When examining professional sports as a business instead of a game, you start to realize what's timeless and what's temporary. Players and coaches are temporary everyone retires eventually. Stadiums crumble no building lasts forever. Teams can change, and your team can even abandon you (sorry Seattle). The only factor that has remained constant throughout the history of modern professional sports is that all teams have a wealthy owner or a wealthy group of owners that can do whatever the hell they want.
The fan-owned Green Bay Packers are the lone exception to this rule and, according to sportswriter Dave Zirin, the ideal model for professional sports ownership. In his book "Bad Sports," Zirin explains that owners are ruining sports and that all teams should be modeled after the Packers.
After reading Zirin's book, I started to notice the noose that team owners have wrapped around our cities' necks. Billionaire owners demand that their team needs a new stadium yet refuse to pay for the facility with their own money. They badger the city, pay off politicians (oh wait, I mean "lobby") and guilt trip fans until they get the city to pledge millions of tax dollars for a new state-of-the-art facility.
If they don't get the money in a timely manner, they threaten to hijack the franchise and take the city's beloved team to a new location. Usually, the home city caves to avoid a PR nightmare, but occasionally, such as in the case of the Sonics, the owners uproot the team into the open arms of new city boasting a sparkling new stadium (what up OKC!).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this system seems royally f*cked up. Hard-working citizens are paying for a new stadium that increases profits for multimillionaires. Supposedly, new stadiums are supposed to revitalize neighborhoods and introduce new businesses and commerce into cities. I can tell you firsthand that this doesn't affect the neighborhoods that need financial assistance the most.
My hometown of Orlando recently helped pay for a $480-million basketball arena for the Orlando Magic. After paying a flat fee up front and a rent of $1 million per year, the Magic will only pay about $80 million (17 percent) of the entire arena cost after 30 years. Assuming that inflation continues at its current rate, that yearly payment becomes even less lucrative for the city with each passing year.
Magic owner Richard DeVos, Sr.'s estimated net worth is around $4.2 billion, according to Forbes Magazine. The $80-million payment is approximately two percent of the DeVos empire's net worth, and the total stadium cost of $480 million is about 11 percent. Something about this doesn't seem right a billionaire invests the equivalent of pocket change into a venture that generates incredible profits for him and the public pays for most of the bill?
I admit that a slew of new businesses have popped up adjacent to the stadium; however, the poorest area of Orlando is located just half a mile away from the stadium and it remains very poor. The money spent for the stadium didn't help out the entire city it only made the rich richer.
Professional sports is a business. Like any business, the owners' main motivation is the bottom line. The average NBA team nets approximately $5.8 million in profit every year, according to Forbes. If teams such as the Magic paid for the entire cost of a new arena, it would take over 80 years for the team to become profitable. No man who earned enough money to purchase an NBA team will ever build a stadium if these numbers are true.
The solution to this problem is to charge the players. The NBA and other professional leagues could levy a "stadium tax" on every player's salary. For the 2011-2012 season, the NBA salary cap is $58.04 million per team, which equates to about $1.74 billion spent on player salaries every year. If the NBA puts just three percent of this money every year ($52 million) into a fund, they'll have $260 million every five years to build a new arena. Teams across various cities can apply for this stadium money based on current revenues and ticket prices as well the age of the current stadium.
The current system is flawed. Entire cities shouldn't pay for expensive stadiums when only a fraction of the population can consistently attend the games. Furthermore, a municipality should never pay for a structure that mostly profits a private enterprise. If I have to pay $20 for a beer and a hotdog, I sure as hell shouldn't have to pay for the stadium as well.
