I’ve never understood why, with Olympics, and with professional sports, the cities are expected to build facilities for the sports.
Consider the NFL. Every team in the NFL makes an operating profit every year. This is mostly due to the lucrative TV deals and the hard salary cap in the NFL.
Against this backdrop, cities are intimidated by the NFL, and other sports as well, to build new stadiums for teams, otherwise, the teams will move to other cities. They will take their ball and go home.
While many of us enjoy pro sports and like having teams in our home communities, is it really necessary for them to be publicly subsidized????
And why is it that NFL stadiums nowadays cost well over a billion dollars????
And why is the prestige of hosting Super Bowls and having an NFL franchise worth it on some intangible level, when it’s not worth it in dollars and cents?
I heard that Glendale, Arizona, actually lost money hosting the Super Bowl, due to the many costly demands placed by the NFL on its host city. The mayor of Glendale couldn’t even get a ticket to the game in his city.
The NFL implies, but never quite says, that cities should build stadiums because of the prestige of having NFL football. But the threat of moving teams is very real. The NFL plants the seed that it would be unthinkable, just unthinkable for a team to move away. And that such an event must be prevented at all costs.
NOTHING warms the heart of a local politician like the computer simulated view of the playing field from his comp seats in the suites of the proposed new stadium.
Because they’re willing to. Lots of large businesses make cities bid against each other for expansions, bids generally involve free land and deferred taxes. Every new Toyota factory goes through months of that process. As long as city governments are willing to whore themselves out for high profile businesses it’s just plain smart for the businesses to let them.
The funny part with the Glendale thing is they started complaining about how much they lost on the previous SB during the run up to this year’s SB. Well guess what guys, nobody forced you to bid for another one. They maybe had an excuse for the first one, maybe they didn’t realize that the NFL would spend the whole time saying the SB was in Phoenix, but all the teams in hotels in Phoenix, and expect Glendale to foot all the costs for police protection. But the second time around... that’s entirely on Glendale.