Jeff Jarvis is down on sports:
In newspapers, according to studies I once read (but can’t Google now), about 20 percent of a newspaper’s audience reads sports. And sports sections get little advertising, apart from tire ads. Yet a large proportion of the editorial and paper budget of a paper goes to sports and in these days of declining revenues, that’s an important consideration. (More on that in a bit.)
On cable TV, I have to pay for lots of sports channels I never watch. Why should I? Maybe everybody else should help pay for my broadband internet bill, huh?
Let’s correct one misunderstanding: Jeff isn’t paying for “a lot of sports channels” on cable TV. He’s paying for ESPN, and the sports fans who subscribe to the extra-cost channels are subsidizing his TV bill; he should thank them.
Then he shoots at an easy target, public funding for pro sports stadiums:
In New Jersey, the state just agreed to build a new $750 million stadium to keep the Giants — a profitable, independent business, last I checked — with considerable taxpayer support. But very few taxpayers will ever get to see a game at that stadium; hell, season tickets are only inherited.
This is a complicated fiscal issue. While it’s not clear that public funding ends up costing the tax payers in the long run, it is clear that pro sports are manna for working people. So it’s appropriate for people in Jeff’s income bracket to show a little appreciation for the people who wash their toilets and cut their lawns by giving them a few bucks toward a baseball team.
When did we get so miserly that we begrudge people of modest means a little happiness?
I can’t imagine why they’d need to replace Giant Stadium.
It works, and works well.
The only reason?
NY is building another one.
Here’s where things get a bit less nice for the little guy. The sports market is only so big (which was probably Jarvis’s point). When NY builds a stadium, it creates pressure for NJ to do something and vice-versa, because a new stadium is a threat to the other’s market share.
This has gone on all over the country, (and in Japan too).
This fight over market share- like the wars between Coke and Pepsi over which carbonated caffeinated sugar drink with pH of vinegar- results ultimately in decreased quality (sports talent is not uniformly distributed at all) and higher ticket prices for the consumer.
Sure the state for a time gets some construction employment but at the cost of tax abatements usually.
I like sports. I especially think Giant Stadium is a perfectly fine place for the Giants to play (except it’s not in NY).
But this- not just player’s salaries- ends up gouging the consumer twice- first in lost tax revenues, and then in higher ticket prices.
Can the people who scrub your toilets afford tickets? Or did you assume they’d watch t.v.? If t.v., why not the good old fashioned high school stadiums with cheap admission and lots of everyday fans instead of those luxury suites that the lobbyists lend out to their favorite politicians?
John, without a new stadium where is the Mob going to bury all those bodies? Think of the impact on Wendy’s chili. But I digress.
How do subsidies cause higher ticket prices? It seems like the opposite to me.
And sure, the toilet-cleaners and hod-carriers can’t buy tickets every week to football, but they can for sure get bleacher seats to a baseball game.
I will grant you both that football sucks, but the common people aren’t all sophisticated enough to appreciate the wonder of baseball.
Nah – Football is great! Baseball is OK tho!
Seriously though, for NJ, I do not see much of a burden. But John’s point is true for many cities. Ask Montreal, when I last checked, was still paying its dues on the Olympic Stadium.
So what’s the deal, do they put a tax on the tickets to pay off the stadium?
It used to be that stadiums used bond financing paid off by the franchise; it was just a scam to get a good interest rate.
What I understand is that they couldnt sell tickets well enough. There wasnt any other activity in the neighborhood for a moderate number of businesses to come up around the stadium – it is quite a bit away from the Centreville and people werent really keen to go to that part of the city (it happens to be on the eastern edge of the city – the french part :)). So, there wasnt enough economic activity around it either.
The Expos failed for several reasons, but one reason also the stadium being far out.
On the other hand, I feel cities should be careful when they venture into these now-almost-a-billion projects. Skydome in Toronto when built was supposed to be a technological marvel etc etc and it did well for a few years. Then the novelty wore out and the Jays started sucking and it is also in debt right now.
I seem to have heard somewhere that the Expos sold a lot of tickets for the first ten years or so, but when they started to suck their attendance went down. It could have been the novelty factor, because I can’t see froggies liking baseball unless the players rode bicycles and smoked on the bases.
Richard, Richard, the Expos always sucked, except for two or 3 years in their approximately 30 year history.
See, that’s the other problem: City builds new stadium, city gets expansion team (which axiomatically sucks), expansion team sucks for years, ticket sales go down as people realize that the expansion team isn’t going to get the 3% or so of players with talent.
Team moves on.
Looking at the attendance figures, I see that the Expos did indeed sell a lot of tickets from the beginning in 1969 until about 1990. Their problem seems to be area population and poor performance, as they hit a plateau in attendance in 1990 while the rest of baseball continued to grow.
See this link.
Beg to differ, sport.
Back when I still had cable (quit cold turkey months ago, and haven’t missed it a bit), I was stuck with 7 sports channels– out of 60– that I never watched but still had to pay for.
There was ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, Fox Sports Net, NESN (New England Sports Network), The Golf Channel and the Outdoor Life Network.
Granted, a number of those are ESPN spin-offs, but they still make up more than 10% of the channels offered on basic, non-digital cable.
If you want to get picky about it, I never watched more than 50 of the channels I had to pay for. I only watched Fox News, Discovery, History, Cartoon Network, Sci-Fi, Comedy Central, A&E, and The Weather Channel. For this I spent $50 per month.
If premium-channel subscribers were subsidizing my cable bill, I shudder to think of what my bill might have been.
$50 and 60 channels doesn’t sound like any Basic Cable package I’ve ever seen.
yeah Stadiums are sweet