With the Super Bowl coming up this weekend, I thought it might be a good time to look at some recent mega-stadium deals within the NFL. These kind of deals always stir up controversy over whether the public investment is actually beneficial to taxpayers.
When Washington, D.C., agreed to hand over billions in land and tax breaks for a new Commanders football stadium, experts thought it would long remain an outlier in sweetheart deals for sports teams.
But just months later, attention turned to Kansas, where officials in December announced plans to fund 60% of a new stadium for the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. The state committed to spending up to $1.8 billion — the largest-ever professional sports subsidy.
The stadium deals in Washington and Kansas — both involving relocations within the same metropolitan area — have set separate records for taxpayer subsidies to sports teams. They serve as further evidence that public officials are uninterested in curbing giveaways to billionaire team owners, despite decades of research suggesting stadiums are a wasteful use of limited tax dollars.
Adjusted to 2024 dollars, the median stadium subsidy for projects that opened in the 2010s was about $400 million. That increased to $605 million for projects slated to open in the 2020s. Already, 2030s-era projects have reached a median of $825 million, he said.
“There are many different ways we can measure these deals,” he said, “but by any metric, the recent Chiefs and Commanders deals are historically high.”
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