Superbowl Sunday highlights conservative welfare state in action

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Feb 07, 2010 at 08:00

Last Friday, just on the eve of Superbowl weekend, the issue of a possible lockout of players in the 2011 season erupted to throw a discordant note into mix. Although NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell tried to downplay the possibility, even the WaPo noticed that things weren't right, reporting that:

On the players' side, Tennessee Titans center Kevin Mawae, the president of the union, told a Congressional subcommittee during a hearing last month on Capitol Hill that the players are fully anticipating being locked out by the owners in 2011. DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the union, said Thursday that the owners had taken a series of steps that appeared designed to lock out the players.

Asked during his annual news conference Thursday about the prospects of a lockout in 2011, Smith called the urgency of the situation a 14 on a scale of 1 to 10.

The owners want massive give-backs from the players, because they claim to be losing money--which would not be surprising, since according to David Cay Johnston, author of Free Lunch, NONE of the big four subsidized monopoly sports leagues makes more money than it receives in public subsidies.  

Below is a clip from Johsnton talking about this on Democracy Now just over a year ago.  Although he focused almost exclusively on baseball in the clip--with a special little section on GW Bush & how local taxpayers made him rich--he did have this to say, more broadly:

Now, in this country right now, we are spending $2 billion a year subsidizing the big four sports: baseball, basketball, football and hockey. It accounts for all of the profits of that industry and more. Now, there may be individual teams that make money, but the industry as a whole is not profitable. And that's astonishing because the big four leagues are exempt from the laws of competition. By the way, irony is not dead, because here are people who are in the business of competition on the field who are exempted by law from the rules of economic competition.

If you go to England and you want to start a soccer team, they have to let you join the soccer league. There are thirteen commercial soccer teams in the London area. New York City, the biggest city in the country, there are two baseball teams, because there's no free entry into the market. In Los Angeles, there's no football team. And the owners use this power to prevent others from owning teams, to prevent municipal governments from owning teams, to prevent nonprofits from owning teams, to extract money from the taxpayers to build them new stadiums.

That's the conservative welfare state in action.

Sports stadiums in general are economic losers, and as for the Superbowl itself, it's not nearly as lucrative as the NFL claims, according to the folks at McCaltchy, the same outfit that wasn't snookered by Bush/Cheney on the whole Iraq War caper:

MIAMI -- Boosters say a Super Bowl is worth $500 million to a host city. But many others scoff at that notion.

As Miami-area taxpayers consider a proposal by the NFL's Dolphins to have their stadium renovated, backers say to look at the numbers: Without a reported $250 million in improvements, the region could miss out on future Super Bowls and the nearly $500 million each game pumps into the economy.

But economists contend the math isn't nearly that simple -- or compelling.

Economists who study sports put the Super Bowl's net economic value at less than $100 million. And they accuse the NFL of dramatically inflating the Super Bowl's spending power for moments such as this, when teams want governments to fund stadium expenses.

"If they weren't talking about the numbers as justification for big public subsidies, I'd let them say whatever number they'd want," said Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., who co-wrote a 2006 study titled "Padding Required: Assessing the Economic Impact of the Super Bowl."

His research shows that the Super Bowl's economic punch probably tops out around $90 million, although it can dip for tourist destinations such as Miami that already enjoy busy winters. His research found that in 1999, the area's economy gained $36 million from playing host to the Super Bowl.

"Not that you'd turn down $30 (million) or $40 (million) or $50 million for one of these events," he added, "but don't tell me it's $400 million."

Using a formula based on tax and income data, Craig Depken, an economist at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, estimated that the Super Bowl added $58 million to southern Florida's economy in 2007.

"It's not nothing. It's not zero," he said. "But it's not nearly what the NFL says it is."

There are citizen fights against stadium scams going on all across the country.  It's gotten particularly fierce lately, what with every sort of public service being cut to the bone--and beyond.  You can get an introductory taste from this breezy overview from SignOnSanDiego, and then get more just by Googling NFL+stadium+subsidies, or go to the motherload at Field of Schemes.

Also of interest is the Stadium Facts blog, which is "the work of a group of Santa Clara residents who are opposed to the City's proposed subsidy of a stadium for the San Francisco 49ers."  These folks really know their stuff, with lots of broader supporting info in their links.  This 2003 study (pdf) of how sports reduces overall income, for instance.  From the abstract:

This paper explores the impact of professional sports teams and stadiums on the wages of individuals employed in several narrowly defined occupational groups in cities in the United States. The occupational groups examined are among those that proponents of public funding of professional sports claim will benefit economically from these stadiums. Our analysis uses data from the March Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS) for the period 1977 to 1998 as well as sports variables previously utilized by Coates and Humphreys (1999), (2001). Previous research focused on aggregate measures of income whereas here the focus is on the wages of individual workers. The results of the study confirm conclusions of earlier research that the overall sports environment is frequently statistically significant as a determinant of earnings and that the predicted mean impact of sports on wages in a sample of individuals employed in occupations closely related to professional sports is an annual average decrease in real earnings of $47.95. The results also show that the effects of the sports environment on wages differ across job-types. Workers in retail occupations earn more on average each year due to the presence of professional sports while workers in other peripherally related occupations like food services and hotels earn less.

So, don't let this be a buzz kill or anything. It's just a teachable moment, know what I mean?