Fans Are Not Like In Sports Stadiums

When fans of a sport team attend a local professional sporting event they are more likely to spend a lot of money on concessions and entertainment either in the stadium or at local restaurants or stores around the stadium (Coates and Humphreys, 2001). Owners lose money a lot of money when there are lockouts in their sport because owners make revenue off a variety of items such as luxury box sales, concessions, and parking (Woods, 2011). During the course of a season owners, restaurants, and local businesses can lose significant amounts of business and revenue because of lockouts. If there are less lockouts in the future of professional sports, they will greatly impact owners, the economy, and local

Professional sports has become one of the most popular industries in the world today. The media spends billions of dollars on advertisements and teams spend millions of dollars on professional athletes all for one reason, the fans. The fans ticket sales and merchandise purchases are what keeps all the sport teams around and prevents professional athletes from losing their jobs. There are three types of fans in the sports world, average fans, fanatics, and fair-weather fans.

The past 20 years have witnessed a massive transformation of professional sports stadiums in North America and the rest of the world. In the United States and Canada alone, by 2012, 125 of the 140 teams in the five largest professional sports leagues, the National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Soccer (MLS), and National Hockey League (NHL), will play in stadiums constructed or significantly renovated since 1990. This new construction has come at a significant cost, the majority of which has been covered by taxpayers. Construction costs alone for major league professional sports facilities have totaled in excess of $30 billion over the past two

I am going to discuss the topic of National Football League stadiums and their public funding. The purpose of the study is to find out if funding of NFL stadiums is “bad business,” The research I will look at the impacts that a stadium has on the economy in the city. Cities’ like to have attractions that they can draw from and be proud of. Most cities have some form of sport arena, and more are being built or are planned to be built. As with any business there are positives and negatives when hosting a sports team. Cities pay multimillions to help fund and build sport stadiums for teams. I hadn’t researched or looked into this topic before, so I was very intrigued by this. At the end of this paper I will give my own personal opinion.

Sports Stadiums are an iconic staple of American tradition. However not everything about these venues is positive. Team owners take advantage of laws and fans to meet their own goals. Citizens and city officials from various locations have taken up their grievances with the NFL in the past. And it has gotten to the point where even political parties join together to bring to light issues with the organization. NFL stadiums are not good for cities because they take advantage of tax payers, hurt citizens on an economic level and cost them billions in subsidies.

Then came the concern that the universities built stadiums that were too big. Many feared that there would not be enough people to fill the seats on game day. A majority of the stadiums were built too large for the time period. The teams had to grow their fan basis by winning important games in order to get more people through the gates. Also, many stadiums were built to hold one big game and crowd a year. But, would this one game bring enough money in to pay off the millions of dollars that were spent to build the stadium? The large stadiums eventually paid off when the fan base became larger, but it took years for that to happen. Now, there are so many people that want to come to the games that there is simply not enough room for everyone.

Stadium subsidies are used to fiancé new stadiums. The government provides financial support to franchises that allows them to build their new stadiums. These subsidies are costing tax payers millions and do not seem to be in the best interest of the city the stadium is in. Those in favor of using tax payer dollars to build stadiums argue that the economic impact a professional franchise has on a city is great and a new stadium will help generate revenue. Research has shown this is not the case. Most stadiums cost the city and never produce enough revenue to make up for those costs (Bast, 1990).

Athletic events aren’t always held at traditional arenas. Those venues may cost far more money than an amateur sports team (and some professional teams) could possibly afford.

The growing interest and boom in popularity in the sport was obvious, in fact the change was so quick and the colleges, with their old-school style stadiums meant for crowds who, only a few years ago, would have been in much smaller proportions, were run over with the amount of people that came in to watch their games. In 1922, it was estimated that 500,000 people were turned down from buying tickets simply due to the lack of space. The total number of fans themselves was growing rapidly as the number grew, in fact in one year alone the total number of fans went from 10 million in 1924 to 12 million in 1925. Because of this school directors and boards of committees saw the major economic implications ahead of them and decided that in order to maximize profits they should simply build bigger stadiums, which they did. Yale was one of the first to see the coming boom and quickly raised its capacity from 50,000 in 1903 to 78,000 by 1914. With the amount of fans growing unproportionately to the growing sizes of the stadiums growing so rapidly talks of a 165,000

Proponents of subsidizing sports stadiums is a great decision because the economic impact it will have on the community is great for two main reasons. First, sports stadiums are massive construction projects. In fact, one could compare them to a medieval cathedral in their attempts to dominate a skyline and inspire pride in one’s city And, just like these cathedrals, they are very expensive, and massive building projects that would require many years of hard painstaking labor. For example, the proposed stadium for the Los Angeles Rams in Inglewood, California, was predicted to cost $3 billion and add 22,000 construction jobs to the economy of Los Angeles, California. Although construction jobs do eventually disappear once a stadium is constructed once the games begin, so does the massive consumer spending. For example, more than 3.5 million people saw the St. Louis Cardinals play at Busch Stadium in 2015.

Sporting events is a place for people to go, relax, have fun, and do something they enjoy doing, watching sports. However, the average family finds it difficult to buy tickets to them and still there are 66,960 fans that attend an NFL game. (Wikipedia) The public contributes to the athletes’ salary and then complains about how

In the United States, new sports stadiums are commonly seen as a vital part of the redevelopment of a city having a great economic growth with the production of jobs and a positive income builder. After this, the owners of the pro sports teams with millions and millions of dollars of subsidies for the construction of new stadiums and arenas and expect these facilities to generate economic benefits exceeding these subsidies by large margins. However, a growing body of fact indicates that professional sports facilities, and the franchises they are home to, may not be engines of economic benefit anywhere claims Sachse, “. In reality, sports franchises typically account for a very small proportion of the total economic output of the cities in which they reside.” Some economical studies on the amount of income and employment in US cities find no evidence of positive economic benefits associated with past sports facility construction and some studies find that professional sports facilities and teams have a net negative economic impact on income and employment. It just shows that these results suggest that at best, professional sports teams and facilities provide non-pecuniary benefits like civic pride, and a greater sense of community, along with consumption benefits to those attending games and following the local team in the media; at worst, residents

Each of the  stadiums are funded in unique ways, communities do not benefit from new stadiums, and stadiums do not save a struggling downtown. Foremost, stadiums hurt public schools, and this money should be used for more important public services.  There are many  reasons we subsidize sports, but stadiums do not help the economy, and there are no net benefits from stadiums.  Teams strive for new stadiums to create an image,  but there are  options so that a community will not loose a team to another city without building a new stadium.

Dallas cowboys stadium, also called AT&T stadium, is the largest domed stadium in the National Football League in Arlington, Texas, United States, which is city-owned and has a capacity of 85,000 seats with a telescopic roof. It is used as the base camp of Dallas Cowboys, a great sport club in the world. Except its major application – professional football, many other kinds of activities can he carried out in the stadium like basketball matches, soccer games, also Spartan games and motocross. The stadium was finished on May 27 in 2009.

Another way to bring in fans is to also give them a good match day experience. Catering, comfort and ease of access