Quote:
Originally Posted by driveway
|
I'd say it's pretty well established that it is a bad economic investment of public funds. It basically boils down to teams shouldn't be paying 100 million/year in players salaries if they can't afford to invest say 50 million/year in a building for their business.
The bigger question is how to undo it all. These decisions aren't made in a vacuum and the league and owners love to play cities against each other and can usually find a city, state or province willing to pay up. The people in a city generally don't want to lose their team and the people and local politicians are basically held hostage.
There needs to be legislation on the national level in both countries to limit or ban the subsidization of stadiums, or there just isn't an easy way out of this.
Somewhat ironically, when the public does pony up for these new stadiums (so they can increase revenue), they are pricing a lot of the public out from going to the games or making it a lot more expensive for the people who go. It would be nice to see a reset in all of this, but it sure doesn't seem very likely.