It’s the Super Bowl! Sometime soon it will be, anyway, you can Google (or Bing?) for what time it starts, but in the meantime the nation’s sports media is all agog over how much money will be raining down on (checks where the Super Bowl will be played) Glendale, Arizona as a result:
More than $1 billion. —ASU News, citing a consultant with a marketing degree who works at Arizona State University’s business school, Feb. 7
“Hundreds of millions.” —Arizona Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill, who was given Arizona Republic op-ed space for this purpose for some reason, Feb. 7
“Hundreds of millions of dollars.” —KPNX-TV, citing the same ASU business school guy, Jan. 25.
“All the way up to $1 billion.” —Sports Betting News, again citing the ASU guy, Feb. 3.
“$600 million.” —Phoenix New Times, citing guess who, Feb. 8.
“As much as $2 billion.” —Phoenix New Times one paragraph later, citing the CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce
“These are made up numbers.” —Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury, Feb. 8.
“Move the decimal point one place to the left [and] you’re much closer to what it is that it actually provides.” —Lake Forest College economist Robert Baade, Jan. 27, 2007
“Typically, a big number like that comes in and it gets a big headline. It doesn’t always get the scrutiny that it probably warrants, largely because newspapers, particularly, are understaffed and they don’t have the resources to do rigorous examination of a story like that every day.” —Louisville Courier-Journal sportswriter Tim Sullivan, Jan. 28, 2015
Not to mention Arizona is very popular this time of year so I think you would get much more displacement than you would from a place like Minneapolis.
True, the WMOpen is also playing at the same time, further displacing the ‘m/billion’ projected.
*Bidwill. Probably the most-misspelled non-eastern-European name in sports.
Eesh, thanks. I checked that against his byline, too, then still typoed it!
At least the people who run Glendale have no illusions about the money raining down on them. According to the city manager, “We’re (at) about $4 million of Glendale money to help make the Super Bowl come to reality. We will not recapture that $4 million in direct spending or net tax benefit back to the city,” said [Kevin] Phelps.
Link failed, here it is. I hope.
Links don’t work in comments for anti-spam reasons. You have to paste the URL separately:
https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/sports/fans-roll-arizona-hosts-embrace-super-sized-super-bowl-stakes-2023-02-04
On top of that, the majority of the ancillary events are being held in downtown Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, and Mesa area. Glendale only has Guy’s (Fieri) Flavortown Tailgate on game day.
The parking areas surrounding the stadium, have been taken up by various tents for those private VIP only events, that the majority of fans could never afford.
In fact, the average price of tickets (starting at $4,000) to the actual game are the second highest ever.
https://ftw.usatoday.com/2023/02/super-bowl-2023-ticket-prices-chiefs-eagles-update
Here’s how many private planes are expected in Phoenix for Super Bowl 2023
https://www.azcentral.com/story/travel/airlines/2023/02/08/super-bowl-private-planes-phoenix-airports/69876998007/
I am sure that there are private planes for the WMOpen, too.
My wife and I were in Arizona last year and stayed in Glendale as we were going to the Coyotes game one evening (why yes, we are Canadian, how did you know?), anyway, one evening we went to a delicious Mexican restaurant in downtown Glendale (not the stadium district). Lovely restaurant, great service, terrific meal. What are the chances that this place sees one extra dollar come from an event like this? I just wonder what pocket this $100.00 to $1,000,000,000.00 in money goes into?
The problem with the last point from 2015 is that journalists have given these claims a free pass for decades, long before newsrooms were gutted and understaffed. It’s lazy journalism now and it was lazy journalism then.
“Milwaukee Supervisor Dorothy Dean, a prominent opponent of the Milwaukee Brewers’ demands for a new baseball stadium, says that in the four years that the issue has been under discussion, she can’t remember ever being interviewed by the Milwaukee Journal (the city’s only remaining daily). One possible explanation was the fact that the journal’s parent company was a registered lobbyist for the stadium-funding bill.”
—Joanna Cagan and me, July 1, 1998
https://fair.org/extra/root-root-root-for-the-home-team/
I mean, if the amount of money ‘raining down’ on Glendale and Arizona more generally is a negative number (and, all things considered, it almost certainly is for any major event like the Superbowl, Olympics, World Cup etc), shouldn’t it be described as raining up?
Really, major sporting events and organizations operate quite a lot like the “nigerian prince” banking scams. They ARE going to transfer $25,000,000 into your account… but then they are going to withdraw it a microsecond later along with whatever you had in the account before.
I dream of a day when no-one is dumb enough to bid to host any major event and the promoters have to pay locations an up front fee to rent facilities as well as agree to cover special policing and other infrastructure costs. You wanna close a street for a block party celebrating yourselves? Ok, that will cost $5,000… and you have to include your cheque with the application to our development authority. Oh, it’s non refundable too.
It is the leagues and organizations that need large population centres (with their excess hotel rooms and convention centres), not the other way around.
Tempe is falling for worse than a Nigerian prince scam. The Coyotes have lost over a billion dollars since moving to Arizona 27 years ago. Yet the 7 dunces on the Tempe City Council fell onto their knees when the ultimate Nigerian prince, Gary Bettman and his sidekick Bill Daly promised Tempe an NHL All Star game or NHL draft. Give me $500 million and I’ll give you all the economic impact of an NHL draft, and I’ll keep saying there’s $500 million of economic impact.
I mean, there is an impact obviously. It’s just negative, that’s all.
The studies I’ve seen show a positive impact from the Super Bowl. It’s just very, very small.
Oh, no, Neil. This can’t be right.
When they were talking about the Super Bowl here in Detroit we were told that it would bring $200 million in return…or $100 million…or $300 million…or golly, it’ll be a lot of money. Curiously, as far as I know none of the local media looked into it afterward to see if the actual impact could be discerned.
The city leaders, when occasionally asked about what it would bring in, sometimes said well, maybe a dollar value couldn’t be placed on it–having placed a dollar value on it last week–but it would be a chance to showcase the city and show Detroit is a good place to do business so it will lead to all sorts of development.
As to showcasing–the week after the game I checked some US and international papers. The consensus was good game, friendly people, nice party, and the city’s a pit. I can’t see anything at all that was developed or a business that moved here where the Super Bowl was a factor.
Regarding the dollar amount discussion, Frank Rashid of the Tiger Stadium Fan Club figured how they arrive at the figures–they throw a dart at a dart board and whichever number the dart hits, they add “million dollars.”
How the Super Bowl host city turned a troubled area into a destination
https://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/news/2023/02/10/glendale-arizona-super-bowl-westgate.html
The controversy-filled history behind Arizona’s Super Bowl stadium
https://www.12news.com/article/sports/nfl/superbowl/arizonas-state-farm-stadium-controversy-history-super-bowl/75-2f3c7a38-36a5-49e1-99fe-af3bceb2ee1e
As an aside, this woman/group is against Meruelo’s proposal, too, based on the ‘promises’ of the Glendale stadium.
https://twitter.com/mayflowaa/status/1624070816899170306