You're probably wondering why the afformentioned peer-reviewed articles are arriving to these conclusions.
In a nutshell, sports franchises do not expand to any noticeable degree the size of the total budget in a jurisdiction for entertainment. Sports is entertainment and we all have a household budget to consume entertainment. All of the households in a jurisdiction then have the aggregate budget. Whether there is a sports team there or not, the budget does not change. So instead of going to the Flames game, we will spend that entertainment budget on other types of entertainment meaning no net change in economic activity.
For a sports team to actually have a net benefit it would need to demonstrate that it was either adding sports spending from other jurisdictions (net of outflowing sports spending from within the jurisdiction to other franchises) or that people were spending a higher budget on entertainment to a noticeable degree. Neither effect happens.
As a result, there's no incremental economic activity from sports franchises on the new very expensive stadiums that support them.
For the public, it's just a plain bad investment and unnecessary knowing that the owners of franchises would have to pay for them if there were no public subsidies.
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