I grew up on the east coast, so I grew up loving the Philadelphia Eagles, Baltimore Orioles, Washington Capitals, and Maryland Terrapins. I played four sports as a teenager: football, baseball, basketball, and I wrestled. When we weren't playing sports, my friends and I would be playing Madden Football video games. To this day, the Superbowl is a holiday in my house. When we get local coverage of an Eagles game, it is on my television set, and I am usually screaming at the TV like I'm at the game. When the NCAA basketball tournament starts, it's like my little personal Christmas in March.
That being said, something is seriously wrong with the way professional sports teams take advantage of America's taxpaying public, and it needs to stop. Professional sports are big business, with revenues grossing in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Why team owners feel the need to threaten the cities they reside in is beyond bad business, reeks of greed, and they should be ashamed of themselves.
Professional sports teams make money on so many levels, and while overhead is high, the revenue from games should more than cover their costs. Owners make money from ticket sales, concessions, merchandise, sponsorships, and advertisers. They pay salaries to their players and staff, rent on their practice facilities and sometimes their stadiums, travel expenses for the team to go to other cities, and the rest is profit.
Team owners should accept responsibility for their free-market capitalist decision to buy a sports team, and stop asking the public to chip in. Imagine if the CEO of Sprint or Hallmark asked the City Council to put an initiative on the ballot to have the taxpayers fix their corporate headquarters because it was aging and in need of repair. Yet that is just what the Chiefs and Royals have done to Kansas City, and it happens every year across the country in one city or another.
The way it works is the team owner threatens to move the team to another city if they don't get the tax breaks and public contributions they are looking for. Owners put pressure on local politicians to produce results for them, or face re-election being the candidate that let the local team slip away.
It's a catch 22: do what is in the public interest, or give the public what they want. When most of the general public is faced with an election, they will vote to give the teams whatever they want, and owners know this. The deal gets sweetened if there is a phantom city waiting in the shadows, offering better public financing than the city they are in.
That's when owners really rake it in. Kansas City was that phantom city to Pittsburgh over the Penguins last year, and Pittsburgh paid a pretty penny to keep their hockey team.
The problem would not persist if local leaders would put their foot down. Yet, politicians won't dare touch the sports issue, as it looks good on the campaign trail to have the local sports hero on your side. "The quarterback passed me a vote and so should you!" No one wants to be held responsible for letting the team leave their city, even if it is the responsible thing to do.
What is the economic impact of having a sports team leave your city? Unless the team is involved in a downtown renovation involving a new stadium, they do very little for local economies. Even then, such renovations sometimes flop, leaving taxpayers holding the tab. When a stadium is not in the inner city and surrounded by parking lots, it detracts from the area it inhabits.
All one needs to do is to look at the Truman Sports Complex and all the good it does for the community. There are about three businesses that benefit from the stadium being located where they are, and the city right next door, Raytown, is suffering. What economic benefit has Raytown seen from Chiefs and Royals games? Yet, the taxpayers of Jackson County last year passed a half-billion dollar bailout for team owners Clark Hunt and David Glass.
Let's look at a few cities and how their sports teams have affected them. Los Angeles lost two NFL football teams in one year, but L.A. continues to grow and have one of the largest economies in the country.
Detroit recently built a new downtown baseball stadium - taxpayer-funded of course - and their downtown did get vibrant for a year. But Detroit now has the highest unemployment rate in the country and is on the verge of financial ruin.
Pittsburgh tried the same thing with their downtown, demolishing Three Rivers Stadium, and building two separate stadiums for the Pirates and Steelers. Once again the economic impact hasn't followed a huge public investment.
Professional sports are a private enterprise. Owners take in all the profits, and the communities pay for the right simply to have a sports team. It won't be until local leaders step up and fight for their constituents and the economic well-being of the cities they represent, that this system will change.
Tell us what you think. Write Spectrum at editor@mcckc.edu.
Copyright 2007 Metropolitan Community College