The Buffalo Bills want a new football stadium to play in, except they don’t want to pay for it.
Rather, Bills ownership wants the public to spend $1.1 billion in taxpayer money to build a stadium for the NFL team, as WHEC reports.
It’s a terrible proposal from a greedy ownership group, and the people of New York and its politicians should stand up against the madness. Taxpayer-funded stadiums are a bad deal, and communities need to stop falling for the trick.
Taxpayer-funded stadiums for professional sports teams are a bad investment, and there are a myriad of studies and articles confirming that. Back in 2017, a poll of economists by the University of Chicago showed 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.”
The coronavirus pandemic last year showed one downfall of these agreements: They can’t generate economic activity when no fans can attend games. Even outside a pandemic, there are many problems.
These stadium deals often fail to deliver the number of jobs promised, and the jobs they do create are mostly low-paying and part-time positions. An NFL team may play as few as nine home games in a season: one of the three preseason games and eight of the 17 regular season games. There is no guarantee that a team will make the playoffs or have a home game in the playoffs. And while venues may have concerts and other special events, they sit vacant for much of the year.
Oftentimes, all these stadiums do is take money that would be spent elsewhere in the community and have it spent at these games, which hurts small businesses in the area that aren’t receiving the same type of massive government handout.
NFL teams can afford stadiums. The league makes a ton of money. Following the 2019 NFL season, 32 NFL teams split about $9.5 billion in revenue sharing. That works out to $296 million per team, according to Sportico.
Plus, it’s not like the Buffalo Bills are some amazing draw. The Bills have never won a Super Bowl. (They lost four in a row in the early 1990s.) They ranked 17th out of 32 NFL teams in the percent capacity their stadium was at in their average 2019 home games.
If the Bills want a new stadium, they should buy some land, apply for the proper permits, and build one. They don’t need our help to do it.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
