Do NFL teams really provide an economic advantage to a city?

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Leeds pointed out that a major league baseball team has about the same economic impact as a small department store, and that is with 80 home games a year. An NFL team only plays eight home games in a season, unless they are a playoff team with home field advantage, in which case they could get one or two more.

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"The net economic impact of professional sports in Washington, D.C., and the 36 other cities that hosted professional sports teams over nearly 30 years, was a reduction in real per capita income over the entire metropolitan area," Humphreys and Coates noted in the report.

The researchers found other patterns consistent with the presence of pro sports teams. Among them:

• a statistically significant negative impact on the retail and services sectors of the local economy, including an average net loss of 1,924 jobs;

• an increase in wages in the hotels and other lodgings sector (about $10 per worker year), but a reduction in wages in bars and restaurants (about $162 per worker per year).

Those employed in the amusements and recreation sector appeared, at first glance, to benefit significantly from the presence of a pro team, with an average annual salary increase of $490 per worker, Humphreys said. However, he added, "this sector includes the professional athletes whose annual salaries certainly raise the average salary in this sector by an enormous amount.

As it turns out, those workers most closely connected with the sports environment who were not professional athletes saw little improvement in their earnings as a result of the local professional sports environment."

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That's because such impact studies often are based on skewed data. For instance, when citing multipliers - the ripple effect that each dollar spent on professional supports is projected to have on the community's wider economy - impact studies often overstate such contributions and fail to differentiate between net and gross spending. And, Humphreys added, such studies typically don't consider what economists call the "substitution effect."

"As sport- and stadium-related activities increase, other spending declines because people substitute spending on sports for other spending," Humphreys said. "If the stadium simply displaces dollar-for-dollar spending that would have occurred otherwise, there are no net benefits generated."

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Do 8 NFL home games really provide a great economical to a city? I understand that NFL create a lot of high paying jobs, that is not what I'm asking. The relativly short season of the NFL really help a these city economically? Compared to the NBA or MLB season length. The surrounding bars hotels ect only see 8 games a year. How much does it really help a city compared to what they take from taxpayers?

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