Yet another entry in the totally not surprising category. Times Reporter Catherine Rampell reports that she has been totally unable to get at the numbers behind the oft repeated estimate that the NYC area will benefit from the Super Bowl to the tune of $550 to $600 million. Seems everyone who repeats the number has simply heard it from someone else, but when you reach the end of the line, there's no there there.
The closest I got to the source of the numbers was this: Alice McGillion, a spokeswoman for the New York/New Jersey Super Bowl Host Committee, using careful, passive-voice syntax, said the estimate was commissioned several years ago as part of the local bid to host the event, which takes place next Sunday at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. But, Ms. McGillion added, “a decision was made” not to release the study that generated the numbers. She could not say why it was never released, who created it, what the underlying assumptions were, or even whether it represented just benefits or included costs. After a while, she stopped returning my calls and emails.
Which is perhaps not unexpected, because virtually every time a government or athletic organization describes the economic benefits of hosting a major sports event, economists pick apart the calculations as flawed, myopic or outright fraudulent.
This is yet another example of rent-seeking, which perhaps reaches its most obnoxious peak in the sports arena. Andrew Cuomo was all set to throw $200 million at Syracuse University to build a football stadium, but does anyone believe that he would throw that kind of money at a state of the art research or teaching facility? Detroit is bankrupt, but as Bloomberg News reports, Michigan Governor Snyder “approved a plan to put public money toward a $450 million downtown arena on behalf of the National Hockey League’s Red Wings and their billionaire owners”. Meanwhile, astoundingly, the NFL actually gets away with calling itself a non-profit, while it is, in fact, all about profit. We in Connecticut are not exempt, of course, with our boondoggle football stadium in East Hartford and our highly paid basketball coaches, one of whom was given a multi-million dollar contract before he ever nailed down a winning season. To put it in perspective, that's enough to pay the measly salaries of about 30 adjunct professors.
So, back to the Super Bowl. Chances are that the New York economy will never net anything close to $600 million off of the Super Bowl, but there's a good chance the Nonprofit Football League will, since New Jersey and New York will dutifully absorb all the costs.
Credit where it's due: Tom Coburn, of all people, has introduced a bill to strip the NFL of its non-profit status. Well, you know what they say about stopped clocks.
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