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.
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.