Sports And The National Football League

America needs the NFL for it is the biggest thing in American. People from various beliefs and backgrounds can come together for the same common goal in their team. It gives Americans something to believe in, something to rely on. Its reputation is held high, regardless of politics or religion the NFL is something Americans can agree on. Football means so much to Americans that they have projected so much belief and desire onto football it has been there for whatever Americans have needed it to be when times have been tough.

Although the National Football League (NFL) seems to provide a source of entertainment for Americans, it is slowly but surely brainwashing our population. Starting in September, a great majority of the American population gathers around TV screens and crowds into stadiums across the country to watch men ram into each other in hopes of getting a leather ball to the end of a field. This occurs every Sunday, as well as the occasional Saturday and Monday night. Fans spend hundreds of dollars on game tickets, and NFL Ticket TV subscriptions to ensure that they never miss a game. If we were to take a step back and look at it, these weekly occurrences seem to become ritualistic. What was supposed to be a source of entertainment has become a routine

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.

American football originated with its earlier form of play that derived from a variation of

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.

Gambling is a common practice throughout human history, one that appeals to the individual’s desire for gain and offers the thrill of risk or uncertainty. Sports gambling is the “wagering of money or other items of value on the outcome of a sporting event, dependent either wholly or in part on chance” (Thompson, 2008, p. 1). Sports gambling generates billions of dollars annually, with large events like the Super Bowl or World Series alone able to generate wagers in the billions of dollars. This research will explore the arguments of those who oppose sports gambling and those who support it in order to answer the question: Should sports gambling be legalized?

During the early 20th century college football played a bad role and influence on American culture by diminishing a good college education. I oppose the role that college football had on American culture because it took away from the main purpose of going to college, which was getting a good education for most Americans. Since the US was involved in World War 1, many veterans came back to the US with no jobs. College coaches were exploiting veterans by concentrating on making their team better rather than wanting them to focus on an education, so that they could get a good job in the future.

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).

The issue at hand, however, is that power has shifted from the cities to the teams themselves. Professional athletic organizations have started taking advantage of cities by threatening to relocate unless they get public subsidies for expensive stadium renovations and construction. With this in mind it is imperative to ask today’s question: Do public subsidies for professional athletic organizations benefit their local community?

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.

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

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.

State and local governments have become increasingly responsible for financing many of the new arenas and stadiums demanded by professional sports teams. While local officials have a long history of efforts to attract team to their communities, the task of securing the funds needed to build the required playing facilities is relatively new. During the early years of professional sports through the 1950s, most teams played their home games in a privately owned stadium or arena. Team owners wanted little involvement from the public sector in their business affairs. Later, when publicly funded facilities became more common, the teams and other users paid rental fees that helped offset the