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Long term lurker, first time poster. I'm working on a research project regarding reducing the ability of American sports teams to have stadiums publicly financed. I would like to compare the situation in the US with European Sports but am not very familiar with Futball (or Rugby). Can any My understanding after some initial research is that many of the largest and most profitable clubs own their own stadiums and finance construction through various debt instruments. It's also my understanding that public money is still in play at least to some extent because European countries/cities compete to attract various international sporting events. A few theories I've considered but have no data to back up or sense as to how valid they are: 1) Relocating is not a useful threat because local municipalities can't fund multi-million dollar stadium construction. 2) Sports club's roots run so deep that it is culturally inconceivable that a club might move. 3) The promotion and relegation system means there is no scarcity of teams and therefore teams can't credibly hold their home town hostage by threatening to move somewhere else. Other cities already have teams and aren't interested in enticing one to relocate, even if the team they currently have doesn't belong to the top tier.
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Sep 25, 2016 00:08
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ChinaBob posted:Long term lurker, first time poster. Various secondary things, but probably fundamentally supply and demand. In the UK there are 92 teams in the top 4 leagues, and only 75 or so towns with a population of greater than 150,000. Even with the biggest cities supporting 3+ teams, the smallest ones left don't have the market there. The only really sizable city without a football team, Milton Keynes (pop 250,000), did eventually, after much controversy, persuade a club to move in. Whereas there are a _lot_ of US cities around the 1/4 million size that have everything a resident might want except a major sports franchise.
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Sep 25, 2016 02:24
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The simple reason is that the very idea is insane.
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Sep 25, 2016 02:36
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The topic of this reminds me of this article, where the conclusion basically seems to be that teams in the US gain their power from being part of a cartel. In Europe, where supply exceeds demand, competition reigns and teams can't strong-arm their host cities.
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Sep 25, 2016 07:04
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HorseLord posted:The simple reason is that the very idea is insane. This pretty much sums it up. You should probably start with researching the furore when Milton Keynes stole Wimbledon, and then look at UEFA's rules that forbid state aid to football clubs, iirc Swansea either nearly or actually got in trouble regarding that for something to do with the Liberty Stadium, also maybe West Ham's move to the Olympic Stadium got looked at for being dodgy as gently caress (because it is). If you can deal with some people telling you to gently caress off for no apparent reason you might get some better information from the good lads who mean well in The Ray Parlour.
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Sep 25, 2016 07:21
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I think to start with you have to consider that European countries are significantly smaller than the US in terms of both population and land mass. Couple that with the fact that there isn't really any unified league structure across Europe and the simple fact is that there's simply nowhere for teams to relocate too. It simply isn't possible for FC Dusseldorf to pick up shop and relocate to sunny Aberdeen. Couple that with major cities already have a pretty high density of teams, I think there is something like 19 pro soccer teams in London alone, so the local city councils aren't particularly likely to play favorites for one city over the other. That said, I don't know that your thesis is entirely accurate either. Financing for stadiums in both Europe is pretty complex and it isn't necessarily a strictly public or private thing on either side of the Atlantic. There is normally a ton of infrastructure costs associated with building a stadium that is footed by somebody. Some countries have national stadiums for different sports which are publicly financed, and may or may not be used for other events than national team games. For instance in England you have Wembley Stadium, which hosts England soccer games, the NFL, concerts, Twickenham which hosts England Rugby, the NFL, and various other stuff, and then the Olympic Stadium, which is now home to West Ham United. Basically all of the stadiums built in Germany for the 2006 World Cup got taken over by local club teams. It really is just not a cut and dried thing.
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Sep 25, 2016 07:44
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Simplex posted:Basically all of the stadiums built in Germany for the 2006 World Cup got taken over by local club teams. Does "taken over" mean leased out to or bought? My gut says leased because as an American it's hard to imagine a sports team assuming debt-- but I have no idea.
