Cities’ generosity to professional sports is not as wasteful and sleazy as you think it is.
It’s worse. So sayeth J. C. Bradbury, in This One Will Be Different: False Promises and Fiscal Realities of Publicly Funded Stadiums (Oxford University Press; 440 pages; $39.99).
The Kennesaw State University professor’s life changed forever on Nov. 11, 2013, when his wife called with the news that Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves were fleeing their downtown park for a fresh facility in suburban Cobb County. The team was “moving a few miles from my house, using my tax dollars.” Bradbury had extensive experience in “public finance and sports economics,” but hadn’t delved into “the economics of stadiums until more recently.” What was the point? The debate was “settled,” since his discipline “had already convincingly demonstrated that sports venues were poor public investments.”
This One Will Be Different offers a firsthand account of how Braves “executives navigated the local policymaking environment to garner political support and favorable media coverage to extract substantial subsidies from Cobb County taxpayers.” If Bradbury limited the analysis to “a fairly typical example of a money-losing public stadium investment,” his book wouldn’t attract much interest beyond metro Atlanta. So the economist explores the entirety of “America’s destructive convention of using public funds to build stadiums for professional sports teams,” summarizing “the findings from decades of academic research on the subject” and reviewing “experiences from other stadium projects — some of which I have also followed closely.”
Sports-subsidizers’ core error, Bradbury stresses, is their belief that purchases “at stadium events” represent additional economic activity. For decades, it’s been clear that stadiums don’t “increase aggregate output” because “the money that attendees spend wasn’t previously squirreled away under mattresses; it is diverted from existing spending within the community.” Put simply, a “dollar spent at the game isn’t a dollar on top of other local purchases; it’s a dollar transferred from elsewhere in the economy.”
And whatever boosters claim, “pairing [a] stadium with a complementary development” isn’t the secret formula for success. The “basic economics that undermines standalone venues from generating new community wealth” doesn’t change. “In the same way that most dollars spent at stadium events are largely reallocated from existing sales, commercial transactions that occur within the surrounding development also represent a transfer of existing local spending, not net new economic activity.” Exhibit A: “The Westgate City Center entertainment district, adjacent to the Gila River Arena and State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., opened in 2006, but it was foreclosed upon in 2011 after the bankruptcy of the Phoenix Coyotes.”
After sacking the foundational flaw of sports subsidization, This One Will Be Different extends its reach in many directions, impressively eviscerating myths and highlighting overlooked matters worthy of wider attention. An example of the latter is Bradbury’s heresy that the “net impact” of a stadium “often isn’t positive … for residents.” When NBA teams bailed on “Charlotte and Seattle in the 2000s … home prices increased in the areas around their newly vacant arenas, which suggests that their presence imposed net external costs on the surrounding community that deterred residents from living nearby.” And when the Seahawks secured a new stadium from voters in 1997, “the strongest support came from precincts in a Goldilocks zone — not too close, but not too far away.”
As for the visitation spike public-stadium supporters promise, Bradbury isn’t buying it. Researchers have “found that even the tourism impacts of events as large as the Super Bowl are somewhat limited, and the economic benefits are far less than commonly claimed.” Ditto for sports extravaganzas outside stadiums. In 2023, a high-profile supporter predicted an economic windfall of $1.3 billion from “the Las Vegas Grand Prix Formula 1 race.”
But hotel records “showed a sharp decrease in demand during the event, with occupancy down 20% over the previous year for the three days leading up to the main events; and on Thursday’s qualifying and Friday’s race, occupancy was down 10%.” Saturday brought an occupancy rate “3% higher and room rates were up,” but did the gains offset the losses? In addition, Clark County “spent $4.3 million on staffing while taking in only $3.8 million in revenue,” while covering “half the $80 million cost of transforming four miles of roads, sidewalks, and right-of-ways into a race course.” Worst of all, “the disruption from the construction and closing off the Strip to normal traffic was costly to local businesses.”
Exasperated by decision-makers’ steadfast unwillingness to accept the voluminous data and undeniable conclusions he and his colleagues have assembled, Bradbury turned elsewhere to learn why cities enthusiastically subsidize sports. The answer lies in the work of Kevin Delaney and Rick Eckstein, who explored “local political maneuvering behind public stadium deals at the ground level.” The sociologists discovered that “team owners were not … the main force pushing for government financing of the new facilities they wanted.”
The “primary proponents” are the men and women of what Delaney and Eckstein label the “local growth coalition.” Comprised of individuals who “have an inordinate influence over public policy and use that influence to serve their parochial interests,” the cabals are populated by “area business interests and … stakeholders from civic, union, and religious organizations, as well as media members.” And political tribalism plays no role when their hive mind is made up:
[P]artisanship is rarely involved, as liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans often form strong cross-party coalitions of support. Candidates who campaigned as “fiscal conservatives” can look past the long history of failed public stadium investments to convince themselves that this public-private partnership is too good to pass up, and defenders of the downtrodden can argue that team commitments provide job creation and community benefits that make the public contribution worthwhile.
Entitled athletes? Greedy owners? Obtuse fans? This One Will Be Different documents the true villains of cities’ disastrous subsidization of sports. They’re community “leaders,” or as cynics call them: Leaders Of Our Town (LOOT). And as Bradbury concludes, the fiercest opponent a public-stadium proposal can face is a “grassroots coalitions of citizens” that refuses to bend to a city’s “insular group of insiders.”
D. Dowd Muska is a researcher and writer who studies public policy from the limited-government perspective. A veteran of several think tanks, he writes a column and publishes other content at No Dowd About It.