The NFL isn't concerned about you as a fan
the NFL is concerned about opening up your pocketbook
and pulling as much money out of it as they possibly can.
The NFL is the most lucrative sports league in the world
and many cities seem desperate to have a football franchise to call their own.
But no city is more eager than Los Angeles
the country's second largest metropolis and football desert since 1994.
But does it make sense to invest scarce public dollars
on a sports operation that posts billions in yearly profits
and counts 18 of it's owners on Forbes billionaire list?
In general about 70% of the cost of building and maintaining NFL stadiums
has been payed for by taxpayers.
With city budgets being pushed to the brink,
is it time to demand that the NFL carry their own financial weight?
There's a beauty to the game, I'd like to see the in Lost Angeles.
I like what it does for a city when they feel good when their team wins.
Or will places like Los Angeles continue to push for a costly stadium
built on the taxpayer's dime.
The NFL generated over 9 billion in revenues last year
and many cities are hungry for a piece of the action.
Often spending huge sums of taxpayer dollars to attract the league to their localities.
I say in 'The King of Sports' the NFL is good at two things:
Providing high-quality sports entertainment, the games are, consistently terrific
and I'm hooked.
And the NFL is good at fleecing taxpayers.
It's about a billion dollars a year I'd calculate public subsidies to NFL owners
and this is a group that consist almost entirely of billionaires
and yet receiving significant public subsidies every year.
Nowhere is this illustrated more than in Los Angeles
where the city's political and investor class has been trying for nearly two decades
to get a team back in the area.
And though study after study
has shown that sports stadiums don't increase local economic activity,
it hasn't stopped cash-strapped cities like LA from approving billion dollar stadium plans
that would be largely funded with public dollars.
So is subsidizing a multi-billion dollar organization worth the public cost?
City councilman Tom Labonge thinks so
and is part of the effort to bring the NFL back to Los Angeles.
My council district has 274,020 people, more than Buffalo and just a little less than Cincinnati
So you could put a NFL in my district.
Labonge who spent part of his early career with NFL Films
feels a personal stake in bringing the NFL back to the city he loves.
Each season he writes the league and team owners to make the case
for football in Los Angeles.
I have a son who's 15 and he's never had a home town team.
I said, you know, I just wanna reach out, it was a simple reach out
got a couple of responses it was good
but someone from the National Football League has to say
'I wanna be in Los Angeles.'
'I wanna be in the second largest market in the country.'
But no one has.
Does having a generation of fans without a home town team
justify spending loads of public money on a stadium?
Especially in a place like Los Angeles which is chronically in debt
and hampered by excessive regulations.
People would be, they'll see public money going to what is a private enterprise
that is somewhat on the up.
They would like to see money go to develop jobs that are current
but you know there's only 8 regular season games at home
if you get the playoffs then you get a few or pre-season games.
I would be cautious on spending heavy public money on that.
Even Labonge realizes that financing a stadium with taxpayer money
may not be the most responsible act of city government.
Yet he and his fellow council members voted unanimously for a 1.2 billion dollar stadium plan,
known as Farmer's Field,
that would be funded with nearly 350 million in public bonds.
The proposed LA deal pales in comparison to the recent sweetheart deals
cut by Atlanta and Minneapolis,
Which gave the NFL over a billion dollars of public subsidies to build new facilities.
And because of how the deals are structured, the league, not the cities,
get the lion's share of the revenue derived from the stadium and concessions.
Making it difficult for taxpayers to recover their investment.
Daniel Durbin, the director of the University of Southern California's
Institute of Sports, Media and Society explains.
Well in theory the value that it brings to your city financially, in theory,
could be so high that it replaces the costs of doing business there.
Although California has been more than happy to wheel out money for all sorts of projects
like the bullet train, that we just keep putting money into and putting money into
and Lost Angeles is the same way.
The city government tends to put a lot of money in projects that may or may not play out.
Just the sheer land costs of a stadium are horribly exorbitant in southern California,
but beyond that you have the difficulty of the environment in LA.
In Los Angeles you don't have, we haven't had an NFL team since 1995
so that's almost twenty years.
And you don't notice people really crying about it a lot
or worrying about it a lot.
In Los Angeles we've got beaches, we've got Hollywood,
we've got all sorts of, we've got Disneyland,
we've got all sorts of things to do during the winter.
We don't live and die by the NFL, so Los Angeles really doesn't need the NFL.
The Irony is that even if Los Angeles did manage to build a stadium
there's no reason to think the NFL may bite.
Through it all the league has remained non-committal
telling Reason:
Their reluctance may not be a bad thing,
thanks to the expansion of sports broadcast and the NFL's byzantine blackout rules,
having a franchise can make it hard for loyal fans to even watch their home town team play.
If we have a team in Los Angeles and that team doesn't sell out
they can black it out in Los Angeles
which means that you very often will lose games as a fan.
And for fans there's no payback to that.
In the 80s and early 90s when Los Angeles had two teams here that almost never sold out,
the Raiders and the Rams, the audience was losing games consistently.
If I can be a fan of the New England Patriots in Los Angeles,
if I can be a fan of the Buffalo Bills in Los Angeles,
and follow the team and certainly with online
and with all of the cable broadcasts being at least accessible to me
I can watch any game that I want to if I have the ingenuity and the money.
If I can be a fan of those teams, what does it pay me back
to go to a local stadium in Los Angeles.
So in Los Angeles, you know, if you look at it as a fan,
you're the one who's chasing, you know, if you really want a NFL team here,
you're always chasing that relationship.
Because the NFL isn't concerned about you as a fan
the NFL is concerned about opening up your pocketbook
and pulling as much money out of it as they possibly can.
While local boosters like councilman Labonge
may continue to dream of luring the NFL to their city,
it's becoming increasingly clear that not having a team
may be the best deal for taxpayers and fans alike.
Perhaps it's a model other cities should emulate.