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Sep 25, 2016 09:27
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Blue Star Error posted:This pretty much sums it up. West Ham's deal was certainly dodgy as gently caress as West Ham pay a pittance and seemingly keep all of the income. On the other end of the spectrum, you have this which is a joint partnership between a local authority and sports team to benefit everyone
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Sep 25, 2016 10:02
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To answer your question outright, it's the insanity plea. Clubs are a functional community asset that interact with and are important to different levels of society, from 'traditionally' working class fans to owners to players to suppliers and their immediate local economy. But clubs are not so protected that they can override or lean on local councils to facilitate the kind of arm-twisting that you see in American sports. In some areas like Germany, partial fan ownership is legislated as well. In terms of the culture, and from having this conversation in TRP, the best way for an American to translate into something relevant would be to relate it back to American College Football. The Buckeyes would never be in a position to tell their fans or local government that they were moving to say, Los Angeles, and in the same way, moving AFC Bournemouth to Newquay is equally as ludicrous. The clubs are so tied to community that moving outside of a traditional city line into a satellite town/suburb can become a major issue. Everton FC play in Liverpool, and their stadium has been due for replacement for about 30 years given it's location and age. One of the suitable sites was in Knowsley, 4 miles from the old stadium, and effectively - but not officially - in Liverpool. The plans to build the new stadium there led to fan groups being formed like 'Keep Everton in Our City' - http://www.keioc.net , and similar objections get raised whenever a team looks to stray too far from 'home'. Sometimes the financial pressures and owners can force through a move - Upton Park is 2.5 miles away from West Ham's new stadium and that generated a lot of controversy. Clubs are also less protected from being poo poo than they are in American sports. If a team in the Premier League attempted to minimally invest to keep down costs and to gain an advantage next season, they go down like Burnley, or Villa. Because teams can get promoted, setting up a local side and having them climb up through the divisions is a possibility - like AFC Wimbledon - who when MK Dons were created, were the protest team created by fans to keep their club in their local community. You also get areas where there's an intersection between nationality, identity, religion and geography in a wonderful clusterfuck of different drivers of behaviour, and trying to get Celtic to move to Dublin is a wonderful but impossible pipe dream. A lot has been written about that AFC Wimbledon / MK Dons move, it might be something to investigate further to understand some of what I'm badly explaining.
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Sep 25, 2016 10:29
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Also if your looking at something linking the two, researching the new Spurs ground in London wouldn't be a bad idea given their bidding for an NFL London franchise, are self funding and had to do a lot of work privately to allow for their increased capacity with their local borough council.
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Sep 25, 2016 10:31
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Total Meatlove posted:In terms of the culture, and from having this conversation in TRP, the best way for an American to translate into something relevant would be to relate it back to American College Football. The Buckeyes would never be in a position to tell their fans or local government that they were moving to say, Los Angeles, and in the same way, moving AFC Bournemouth to Newquay is equally as ludicrous. I think a good analogy would be football clubs as a kind of abstract version of a monument or a listed building. Like if some businessmen decided that the US tourism economy would be more profitable if the statue of liberty was moved to Texas, it would get a similar reaction to suggesting Liverpool should move to London.
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Sep 25, 2016 11:11
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjAtG6GW76E here are some ppl cheering for me playing a video game. i do not speak just listenin to my anime music ty
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Sep 25, 2016 11:22
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Total Meatlove posted:Clubs are also less protected from being poo poo than they are in American sports. If a team in the Premier League attempted to minimally invest to keep down costs and to gain an advantage next season, they go down like Burnley, or Villa. Because teams can get promoted, setting up a local side and having them climb up through the divisions is a possibility - like AFC Wimbledon - who when MK Dons were created, were the protest team created by fans to keep their club in their local community. Plus don't underestimate culture: everyone would laugh at you and ask what in the gently caress you thought you were doing. quote:I think a good analogy would be football clubs as a kind of abstract version of a monument or a listed building. Like if some businessmen decided that the US tourism economy would be more profitable if the statue of liberty was moved to Texas, it would get a similar reaction to suggesting Liverpool should move to London.
