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 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.