Reddit mentions of Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums

I don't know what specific studies Mr. Longhair was talking about specifically, but I'm pretty sure he's referring to the work of Roger Noll, a Stanford professor emeritus in economics and a former senior economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. The economics of sports is/was one of his research focuses and he wrote a book in 1997 on the subject of taxes to fund stadiums and their economic impact. He's the go-to expert that journalists, local and national, turn to when they're writing pieces on the public funding of stadiums.

>There is such an enormous economic impact to being an NFL city that goes way way beyond whether our team sucks or not.

True, but not in the way you intended.

More often than not, "stadiums and arenas rarely bring about the promised prosperity, and instead leave cities and states mired in debt that they can't pay back before the franchise comes calling for more" according to leading sports economics that study the impact of stadium construction. (Atlantic, 2012)

"NFL stadiums do not generate significant local economic growth, and the incremental tax revenue is not sufficient to cover any significant financial contribution by the city,” said Noll, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He has written articles and books and given talks on the public financing of sports stadiums. (Stanford, 2015)


"Hidden costs may include city or county [...] issuance of tax-free bonds that divert investors’ money away from school, road, and mass-transit infrastructure (Hamilton County, Ohio, issued tax-free bonds to fund the stadium where the Cincinnati Bengals play, and has chronic deficits for school and infrastructure needs as a result)." (Atlantic, 2015)

"In a 2015 study, Ted Gayer and Alex Gold of the Brookings Institution concluded, “Despite the fact that new stadiums are thought to boost local economic growth and job creation, these benefits are often overstated. Academic studies typically find no discernible positive relationship between sports facility construction and economic development. Most evidence suggests sports subsidies cannot be justified on the grounds of local economic development, income growth, or job creation.” " (Atlantic, 2015)

See also:
-(Atlantic, 2018)

Based on what? Intuition? Or actual scholarly inquiry into a complex economic subject? Because there's been a lot of the latter, and it doesn't usually come out looking good.

Here's a 500 page book on the subject one might choose to read.