It's Time to Get Government Out of the SPORTS BUSINESS

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 2000 by Raymond J. Keating

Rosentraub advocates requiring the league to supply an expansion franchise if a team leaves a stadium that was in any way publicly subsidized. Once again, that would be government managing a business, He also proposes that, if a team leaves a government-subsidized stadium, the government providing the subsidies should be entitled to that portion of the team's wealth that is tied to the subsidy. Calculating such shares would be a monumental task, likely plagued by politics. Moreover, such a requirement would provide states and cities with added incentives to tap taxpayers for sports venues--a costly proposition indeed.

Real solutions? The following proposed remedies to the sports subsidies mess deal more directly with the real problem--i.e., government taking money from the many and handing it over to professional sports team owners and players--but face perhaps insurmountable political obstacles.

The first solution is to elect individuals to office who oppose corporate welfare for sports teams and will privatize sports venues currently owned by the public sector, as in St. Louis and Toronto, However. this is a daunting task. Politicians often fail to take stands on such issues. Even when they do, they sometimes change their minds later. For example, in 1994, the newly elected governor of New Jersey, Christine Todd Whitman, put a stop to her predecessor's plan to bring the NBA's Philadelphia 76ers to a new $135,000,000 arena in Camden.

Another option is to make sure the voters at least have the final say about public investment in sports facilities through a referendum. In his book, Home Team, Michael Danielson notes that voters were friendly to new ballparks in the optimistic 1950s and 1960s, rejecting just two of nine stadium referendums, but turned more skeptical in the sometimes austere 1970s and 1980s, voting down 13 of 15 stadium proposals. In the early 1990s, voters once again looked with favor on millionaire team owners, voting for 12 of 17 proposals between 1990 and 1996. (It should be noted that the 1996 vote in favor of the new San Francisco Giants ballpark involved no public dollars, just an exemption from building restrictions.) In 1997-98, results were more mixed: seven votes for public funding and six against. So, over the years, the results have been mixed when stadium issues have been placed on the ballot, but at least voters' voices have been heard.

Another idea is to extend baseball's antitrust exemption to the other leagues. Although state or local government solutions are almost always preferable to distant Federal action, there may be some limited role for the Federal government when it comes to stadium and arena subsidies. Given the endless, destructive bidding between states and localities for professional sports teams, it is difficult to imagine a lasting solution coming at those levels of government.

First, it must be understood that Major League Baseball, the NFL, the NBA, and the NHL are in no legitimate economic sense monopolies. In reality, they are more like partnerships. In North American Soccer League v. NFL, Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist observed: "The NFL owners are joint ventures who produce a product, professional football, which competes with other sports and forms of entertainment in the entertainment marketplace. Although individual NFL teams compete on the playing field, they rarely compete in the marketplace.... The league competes as a unit against other forms of entertainment."