Read the following post and give your comments on it. What do you agree with? What do you disagree with?

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Cities and their residents are proud of their professional sports teams, people from New-York are proud of the Nets, Boston is proud of having the Celtics Therefore, cities are willing to host these teams. To do so, they pay for stadium renovation or even construction when a team wants to relocate. However, there are questions about the actual economic impact of stadiums and arenas in host communities. These questions regard the integrity of the developers and politicians who embellish its economic impact. We will see how and why that is done and if this practice is ethical.

Here is how it works. Residents of a community give funds to their city council via taxes. The city council then uses funds to subsidize the production of events, facilities These facilities or events attract visitors from out-of-town who spend money in the local community. This money creates income and jobs for the community. Therefore, it is a cycle where residents are responsible for creating funds to receive a return on their investment via jobs and new incomes. (Crompton, 1995, p. 15) They are responsible for the economic impact. In sports, economic impact is defined as the net economic change in a host community that results from spending attributed to a sports event or facility. (Crompton, 1995, p. 15) We will see later, that most economic studies fail to find enough net gain to a community to justify the large public outlays to build a new stadium. (Brown, Rascher, Nagel, McEvoy, 2016, p. 220) So how politicians and developers still get the public funding to build new stadiums? One of the reasons why it happens is due to the league. Professional leagues only allow a certain number of teams in their leagues. Teams can, therefore, choose where to base themselves and have the possibility to relocate. Residents of a city do not want their team to leave their city, so they are usually willing to foot the bill for most of a facilitys construction and maintenance costs. (Brown, Rascher, Nagel, McEvoy, 2016, p. 220) They also usually state that it will create jobs and bring value via spending for parking, food, and drinks at the stadium, restaurants It would also increase the value of the place and create opportunities to create new shops and more jobs. For example, the new stadium for Los Angeles Rams could cost $3 billion but would create 22.000 jobs. (Wolla, 2017) The numbers showed by studies, depend on who commissions the study. Consultants are hired in large measure to tell their clients what they want to hear, and what they want to hear is that their event or team or whatever is going to generate a lot of money. They will if necessary incorporate assumptions and adopt methods that facilitate the support of their point of view. This is because economic impact analysis rests on assumptions such as Using Sales Instead of Household Income Multipliers; Misrepresentation of Employment Multipliers; Using Incremental Instead of Normal Multiplier Coefficients (Crompton, 1995, p. 17) For example, in 1992 when the San Francisco Giants could leave their stadium for San Jose, the citys budget director report that she could only document an insignificant $3.1 million net gain to the city coming from the Giants. In contrast, the mayor of San Jose, who tried to persuade the citys residents to approve $265 million of public funds for the new stadium announced that the team would deliver between $50-150 million a year in economic benefits. (Crompton, 1995, p. 16) The last part which could justify public fundings allocated to stadiums construction and that developers and politicians use is the psychic impact. For each major professional team, the States of Michigan and Minnesota estimate about $100 million of psychic impact. Therefore, for some, the economic impact added to the psychic impact could justify some public facility investments. (Brown, Rascher, Nagel, McEvoy, 2016, p. 220) They lack integrity towards their community as they deliver promises to get funding, that will not be held and will impact them even negatively.

The controversy due to sports stadiums comes from the fact that those who gain the most from the construction are not always those who pay for it. (Brown, Rascher, Nagel, McEvoy, 2016, p. 220) The teams make the profit, while the city residents, the funders do not. We could compare it to medieval cathedrals which showed the pride and strength of a city but not necessarily made sense from an economic perspective. 86% of economists agree that local and state governments in the US should eliminate subsidies to professional sports franchises as they cost taxpayers more than they generate economic benefits. Indeed, the best impact they have is very small, and no facility had a reasonable return on investment. (Wolla, 2017) These findings are supported by Crompton too. As construction of new sports facilities does not significantly enrich cities. . .. Rather, they typify the kinds of wasteful expenditures our society makes. When independent studies evaluate the economic impact of public subsidies for sports teams, the results are not encouraging. (1995, p. 17) This makes sense in another way. If consumers would not spend their money to attend baseball games, for example, they would more than likely still spend it on other hobbies. Therefore, this public money could be spent on infrastructures, education, police which benefits more to the local community. (Wolla, 2017)

We can argue that it is not ethical. Ethics being the body of moral principles or values governing or distinctive of a particular culture or group. (Ethic, N/d) As especially, developers know that it is not going to benefit the community but only the sports team itself. Politicians may be biased by the research as they might just see the numbers and think it could benefit the city and its residents. Therefore, it is not in agreement with core values such as honesty due to the biased results by using assumptions to get the numbers to say what you want them to say. It is not just as well as it will cost to the community and its residents without giving them back. And it is not being consistent in word and deed as they state it will benefit them, but it will not, and they know it.