Pros And Cons Of Building Professional Sports Stadiums

Abstract

Majority of new professional sport stadiums and arenas are funded through taxpayers’ dollars today. Economic analysts see this as an issue to the general public because of the lack of benefits that are involved. The history of this topic will be presented and discussed along with the financial breakdown of the total costs. It will be noted on how professional sports stadiums were built from private funding. This could be a reason to why concerns have been brought up to the public’s attention and the opportunity to lower the percentage that taxpayers have to pay.

Introduction

Majority of the funding used to build arenas and professional sport stadiums come from taxpayers’ dollars. Public funding has drawn a concern because of the lack of

This usually comes in the form of taxes.

“In the context of sport, economic impact is defined as the net economic change in a host community that results from spending attributed to a sport event or facility.” (Crompton 1995).

Although recent professional sport stadiums have been funded and built off of the public’s tax dollars, they can also be built with the source of private money. According to the authors (Poitras et al. 2006), subsidies to build professional sports stadiums are considered “unnecessary”. In their analysis, new professional sports stadiums could recover all of their construction costs if they were built by private money. This cannot happen if this is done through public money like taxpayers’ dollars. Private money refers to lending money to a company or individual from a private individual or organization.

In fact, there have been several stadiums that have been built off of private funding. In 1997, the Atlanta Braves’ Turner Field was built with 100 percent private funding. In 2001, the San Francisco Giants’ SBC Park was built with over 96 percent of private funding (Poitras et al.