Thanks Goodell... thanks for reminding me why, as much as I love watching football once in a while, I hate you, the NFL and all of the financial games you play to make ME THE TAXPAYER give you a place to make even more money. So screw you. Move all the teams wherever you want. Shame on us for watching.a bittersweet moment because we were unsuccessful in being able to get the kind of facilities that we wanted to get done in their home markets.
I love football, but I agree it's shameful that the taxpayers are put on the hook for exorbitant stadium costs. It certainly doesn't seem to benefit the regions paying for it. This study is based on relatively old data, but it's findings suggest that stadium construction actually HARMS the local community. Indeed, my work with Humphreys finds that the professional sports environment—which includes the presence of franchises in multiple sports, the arrival or departure of teams, and stadium construction—may actually reduce local incomes. For example, we found that the overall sports environment reduced per capita personal income, a finding that was new in the economic literature at the time we published it (1999). We also found that, in many local economies, wages and employment in the retail and services sectors have dropped because of professional sports.