Publicly funded NFL Stadiums
THE BOX SCORE
NFL stadiums are expensive.
The American public pays for about 1/3rd of the cost of stadiums through tax dollars.
the complete game
I love football. I love awesome stadiums. But I hate publicly funded stadiums (i.e., using tax dollars to build or renovate stadiums). We’ll get to why it is wrong to ask the public to build NFL stadiums in the next post, but, for now, let’s get a view from the cheap seats of how much things cost.
NFL stadiums are expensive. Really expensive. The following chart looks at the original construction costs for all 30 current stadiums.
Cost of New Construction for NFL Stadiums.
Note a couple of things about the chart above.
It cost more than $20.5 billion to build 30 NFL stadiums, which is enough to buy 57 million Apple Watches or send the whole town of Missoula, Montana (pop. 76,000) to space on Virgin Galactic.
SoFi stadium is really, really expensive. At $5 billion dollars, it costs more than 19 other NFL stadiums combined.
Still, that chart doesn’t give us the whole picture. If we take into account stadium renovations and control for inflation (in 2021 dollars), NFL stadium costs balloon to almost $33 billion. That is roughly equivalent to what the U.S. spends in foreign aid each year. (And that doesn’t even count the myriad tax breaks, tax credits, tax rebates, donated land, infrastructure projects, and opportunity costs that state and local politicians give NFL owners.)
Total Cost of Construction and Renovation for NFL Stadiums in 2021 Dollars.
There is nothing wrong with building expensive stadiums. What I don’t like is billionaire owners making John and Jane Q. Taxpayer foot the bill. Americans have paid over $10.6 billion to build the current NFL stadiums. But when we want to visit that stadium we helped build, we’re then required to pay that owner $200 per ticket, $50 for parking, $13.75 for a beer and $6.25 for a hot dog.
Public Contribution to NFL Stadium Construction/Renovation in 2021 Dollars.
You might think, “good for SoFi, Met Life, Hard Rock, and Gillette stadiums for not taking public money.” I agree. But even a privately funded stadiums still receives a lot of benefits from the government. For instance, New Jersey spent over $250 million on infrastructure and land to support Met Life Stadium. And while Stan Kroenke used private money to build SoFi, he also receives over $100 million in tax breaks.
One good piece of information is that the percentage of public funds used to build/renovate stadiums has gone down over time.
Percentage of Public Funds Spent on Construction/Renovation of NFL Stadiums by Year
Yet, that trend won’t last. The Buffalo Bills will soon break ground on a new $1.4 billion stadium, with taxpayers picking up $850 million of the tab. The Tennessee Titans are asking the public to contribute $500 million to their new $2 billion stadium. The Maryland legislature committed $1.2 billion for renovations to Camden Yards and M&T Bank Stadium. And until Dan Snyder finally wore out his welcome, it looked like Virginia was going to foot a lion’s share of the $3 billion stadium for the Commanders.
Now that we know a little about the costs, the next post will explore how billionaire owners get average Americans to pay for their stadiums.
