Pros And Cons Of Sports Stadiums

The commitment to athletics in Division III has lead to money being spent on new sports and recreation facilities. So much so that it’s been put to question if there is an “arms race” to who can build the biggest and

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).

Sports teams, or professional athletic organization, are extremely important institutions within a city or region. They can help connect people with places, and through this loyalty, a sense of civic pride can be seen. Furthermore, the multi-billion dollar industry sports produces effects that can impact individuals and communities. In recent years dozens of new sports stadiums have been built throughout the country, with major funding coming from public subsidies. The aim of this paper is to analyze the positive and negative impacts that come with these subsidies.

Sports teams are a symbol of a cities pride. Take for example the Chicago Cubs. They create a sense of loyalty toward that city. However, none of that would happen without a stadium. Stadiums and teams can play a very important role in a cities economy, or they could also be irrelevant. To decide whether or not they are useful or not you must first understand each side of the argument. So first, let’s examine the pros of having a stadium within your city. Then, we will discuss the harms of having one. And finally, decide which side is more beneficial for the economy.

In today’s world of big time professional sports there are the two major players and they are football represented by the National Football League (NFL) and baseball represented by Major League Baseball (MLB). Now there are other sports that the American public enjoys watching, however the argument generally boils down to which sport is the true favorite of the American people: baseball or football. In this paper I will attempt to examine both sports from several different angles to include attendance, television revenue, ticket costs, venues, salaries, entertainment value, and athlete perception. The goal of this exercise will be to determine, once and for all, which sport is the American

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

   Abstract:  The Stadium  construction boom continues, and taxpayers are being forced to pay for new high tech stadiums they don’t want.  These new stadiums create only part-time jobs.  Stadiums bring money in exclusively for professional leagues and not the communities.  The teams are turning public money into private profit.  Professional leagues are becoming extremely wealthy at the taxpayers expense.  The publicly-funded stadium obsession must be put to a stop before athletes and coaches become even greedier.  New stadiums being built hurt public schools, and send a message to children that leisure activities are more important than basic education.  Public money

This directly impacts the projected NPV of the project as almost 95% of the cash flows are derived from this boost in sales. In addition to the financial support, remodeling the Stadium location also fits well with their business strategy. Some of the key supporting evidence includes a high percentage of the target market in the trade area at 42% of college educated adults, and a population with the highest median income of the group at $65,931. Most important to Target however, would be the maintenance of their brand. As a company that places a high value on the image of their brand, revitalizing a lagging store would both keep their presence in the local area and potentially draw more customers to an upgraded location. The final decision would be to accept the project under no budget constraints, but not issue new debt or equity to achieve it.

The Olympic Games is one of the biggest and most unrivaled sporting events in the entire world. At first it may seem like a huge plus or advantage for a city or nation to host this event. However on the contrary there are a lot of negative aspects that occur when a nation hosts this event. While the event is taking place, from the outside it looks like a state of the art, prestigious event that it is. Some of the problems that are caused by hosting Olympic games deal with, stadium development, local resident life, security issues, and many others that will be discussed. One of the big problems when dealing with a mega event such as the Olympic Games is the stadiums, which get built, and how they get abandoned or not used after the games are finished. This is one of the major problems surrounding the Athens 2004 games. Many of the stadiums and infrastructure are left untouched and abandoned to this day.

Unfortunately, these arguments contain bad economic reasoning that leads to overstatement of the benefits of stadiums. Economic growth takes place when a community's resources--people, capital investments, and natural resources like land--become more productive. Increased productivity can arise in two ways: from economically beneficial specialization by the community for the purpose of trading with other regions or from local value added that is higher than other uses of local workers, land, and investments. Building a stadium is good for the local economy only if a stadium is the most productive way to make capital investments and use its workers.