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.
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