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Sep 25, 2016 11:58
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In the case of football you also have the factor that until the mid-1990s, it had a solid public image as a working-class sport with a highly exaggerated but not entirely unjustified reputation for attracting mindless thugs who just wanted to fight and smash things up. Football was something that local government tolerated and something they policed, but not something they necessarily wanted to have in their borough, and something that quite a few of them would have happily seen disappear into a black hole. The idea that a local authority would want to pay out tuppence ha'penny to keep its football club is often quite as laughable as the idea of it considering moving away in the first place. You also probably want to look into how clubs were a lot more mobile within a given area before the inter-war years, and frequently moved ground and/or changed name more than once before finally settling down. After that you start to find clubs who've been in one place long enough to put down roots and become an established part of their community, professional football has by this point been around long enough to be an institution, and the grounds of top clubs are now so large that it's a lot less feasible to abandon that investment and go somewhere else. (I would also not be including rugby in this because there are very few areas in which it is a primary sport and no countries except Wales where it can even dream of claiming to be a national sport in the way that football undisputedly is almost everywhere in Europe. If you were doing this the other way round, you wouldn't be looking too hard at the CFL.)
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Sep 25, 2016 12:15
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It's odd that America has socialism for sports and capitalism for vital services like healthcare, while Europe goes for capitalism for sports & lots of state intervention in important things like health. Makes you think.
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Sep 25, 2016 13:45
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ChinaBob posted:Long term lurker, first time poster. It's important to realize your question has nothing to do with sports, but we will get back to that. Certainly you can look at that aspect, number 2 'feels right' --football teams are products of uk's very classist society and that tradition continues to this day. But as others have said you can boil this down to basic economics as well. Europe represents a mature market where no individual supplier (team) has the bargaining power to make such demands (and for the few that do see 2). In the states you still have mid size cities that don't have major teams and that's going to lead to new teams shopping around ( and the same for struggling teams not tied to the city they are in). An existing team that is doing well trying to play this game doesn't really happen much if ever. But anyway stadiums represents a huge investment, of course people are going to wheel and deal if that is an option because why the gently caress wouldn't you? You can try and pass laws (probably won't work) but is it really even much an issue? Not really. Some amount of public help in building giant stadiums is extremely common world wide even when teams stay put. The real problem tends not to be in sports stadiums (because it's quite rare and arguably public assistance would be happening anyway)-- the real area where this is a problem is what happens in places like Kansas City. This is where Kansas and Missouri underwent a massive prolonged bidding war for major corporations headquarters and offices that has basically bankrupted the associated governments. All the way to the point where they came to a sort of truce to stop trying to poach business because the only winner was the corporation in the end. Or when boeing shops around for favorable labor laws. So again, this has nothing to do with sports, large entities bartering with local government for favorable tax statuses is the name of the game world-wide regardless of industry. Focusing on sports arguably leads you to the wrong conclusions since you're too busy focusing on the tree to see the forest. I'm quite certain when you run the numbers the amount sports team receive in assistance represents a fraction of a fraction of a percent compared to overall corporate welfare.
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Sep 25, 2016 13:47
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radmonger posted:Various secondary things, but probably fundamentally supply and demand. In the UK there are 92 teams in the top 4 leagues, and only 75 or so towns with a population of greater than 150,000. Even with the biggest cities supporting 3+ teams, the smallest ones left don't have the market there. This is the reason right here, European clubs don't have the bargaining power to do it, not this bullshit about Europe's superior community-based sporting culture. forkboy84 posted:It's odd that America has socialism for sports and capitalism for vital services like healthcare, while Europe goes for capitalism for sports & lots of state intervention in important things like health. Using the free market to force the local government to bid for your services against other local governments is not any definition of socialism I'm aware of.
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Sep 25, 2016 14:30
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Jarmak posted:Using the free market to force the local government to bid for your services against other local governments is not any definition of socialism I'm aware of.
