This is Part 2 of a multi-part story that explains the nature of stadium drama in the United States of America from a pro-sports but liberal perspective. I do not know how many parts this will have, as I am publishing each piece as I go. Part 1 can be found here.
In the last post I discussed the unique ability in North America for teams to simply move to another city if they don’t get their way with regards to newer and better stadiums.
Today we will discuss the question of why we should care if there’s a team in our city. We will make two different argument sets. One for football fans, and one for non-football fans.
I am going to limit my explanation here once more to the National Football League. The problems are very similar in all of the other major American sports. Football is the hardest sell because, as I mentioned before, we are looking at 10 game dates, not 41 or 81. But if you want to think of this in terms of any sport, you probably can.
Whether you are a football fan or not, read the whole article. Even when I’m talking to “the other side”, I’m presenting information that might make you think.
Football Fans: Why does a team have to be in my city? You’re still asking a lot of us.
My first question is what kind of football fan are you? Let’s break this down by type of fan as well, because everyone is coming with different ideas about what your answers may well be.
If you like football, as a sport, in general, you’re leery about these big stadiums, because if you want to go to a game, you can pay $10 any given Friday in the fall and get a game that is plenty entertaining and just fine, thanks to the ubiquity of the high school game. If the high school level isn’t quite enough for you, the situation isn’t a whole bunch different with university options — although, colleges can often put similar demands with regards to stadiums, though the demands may be less extravagant, and the threat is not “we’ll move”, it’s “we’ll have to drop the program".
If for you, the professional game is what you need to see… first, I don’t blame you. The NFL is the most competitive sports league in the world — in that it is easily the quickest one for teams to be capable of rising to the top in. (Not to say that they actually *do* rise to the top, as any Cleveland Browns fan can attest to.) Even here, we have two sub-groups of fans.
Thanks to the rise of fantasy football, especially the short weekly games, more and more fans are becoming the fans of every team, of just caring about the players on their fantasy teams, and not so much an individual team. Of course, in a lot of cases this is because your city doesn’t *have* an NFL team, and while you could support the “nearest” team, such as being a Seahawks fan in Portland or something, there’s not really a compelling reason to do this, because it’s not like you’ll ever drive there for a game. Of course, if you were to *get* a team in your city, things become more interesting. How badly you want that team varies. Be smart, don’t agree to a bad deal. Consider good ones.
(This is a problem that isn’t an issue in Europe, in general. If you want to go to Premier League soccer while living in England, I can guarantee your drive to the nearest team is shorter than the drive from Portland to Seattle. Not to mention that you almost certainly have a minor league team that can rise up to BPL nearby if you don’t have a BPL team close, and you probably support that team.)
If you are the other type of pro football fan, you have your team. You’ve maybe been to a few of their games (although maybe you can’t afford it, too many teams are rising prices out of affordability.) You might just be a casual fan, you might be a diehard fan. If you’re a diehard fan, of course, I don’t need to explain anything to you. You care more than I do. You desperately don’t want your precious team to move. It’s an important piece of your identity. I hope you are smart enough to not approve a terrible deal just to keep your team, however. (I have some food for thought on this at the end.)
For the more casual fan of a team, you can possibly survive it not being a part of your identity. It would be a change, but it would not be a killer. I think this is where I fit in with regards to the Chargers, for instance. We want the stadium, but we want a good deal. We understand that there is value in having the team, and the stadium as well for that matter. It’s our job to explain what the stadium means to us, and I will attempt to do below. Overall, here, I say to judge wisely. We must figure out what we are willing to do to keep the team, and not go overboard.
Non-Football Fans: I don’t care about football. Why should I care about a stadium? It’s a terrible economic proposition, etc.
What does a stadium, a team, actually do for a city? I am not going to talk about direct economic impacts. Those are well-covered by other authors, and precisely the reason I do not want a bad stadium deal. Bad deals can screw cities over. But there’s more to life than economics.
Community building is a thing. People that support a sports team, right away, have something in common. Republicans and Democrats in San Diego overwhelmingly have one point of commonality: they are Chargers fans and Padres fans. It’s not universal, as not everyone cares about sports. But it is one easy common interest to discover, one way to bring people closer together. The football game isn’t about the 22 players on the field. It’s about the 60,000 people in the stands, engaging in a collective human experience, and perhaps even a million fans engaging in it on a more distant level through the television and other such devices.
On this same note, sports provide a safe outlet for tribalism. In antiquity, tribalism lead to hatred and violence. It still does in many parts of the world. But sports give us an opportunity to compete against each other, whether it’s nation vs. nation as in the Olympics and World Cup, school vs. school as in college and high school sports, or city vs. city as in professional sports. Even though the players don’t necessarily have ties to the city before their hiring for a particular team, the fans can still pull together.
Civil respect matters. For better or for worse, cities that have major sports teams are better respected as cities. They feel more like legitimate big cities when you have the big teams there. You may take issue with this, not being a sports fan, but it’s the reality of American culture.
Stadiums host other events too. While the economic impact of such things should not be overstated (individual events have little to no direct economic impact on a city), being able to host other events that require such large stadiums benefits the city simply as a matter of pride. “Big Event — YOUR CITY” feels good. Feelings do matter.
Stadium design and location matters. Petco Park revitalized a decent part of the East Village in downtown San Diego and has been an overall boon. If you do it right, you *can* make stadiums an economic benefit. They just happen to rarely be done correctly.
Conclusion
Even if you are a diehard sports fan, you should not accept a terrible deal for your city just to keep or get a team. The city can get screwed over and you will get very serious buyer’s remorse. The economic impacts are well defined by others.
Even if you’re not a sports fan, there are good reasons to want a stadium in your city. It is interesting how we, as liberals, are always calling to human emotions, to caring, to community, and then reject it so ferociously when it comes to the sporting world. This is justified to an extent, because there are still a lot of problems, and a lot of bad deals being proposed. But some deals just might be worth it. Every deal should be examined on its own merits.
One other thing to note: (The “food for thought” I promised) If an NFL owner tells your city that there is an X dollar amount they are capable of putting into a new stadium, and that X is less than 500 million, but they also threaten to move, they are lying. The NFL charges $500 million to relocate. They might claim that they can make more money elsewhere, and thus that makes the difference between whether the $500 million comes from, but if that’s all they cared about, they would likely be already gone. Any NFL owner can put in at least $500 million towards a stadium in your city — they’d need to do that, plus stadium costs, to go elsewhere. If they truly can’t afford the $500 million you have them over a barrel because they can’t move anyway. Get a great deal! (Other leagues have different relocation fees.)
Next time: For those that want to keep a team, but think that the economic costs of keeping one are too much, despite the non-economic points in this post. What can possibly be done about this system of extortion? I will discuss a few alternatives to the current American sports model.