
Sports fan lobbyist fights NFL blackouts, taxpayer-funded stadiums, and Comcast - andrewfong
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/08/sports-fan-lobbyist-fights-nfl-blackouts-taxpayer-funded-stadiums-and-comcast/
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npkarnik
I hope this guy succeeds. In most markets, blackouts are rare, but when they
do happen, it's nothing more than a disgraceful power play and a relic of
rules that were devised 40 years ago. The real crime is publicly financed
stadiums.

The tax-payer funded stadiums racket is usually driven by teams explicitly or
implicitly threatening to move - the oldest and most effective trick in the
book. A recent example was the half a billion dollars the Minnesota
legislature coughed up to the keep the Vikings from (probably) leaving for
L.A. Remember that the most popular and profitable American sports league
_doesn 't even have a team_ in the second largest market (even though it used
to have 2) and realize that the NFL will continue to be able to hold cities
hostage under threat of relocation.

Even the New York Yankees have tried it (
[http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/sports/features/2860/](http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/sports/features/2860/)
) and ended up with over $200 million of public financing for New Yankees
stadium if I remember correctly. Almost as if someone actually believed that
they might become the New Jersey Yankees??

The most egregious recent example is the New Braves Stadium in Cobb county
that was subsidized with around $300 million of taxpayer dollars by "tea-party
conservative" Cobb county officials. All of this for a stadium that isn't even
20 years old...in a county that had to lay off around 200 teachers and
furlough the rest.

Not a bad business, if you're an owner in a North American sports league. The
NHL is a different story for most markets, but owning an NFL or MLB team is
unquestionably a license to print money. NBA owners love to plead poverty when
the CBA is up, but the goddamn Milwaukee Bucks sold for over a half a billion
and the wait line to buy an NBA is longer than ever.

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Pxtl
Yup. We had the same problem here in Hamilton. Nobody even _cares_ about the
CFL, but the Hamilton Tiger-cats had enough pull to bully the city about where
the Pan-Am stadium would be located and how much parking and how big it would
be. Again, constantly threatening to leave (when every city they threatened to
move to said they weren't actually that interested in paying for a stadium).

At the end of the fiasco, it got located right back into the same depressed
residential area as the previous stadium. For like $200 mill. And the new one
is smaller. And it wasn't ready in time.

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dingdingdang
There is no way the public should be in the position of lacking hospitals and
fundamental public services while sustaining huge commercial payouts for
already astronomically rich sports ventures. Yet, this is clearly the case. If
this guy had a kickstarter or similar crowdsourcing option to sustain his
legal campaign I'm pretty sure Comcast and co. should be even more scared.

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jnks
I'm sure if hospital threw off hundreds of millions in entertainment and
tourism revenue municipalities might be more amenable to funding them...

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dingdingdang
If you start counting secondary side-effects in terms of income then I'm
pretty sure that hospitals come out WAY more positively in terms of the
millions upon millions they have 'created' in revenue terms by having a
healthy and functional (i.e. not dead) workforce that is out and about working
and spending their way through life.

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snarfy
Sports would be a shadow of what they are today if they weren't so heavily
subsidized. I remember a statistic that something like 80% of a basic cable TV
subscription goes to pay for ESPN.

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delg
Everyone hates lobbying until it's used as a tool to tell legislators what
they want legislators to hear.

~~~
themartorana
You mean a voice for the public where it rarely, if ever, has one? Yes, why
would people be in favor of that?

~~~
delg
Rare? That's not an accurate depiction of the status quo in the least. AARP is
one of the more influential groups in DC not because it gives away a lot of
money but because of the voting block it represents. If you did an analysis of
who you are as a voter then reviewed groups in DC representing your interests,
I bet you could get 2 meetings on the Hill before the end of the year.

