Another Pro Sports Team Demands a Free Stadium

The Vikings are telling Minneapolis to build them a stadium or they'll leave (not the main focus of this article on football economics but it's in there). Of course, this has happened before, and sometimes, when the city has a tourist economy outside of sporting events, they can tell the NFL team not to let the door hit them in the ass on the way out, as happened in San Francisco a few years ago. (I still love how stunned the Niners owner was.) Same reason the NFL won't give LA a new team, because LA won't spring for a stadium. On the other hand the Steelers were successful in their bid, in a post-industrial Pittsburgh that has better things to spend money on than a new stadium. Sometimes when they don't get their way teams will just plain-old sue their cities, as in Oakland. Thanks Al Davis.

It turns out my anecdotal instincts are correct. Economists have looked at these questions and it turns out that building new stadiums isn't much benefit to anybody except the sports teams in question. In an article titled "Too Big to Fail", we hear about the Chargers' stadium plans:

...[a new Chargers stadium] is definitely a questionable use of redevelopment resources. If you look at the state redevelopment law, there's two purposes for which the state has authorized cities to use tax increment financing. One is fighting blight and the other is providing affordable housing. Nowhere in the state community redevelopment law does it say you can use these resources because you don't want your football team to go to another city. None of the rationale we have heard from the Chargers or the mayor links the construction of a football stadium to either affordable housing or economic development. It's hard to argue that the Chargers' stadium would have any of these benefits because the team has said the plot of land is so small the only way they can finance it is with the city, because they can't build anything else there. Well, if you can't build anything but the football stadium it's hard to see how you will have any measurable impact on blight, affordable housing or economic development

From a redevelopment standpoint, a football stadium is not a very good investment of your redevelopment dollars. If your goal is redevelopment, which it's supposed to be, you can buy a lot more redevelopment taking that $800 million meant for the stadium and investing it in other things downtown.

Sports rarely report on the business aspect of pro teams (which is the real reason these people are all doing what they do); the only time you'll read dollar figures is when a player signs a huge contract, everyone clucks their tongues that this quarterback is making so much, then they go right on buying tickets and merchandise to pay that quarterback's salary. That's why stadium stories are certainly not going to be reported nationally by the sports media, so putting these stories together is up to those of us who read local papers or who travel around the country a fair bit and hear these stories in bars.

You might be a Chargers fan offended by my lack of sports patriotism (about which I wax eloquent here). Fair enough - but you have to recognize that professional sports organizations are really interested first, always and only, in money. If winning gets them there, that's what they'll do, and somehow if losing gets them there, that's what they'll do. And that's completely appropriate, because that's what private companies are for; you don't expect the owner of a McDonald's franchise in one town to make decisions that lower his profits just because he's loyal to that town. If he can move to a new town, and make more money, he will, and too bad for the customers from the first town that didn't come in! Same goes for the NFL, and yet somehow, people think differently about it. What we see over and over again is that if screwing the fans or city will get them there, that's what they'll do (exactly as we should expect with a private franchise). It's why your jerseys cost $200. Now, if the McDonald's franchise owners group in your city were exerting such influence on local politics, you might call it special interest pressure. Granted, other corporations do it too when they threaten to move their offices unless they get a tax break, but that has far more economic impact than an NFL team moving. (By the way, LA's economy doesn't seem to miss their teams.) So what enables the NFL to treat cities the way they do, when McDonald's can't? You the fan, that's what, taking the team's side and then voting out the politicians that took a stand against them when they got greedy. That's how they get mayors over a barrel.

The NFL is not a government agency. They're not entitled to public funds any more than your or my companies are, but they know they can stay at the trough by exploiting their fans' easily abused loyalty. Bottom line: NFL teams, you want a stadium? Move to one, or build it on your own goddamn dime. Maybe Minneapolis would lose tourist dollars without a team, but San Diego sure as hell won't.