With the professional football season officially underway, I thought that it would be a great time to take a look at one facet of the economics of football, professional stadiums. It came to my attention that all but four of the professional football teams in the United States play in an open-air stadium which I thought was really interesting. To me this seems counterintuitive. Why would you want an open-air stadium? Is it purely because it is less expensive to build? You need less materials, less time, and less engineering so you might be able to save a couple pennies? This, however, does not hold up. If we do a quick comparison, we will see an open-air stadium, MetLife Stadium, built in 2010 cost $1.6 Billion where as a stadium with a retractable …show more content…
Why would you want an open-air stadium? I would think that a domed stadium would be preferable for several reasons. To start with, if you had a domed stadium wouldn’t you be able to charge more per ticket for seating? Personally, if I were to go to a football game I would gladly pay a little bit extra to stay warm and know that I would not get rained or snowed on. Secondly, wouldn’t you want to minimize the amount of risk to your players from poor weather conditions? If your players are how you generate revenue, then it would follow that you would want to minimize their chance of injury or harm. These all seem to lead to the idea that an open-air stadium is an irrational choice. If it were an irrational choice, however, I would not expect it to be so widespread. Of the 32 professional football teams in the United States there are only four teams that currently play in a domed stadium and two of those four teams are currently in the process of building new stadiums that are not domed. With that many teams either already using an open-air stadium or in the process of moving to one it seems hard to believe that they could all be making the same foolish