America’s Center, which the state agreed to pay $280 million for, opened up. The Rams played there until the 2015 season. By the time the team left, Missouri taxpayers were left with $144 million’s worth of debt on the facility, which has been without a permanent tenant since.
One could argue that sports stadiums create jobs, but this is a futile point. NFL teams use their stadiums less than one dozen times per year and hire a handful of game-day staff to perform low-skill, low-paying labor as cashiers, custodians, ushers, parking attendants, ticket takers, security guards, and more. While it is good that people can earn some extra income and the occasional concert or other event may give them a few more days of work per year, it is hard to justify the massive cost when the stadiums are vacant for 90 percent of the year. Not to mention, private companies who aren’t taking in massive amounts of taxpayer funding also create jobs.
As for the evidence that these stadiums are some sound economic investment, good luck finding it.
Roger Noll, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, found that “NFL stadiums do not generate significant local economic growth, and the incremental tax revenue is not sufficient to cover any significant financial contribution by the city.”
It is possible to fund these stadiums privately. That is exactly what the New York Jets and New York Giants did when they built the $1.6 billion MetLife Stadium, which opened in 2010. However, big business would rather have the taxpayers do the work for them so they can maximize their profit.
In a free-market economy, there is no reason why taxpayers should be supporting this economic fascism. If someone wants to build a football stadium, they should pay for it themselves and pay taxes on it and follow the same rules as everyone else in society. Getting ripped off just because people like sports is a disastrous economic strategy. Maybe if people took the name of the sports team out of the equation and instead thought of it like giving money to GM or Carrier to keep try to keep jobs in the U.S., it would be easier for the masses to see the flaws of this corporatist strategy.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
