As the headline to this Businessweek story says: It Pays To Move. The Rams may head back to Los Angeles and in the story, there is unsettling financial data about the role of public money in these stadium scenarios. Turns out, taxpayers have been on the hook for 60% of the bill.
Since the NFL’s exodus from Los Angeles, 28 of the league’s 32 franchises have built new stadiums or renovated old ones at a cost of more than $10 billion, with taxpayers covering $6 billion of the total, according to a tally by economists Robert Baade and Victor Matheson. And that doesn’t include Minnesota, where the Vikings were a candidate to move to L.A. until May, when the state and the city of Minneapolis agreed to pitch in $498 million toward a new $975 million stadium.
