The fact that sports are a big business does not necessarily translate into any real benefit for individual communities, and often can be seen as a construct in which the general public, is more or less, subsidizing billionaire sports owners for the stadium or arena facilities so being constructed. The very first hint that things are out of skew is the fact that the billionaires or the mega rich that own these sports franchises aren’t really interested in owning their own stadium or arena, but distinctly prefer to have these stadiums and arenas built by taxpayer monies, all under the guise that somehow these stadiums and arenas are a net good to the community, which makes no sense, since if they were actually a net good, financially, then these very savvy owners would own them privately.
It was not all that long ago, that as reported in the book, Field of Schemes, we find that it was common that “…until the late 1940s and '50s, most professional sports teams played in privately owned facilities built by the teams' owners with their own revenue;” but those days are long over for it is now pretty much typical for stadiums and arenas to be built by taxpayer money nowadays on behalf of the mega rich owners. While sports owners can cite all sorts of surveys about how beneficial such a stadium will be for the community at large, and the employment thereof; the reality is that this isn’t true, because common sense indicates that, for example, a professional football stadium so used for football games ten times in a calendar year, is almost for a certainty going to be a money loser, because of the expense so necessitated to create that stadium, in the first place, and the fact that the stadium is so underutilized as compared to alternate uses of that area for business enterprises, or educational facilities, or anything of actual purpose.
Further to the point, when public monies are misallocated to essentially help feather the bed of those that are mega rich, then those that are members of that community, are going to suffer the ill effects of the lost of infrastructure and real businesses that could have actually helped the community in improving itself, by the collection of fair payroll, property and sales taxes and the like. While, it is true, that communities often do take pride in their sports teams, that doesn’t mean that they should be stuck footing the bill for the stadium, in which they never benefit from the profit and the increased worth of the sports franchise. In other words, at the present time this is the worse of all worlds, in which, the mega rich, are permitted to reduce their financial exposure by laying off onto the public the significant expense of the stadium, while aggrandizing into their own hands, the profits and the ever-increasing value of said franchise. So that, in essence, the public subsidizes and ends up holding the bag for those that are already exceedingly wealthy and powerful, with no real upside, while suffering from the considerable risk of financial downside.
When it comes to sports, it should never be about privatized profits, with socialized losses, but this is in fact, the situation as it really is. Those, then, that are the stewards of the public purse, need to better understand that if the mega rich won’t personally fairly pay for that which they claim that they need, then it must not be a good financial deal for the general public.