The people negotiating the Buffalo Bills' stadium deal barely bothered making a coldly rational case for it because there isn’t one. williamfleitch writes on why the politicians involved will probably get away with it anyway
Photo: Bryan Bennett/Getty Images Even by the low standards of publicly funded stadium boondoggles, the deal to build the Buffalo Bills a new home is terrible. The team’s new $1.4 billion venue, to be constructed adjacent to the current Highmark Stadium, will cost state taxpayers $850 million, the largest-ever public expenditure for an NFL stadium.
What’s fascinating is how weakly even the stadium’s boosters are defending this thing. Hochul has said it will “create 10,000 construction jobs,” which is a long way from promising it will pay for itself. The state did a study, quoted in the governor’s press release about the deal, finding that the Bills “generate $27 million annually in direct income, sales, and use taxes for New York State, Erie County, and Buffalo.
Sports are big business, obviously. The NFL projects $25 billion in revenue by 2027, which would make it three times as big as, say, News Corp. But the reason sports make money at all, considering they provide no essential service — they don’t cook food or farm the land or mass-produce hybrid cars or anything — is that people care about them. We assign them a value that goes beyond money. If sports were a zero-sum industry, they would go out of business because we don’t actually need them.
Which is to say, if the Bills left Buffalo, that would be all she wrote for NFL football there. And if you argue, not unreasonably, that there shouldn’t be a team there given the city’s recent trajectory, well, I’m gonna bet you don’t have any sort of connection to Buffalo. The Bills are such an inextricable part of the city’s and the region’s identity that losing them would be devastating — even more from a cultural standpoint than a financial one. “This is the No.
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