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.
-
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.
-
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)
-
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.
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.