Just as arts organizations are getting good at the economic impact arguments — that professional-grade culture revitalizes communities, spurs leisure spending on restaurants, hotels, and such, and bolsters the essential baby-sitter industry — professional sports teams are getting a new quiver for their bow: successful sports teams make people work harder, take bigger risks, and shop, shop, shop.
According to the Boston Globe:
In a forthcoming paper, economist Michael Davis and the psychologist
Christian End say that having a winning NFL football team increases the
incomes of the people who live and work in its hometown by as much as
$120 a year. And while the study doesn’t identify exactly what causes
the boost, the authors point to psychological literature suggesting
that winning fans are at once harder workers and bigger spenders. In
short, buoyed by the team’s success, we work longer hours, take bigger
risks, and shop more avidly, all of which helps the local economy.
The obvious question is whether hosting a losing NFL football team makes the community worse off than if they had no team at all. We’ve got to manage our risks, after all.
Being from Buffalo, I feel uniquely qualified to respond to your question about the value of losing football teams! Unfortunately, the football fan exists in an optimistic fantasy land of “there’s always next season” so whether they lose or not really doesn’t have a lot to do with the true economic value of a team: there is still the endless parade of souvenirs, tailgating food, beer sales, and, in the case of the Buffalo Bills over 54,000 season ticket holders. And sometimes just the possibility of a win is enough to make people feel better about the community, more productive at work, and maybe even more financially well off. And even if the team ultimately loses a playoff series, the fans still support the team.
Buffalo has the dubious distinction of being the smallest city in the nation that is the home to two professional teams – the aformentioned Bills, and the NHL’s Sabres. To put this in a cultural context and to assess the economic effect of professional teams (winners or loosers)is also interesting.
Corporate support of sports teams reduces the already very low level of overall corporate support in this community as a lot of money is spent on advertising, sponsorships, corporate suites, and ticket purchases by corporations. I have had more than one corporation tell me that sponsorship money for theatre wasn’t available because either the Bills or the Sabres “needed our support this year.” Attendance at cultural events always suffers when there is a run to the playoffs or a big game. You can see the holes in the seating plan from the no-shows. And of course there is the media obsession of covering the teams – every local television station has a sports department and probably 20% of the time on each local news broadcast is about sports – and sometimes its a lot more. None of the stations in this market reviews any arts activities or has anyone assigned to covering the arts.
In developing arguments for County support of cultural organzations in this community, we determined that the arts attracted over 2,000,000 patrons a year and that this was more than double the number of people attending Buffalo Bills games in any given season. The argument predictably fell on deaf ears. All I can say is thank goodness we DON’T have winning teams in this community – the arts couldn’t survive their success.