Super Bowl XLIX

The Super Bowl Comes To Glendale, The City Ruined By Sports

by Travis Waldron, Think Progress

January 31, 2015 at 11:24 am

In a world in which American cities have handed over billions of dollars in public money to finance sports arenas and stadiums, there is perhaps one city that stands above the rest as a warning for what can go wrong when they do so. It just so happens that place is Glendale, Ariz., which will host Super Bowl XLIX this Sunday.

Glendale has spent liberally on sports in the past decade and a half, luring professional hockey, football, and spring training baseball with millions of dollars of its own money and plenty of help from the state. Sunday will mark the second time it has hosted the Super Bowl, and the game’s biggest proponents are, in typical fashion, making the argument that helped sell all of this sporting infrastructure that brought teams and events to Glendale in the first place: it will be a boon for the local economy.

The Arizona Super Bowl Host Committee, in fact, estimates that the game will bring some $500 million in benefits to the state economy. A significant portion of that, in theory, should be reserved for Glendale, the host city that sits, with a population of just over 230,000, a few miles northwest of Phoenix.

The problem is that the Super Bowl almost certainly won’t generate $500 million in economic benefits for Arizona. Economic research has shown that for a variety of reasons – among them: a failure to account for costs, money that leaks out of the local economy, and money that would have been spent anyway or, in the absence of such an event, elsewhere in the city – Super Bowls and other mega-events and the publicly-funded stadiums built to host them virtually never have such an effect. They may provide minimal gains, and sometimes losses, to host cities, but they’re never major shots in the arm. Cities that believe otherwise, about stadiums or the events themselves, run the risk of major trouble.