Should the taxpayers have any involvement in funding sports stadiums, or no? Been reading so many articles and Reddit threads about the whole thing with the A’s, and there’s multiple things, but three things stick out to me especially.
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John Fisher never truly planned on keeping the team in Oakland to begin with, and used Oakland to negotiate with Vegas in order to get the public funding for the stadium that he needs.
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Oakland, or at least the area around the Oakland Alameda Colisseum is a shithole that needed renovating, and sports teams don’t actually bring in the economic benefits they advertise (mainly because the cost of the tax breaks and other tax benefits to build the stadiums is generally more than the tourist dollars needed to break even)
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Sports fandom is a lot more localized than I thought, at least in the US. LA doesn’t care about the Chargers, Vegas doesn’t care about the Raiders, but care about the Golden Knights because it’s a team original to Vegas that is a men’s team (the Aces are the Vegas WNBA team, but of course, WNBA).
Just stuff I’ve been thinking about all day today.
“Should the taxpayers have any involvement in funding sports stadiums, or no?”
No. I’d say more but I’m trying to use profanity sparingly.
100% this, the politicians that push this shit always get their piece of the pie and the taxpayers get the shaft every time after funding it.
"Privatise profits, socialise costs."
I'm sorry, what was that, I can't hear you over the field screaming at me not to be racist.
All rise for the black national anthem.
No.
...On second thought, FUCK NO!
Say Smeg instead.
Absolutely not, and I hope the entire business of pro sports fucking dies and so does everyone who was ever involved with it.
Sports teams used to have a useful function when it was just the locals. You had a team from a town, composed of people from that town, that was representing that town and its people. The people knew the athletes, maybe they were coworkers, maybe they just saw the guy who scored that awesome last minute goal against Fuckville the other week at the market. It created social cohesion: "Look at this guy, I know him, he's like me and he represents me!"
But now? When teams are trading hilariously overpaid idiots and whiners who don't know anything about the place they're supposed to be representing? In case of Europe, half the time they don't even know the fucking country's language! There's no value in that, it's just a deranged festival of consumerism with some money laundering on the side. Let it die. The fucking Olympics too, let it go back to dudes running marathons in slacks and secretly hitching rides in cars instead of wasting millions on developing a kevlar thread that will shave 0.2 seconds off of someone's time. Turn stadiums into publicly accessible sports complexes and hold free classes in everything from sprinting to archery, instead of having the people sit on their asses, chug terrible beer, and consoom celebrities.
Hell yeah. I'd be totally cool with Fuckville taking on Shitsburg at the local county softball tournament, especially since everyone would actually care, because people's communities were involved.
Let me know when professional football players take the bus to games again.
I was a sports photog for a while. Please advise which cattle car I get into
If the venture is profitable, then they don't need government funding, thus the government shouldn't fund it. If the venture would be a net negative then the government shouldn't fund it.
Succinctly: if a business can survive on its own, it doesn't need subsidies. If a business can't survive on its own, it doesn't deserve subsidies.
No.
Honestly, you have no idea how wildly unprofitable the stadiums and teams are. It's genuinely shocking. The entire sports industry is pure Bread & Circus supported by government subsidy and co-operation with propaganda companies (Advertisers). If it wasn't for government subsidies, every major sporting organization in the US would implode.
The only reason things like the NFL, NBA, and MLB exist as the central sporting organization of an entire country for an entire sport is because of the vast amounts of money being poured into these unfathomable money pits. And it gets worse too: long-term statistical studies have shown that there are basically no significant positive gains for these massive sports teams in either tourism, business profit, tax revenue, or anything else because of the increases in other expenses including massive police presences.
Genuinely, no major sports event is profitable for the cities that have them. Cities that are in economic hard times should close all of their sports teams.
The MLB has also for the last decade been relying very heavily on regional cable networks paying unsustainable locked-in contracts for hundreds of millions a season for local broadcasting rights.
The thinking was that live sports would save cable networks from cord cutters because the product wouldn't be available elsewhere.
The teams got fat on the payouts, but the bottom fell out of it last year because Sinclair whom held a lot of the rights for many teams went bankrupt and reneged on the contracts.
Same with hosting Olympics.
Now they COULD be beneficial except that they are basically subsidized. If they were instead treated like amusement parks and provided their own security and paid actual taxes.
I think something like the Olympics has value in the idea of a world championship for the greatest athletes. It doesn't need the megaprojects or anything; but I feel like most of the best gymnasts and runners would prefer death to not going to the Olympics.
No. Any suggestion that the arena brings in more business for the city so it's worth the cost is bullshit. It never is.
I'm assuming Las Vegas will require an indoor, air conditioned stadium.
Las Vegas has a longstanding AAA team, but they have historically been considered the least desirable affiliate by the big league clubs because of local conditions. Teams would play musical chairs trading affiliates every 4 years and when the music stopped, whoever was left empty handed had to take Vegas.
Teams hated Vegas as a site to train their prospects because the dry air and elevation meant every hitter suddenly became Babe Ruth while pitchers got destroyed and lost confidence.
The sun-baked infield dirt also became as hard as concrete, turning routine groundballs into rockets and causing tons of fielding errors.
The A's actually are the current owners of said AAA team at the moment. Allegedly the plan is to relocate the AAA team and play home games strictly at night at that stadium until the indoor stadium gets built, because the people of Oakland absolutely fucking hate the ownership already due to fielding shit teams constantly and don't attend out of protest, but definitely will barely go to Oakland games with this news.
Thanks, didn't know. Last time I remember it was the Mets.
I think the AAA got a new outdoor stadium sometime in the last 10 years or so, but it would still be insane to play there even temporarily.
But I guess the Jays playing in Dunedin and Buffalo or the Expos playing in San Juan means there's a precedent for this sort of bush league thing to happen.
As far as 3 is concerned Vegas doesn't really suffer from this problem since it is such a tourist city. At any one time there are hundreds of thousands of tourists in Vegas looking for something to do. Every game will be sold out no matter what. Similar to NYC, people will go to a yankees game just to say they saw the Yankees or go to a Knicks game just to say they went to the Garden.
Hahaha okay so LV steals Oakland's NFL team and then a few short years later jacks their MLB team too? That's classic.
If the A's are moving to Vegas that would put a major and a Triple-A in the same city (the Aviators; who are affiliated with the A's). That's an arrangement that generally doesn't last, especially in a market as small as Vegas .
I'd love to see the Aviators move east. There's a couple underserved markets that could take them.
No.
the dollars in sportball have gone up because better monetization.
the number of raw viewers have gone up because population growth.
but the percentage of americans watching pro sports has already crested and it's falling. a lot of their success was piggybacking off of cable, forcing people to pay for ESPN. if you look at the licensing deals, pro sports are in a very bad contraction position. there are going to be a lot of bankruptcies and writeoffs declared because everything had banked in growth, yet cable cutters have decimated viewership, and people didn't pick up the online offerings to compensate. and then covid came, shutting shit down even worse.
"If stadiums MADE money, owners would pay for them THEMSELVES."