Two weeks ago, three NFL teams – the San Diego Chargers, the Oakland Raiders and the St. Louis Rams – all bid to move their teams to Los Angeles. The nation’s second biggest city hasn’t had a team since the Rams left for St. Louis in 1995, while Green Bay has supported their team since 1919. That should tell you how much Los Angeles really needs an NFL team. Not at all.
After NFL commissioner Roger Goodell set up a shameless contest designed to make Oakland, San Diego and St. Louis dance like rummies for quarters to keep their teams in their towns, Goodell announced this week that the lucky winners of the L.A. sweepstakes were the St. Louis Rams.
Now, when multimillionaires threaten to move their toys across the country, who cares? And, honestly, I really don’t. After all, the Oakland Raiders have already moved to LA and back. The Cardinals moved from Chicago to St. Louis to Arizona, where cardinals can’t even survive. The Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore, so now Cleveland has a bunch of guys who dress up like football players every Sunday, and call themselves the Browns.
The only American city with four major league teams that has never lost one is, yes, Detroit. The Lions might be the only NFL team to miss the Super Bowl every single year, but the Ford Family has never once so much as hinted about moving the team.
None of this makes sense unless you’re a shameless, greedy owner trying to make a buck – or trying to get a bunch of broke cities to give you one.
So why does it matter? Because we’re paying for it. That’s why. We subsidize the owners’ game, by the billions — a game they’ve rigged so only they can win. According to Judith Grant Long, a professor at the University of Michigan, the United States is home to more than 120 major league baseball, football, basketball, and hockey rinks, arenas, parks, and stadiums. The teams that play there have received taxpayer subsidies totaling $21.3 billion. That’s billion, with a b—and only two of those stadiums have made a profit for those taxpayers. The taxpayers’ willingness to pay those subsidies helps explain why 99 of those 121 stadiums have been built since 1990.
That includes the dome in St. Louis, which the city and state taxpayers chipped in a cool $280 million to build in 1995. They still owe more than $100 million on it, which will be much tougher to pay off without a team drawing fans and paying rent. The Rams aren’t leaving because of the fans, either, who have bought some 85-percent of the tickets the past decade, supporting a team that hasn’t had a winning season during that stretch.
Rams owner Stan Kroenke doesn’t care about the fans, the taxpayers, or, it seems, anything other than his own desires to go bigger.
Americans—and only Americans—have entered the era of the disposable stadium.
It doesn’t have to be this way. And in Canada, it isn’t. Canadians don’t pay for their stadiums. Their teams do, which kind of makes sense. Canadian taxpayers instead pay for their schools, which also makes sense. Guess whose students are ranked in the top five worldwide, way ahead of American students? Taking candy from a baby may be immoral, but taking money from students and giving it to billionaire franchise owners should be illegal.
The phenomenon of disposable, taxpayer-funded stadiums is not only foreign to foreigners, but also to American college football fans. Beyond the considerable benefit of being a tax-exempt educational entity, American universities typically do not ask taxpayers to pay for their stadiums. You never hear about them holding the local taxpayers hostage by threatening to leave for Nashville or Jacksonville if their hometowns don’t build them a new stadium. Which is just one more thing that separates college football from the pros—for now.
Who orchestrates this fraud? Why, Roger Goodell, of course, who made $44 million in 2014. Not bad for the leader of a non-profit organization. Yes, you heard me correctly. The NFL shamelessly filed for non-profit status back in 1942. More amazingly, the government granted it – which makes you wonder who, exactly, would not qualify as a non-profit?
The NFL finally dropped its non-profit status last year, but not due to some long dormant sense of decency. They were simply tired of reporting Goodell’s ungodly salary every year, and getting mocked for it. It turns out the NFL will only be paying about $10 million in taxes this year – a figure Goodell himself could pick up, on behalf of his employer. If you need proof that an organization wasn’t really a non-profit in the first place, watching them drop their non-profit status to hide their unseemly salaries is all the proof you need.
So, what now? L.A. will roll out the red carpet for its latest NFL team, while San Diego and Oakland will hi-jack their cities for stadiums they don’t need, and can’t afford. The money will come out of the pockets of schoolchildren.
Why should fans be loyal to teams that clearly aren’t loyal to them? If those taxpayers build stadiums for owners who have no reservation about leaving them behind, the taxpayers need to admit they’re in an abusive relationship.
But that seems to be the NFL’s specialty.
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Great job again Mr. Bacon. I enjoy your blog every week. Keep them coming and don’t ever give up your critiques of those who need to be criticized and praise for those who deserve it.
Thank you
Dan J. Lord
Look out NFL and Roger Goodell, the JOHNUBACONATOR now has you in his gunsights!
Message (Required)
Message (Required)Right you are, John U.
Ridiculous that Goodell was paid $44m as head of a nonprofit, more ridiculous that the NFL could ever be legally considered a nonprofit and stupendously ridiculous that tax payer money subsidizes billionaires for building stadiums they frequently abandon at the drop of a well tailored fedora.
John,
Your bleeding heart has covered up the real message. Administrators, elected and appointed, have been the ones to decide to fund private institutions with public money. Voters, all of them, are responsible for this, not Roger Goodell. If the NFL owners’ want to pay $44 million a year for a puppet show, it’s their money. I don’t have to buy a ticker or watch an inferior product on TV.
My experience leads me to believe that eventually the baloney will resist the grinder. Empty seats affect TV ad
revenue and that affects how much the idiots in corporate America are willing to pay for an inferior product.
It will all come right in the end when we, as individuals, start taking responsibility for our own actions. This country managed to write a Declaration of Independence, a Constitution and fight several wars, some successfully, some not, no mater which cities had an NFL franchise. It isn’t that important.
St. Louis was unable to keep the football Cardinals because they weren’t smart, and then compounded the comedy of errors by building the No Name Dome and paying the NFL $160 million in reparations for a losing
franchise. If Carroll Rosenbloom had lived, the Rams would have stayed in LA and been successful. Some people are still wondering how an Olympic swimmer could drown in the surf off Key Biscayne.
Thanks for the blog.
bomberjohn5
I am reading an article right now that said Carroll Rosenbloom was a poor swimmer who never swam alone.
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Steve Rosenbloom said his father lived near the water for years, but was a poor swimmer and never swam alone.
“If he went out alone that day, he was breaking a habit of a lifetime,” Steve Rosenbloom said.
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That was from an article written in 2007
Here is the link to the article. http://www.pressboxonline.com/story/3089/carroll-rosenbloom-man-of-mystery. Regardless of his swimming ability, his death is definitely suspicious.