It's not in the public interest to subsidize sports unavailable over-the-air for "free".
The point of elitism is to cut audience of events to a minute few. Sponsors aren’t happy. Fox NASCAR’s Mike Joy made a serious point on a segment of Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast. Based on his analysis of sponsorship issues in motor racing as a whole (he worked at General Motors in the early 1980’s in Pontiac’s publicity department), team sponsors and advertisers are being shortchanged by the push to premium pay where instead of interacting with players and fans together at events (i. e. players being on a local broadcaster’s afternoon newscast for evening games or on the evening newscast after a 1 PM game), they have to resort to business-to-business (B2B) deals because they can no longer interact with players and fans. That is related to premium pay and the lack of advertising opportunities with premium pay television.
https://youtu.be/NrhUvmZgLyw?si=KHGYhPPfd4xnmwFN&t=1668
My take is that we need to review HBO v. FCC from 1977.
Suppose you’re a local merchant. Would you sponsor a team if their games were on premium services your fan base would not subscribe?
Amazon’s games effectively fund The Washington BLEEP.
It is the push to these premium services that has encouraged and embraced the idea that pornography should be allowed on television, and likewise obscenities.
Excellent point. Personally, I’m not opposed to some taxpayer subsidies when it comes to building stadiums. However, it can’t just solely benefit the owners on event days. As you said, on the same page, if the taxpayers are gonna be partially on the hook for stadium, then, being able to watch whatever sport is regularly played in that stadium over the air or on basic cable should be a given.