“Where are our priorities?” asked Senn high school history teacher Jesse Sharkey in a Reader article last fall about the $360 million the city paid to rebuild Soldier Field so the Bears can play eight games a year there. “It’s just outrageous that our city would spend all those hundreds of millions of dollars on a new stadium but can only come up with $1 million for reduction of class size,” Sharkey said. His comments inspired writer Ben Joravsky to note that, curiously, in all the furor over the stadium’s location and design, “the one aspect of the project that engendered little early public criticism was that price tag.”
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Rosentraub argues that professional sport is on the receiving end of an enormous welfare system paid for by the average citizen to benefit an elite group of successful, privately owned businesses and their employees. The key to understanding the system, he says, is to recognize that there is no free market in pro sports–the leagues are cartels. The NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL exist to make team owners and players rich, and they do that by limiting the number of their teams. By keeping supply smaller than demand, they create the only real competition in the business–that between cities striving against each other, offering ever fatter subsidies and more lavish facilities to land or hang on to a precious team. To level the playing field, Rosentraub says, we’d need a twofold act of Congress: legislators would have to repeal the Sports Broadcast Act, which gave the NFL the right to sell its games to more than one network, and take away the leagues’ ability to limit the number of franchises.
Campaigns for new stadiums follow two patterns: if a city has a team, the owner threatens to take it elsewhere if he doesn’t get the new facility or improvements he says he needs. A city without a team may be convinced that if it builds a stadium, a team will come. In both cases, arguments get put forth about how good the new facility will be for the city–how it will spur development and boost the economy. But Rosentraub says these claims are seldom examined carefully–in part because sports play a nostalgic, emotional role in our lives–and that if they were examined, they wouldn’t hold up. “If you ask the question, ‘What do sports do for a regional economy?’, the answer is ‘zero,’” he says. “The presence or absence of a sports team has no correlation to economic activity.”