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Sep 25, 2016 14:55
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I'm trying to conceive of how a football team could even move. Liverpool, right, their big thing is that they're from liverpool. They'd become what, the cardiff liverpools? how would that work? Anywhere to move to already has a team or two, and the fans aren't going to follow. Why would you convert a billion pound major team into a poo poo one that's located in the middle of nowhere, has no heritage and no fans? How would the liverpoolness be kept in? Talent scout in liverpool and go "hey 18 year old kid, want to move 100 miles away where you know nobody?"
HorseLord fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Sep 25, 2016 |
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Sep 25, 2016 15:01
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Do any Liverpudlians play for Liverpool? The rest of your points are valid, though.
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Sep 25, 2016 15:05
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Jarmak posted:This is the reason right here, European clubs don't have the bargaining power to do it, not this bullshit about Europe's superior community-based sporting culture. Then why isn't it the same in America? Why doesn't every decent sized city in America have a decent team?
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Sep 25, 2016 15:11
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Whorelord posted:Then why isn't it the same in America? Why doesn't every decent sized city in America have a decent team? Because in america the teams don't matter in the slightest, the product matters, and the product is NFL. The teams themselves can be changed like light bulbs. Any hesitation a viewer might have like "didn't they only move here a month ago?" is soon forgotten when the overexcited announcer starts talking and the TV screen gets motion-graphics vomit all over it. Just like your other two sports, WWE and presidential debate. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Sep 25, 2016 |
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Sep 25, 2016 15:16
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HorseLord posted:I'm trying to conceive of how a football team could even move. Liverpool, right, their big thing is that they're from liverpool. They'd become what, the cardiff liverpools? how would that work? Anywhere to move to already has a team or two, and the fans aren't going to follow. Why would you convert a billion pound major team into a poo poo one that's located in the middle of nowhere, has no heritage and no fans? How would the liverpoolness be kept in? Talent scout in liverpool and go "hey 18 year old kid, want to move 100 miles away where you know nobody?" Liverpool F.C --> Liverpool Slavers --> [City Name] Slavers
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Sep 25, 2016 15:17
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A Buttery Pastry posted:You just need a transition period where you rename the team along American lines, and slowly emphasize the non-city part of the name. Like this: This has been attempted with Hull City AFC(Hull Tigers) and it got rejected
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Sep 25, 2016 15:26
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Total Meatlove posted:This has been attempted with Hull City AFC(Hull Tigers) and it got rejected and yet the MK Dons still hold onto the Dons part despite essentially admitting they are a completely new club that only came into existence in 2004
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Sep 25, 2016 15:58
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MK Dons is a young team for a young city. And it has growth prospects. When I was in the US it was mostly the fading rust belt cities like Buffalo that wanted major league status, which was economically impossible.
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Sep 25, 2016 16:01
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TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:So again, this has nothing to do with sports, large entities bartering with local government for favorable tax statuses is the name of the game world-wide regardless of industry. Focusing on sports arguably leads you to the wrong conclusions since you're too busy focusing on the tree to see the forest. I'm quite certain when you run the numbers the amount sports team receive in assistance represents a fraction of a fraction of a percent compared to overall corporate welfare. I definitely realize this. The scope of this particular project is focused on sports.
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Sep 25, 2016 17:25
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Whorelord posted:Then why isn't it the same in America? Why doesn't every decent sized city in America have a decent team? NFL/MLB/NBA are effectively cartels that bar other teams from entry and the financial costs of starting a new league are high enough to keep people from attempting it. The last successful 'upstart' league merged into the NFL in 1966. College football, the second most watched sport in the US, fills some of the demand for football in cities that don't have an NFL team.
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Sep 25, 2016 17:31
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ChinaBob posted:Does "taken over" mean leased out to or bought? My gut says leased because as an American it's hard to imagine a sports team assuming debt-- but I have no idea. City builds a stadium -> club leases it from the city is pretty much how it works in the US as well. Most publicly financed stadiums are paid for by municipal bonds. The actual cost to the city is because those bonds are tax exempt, not any actual direct payment by the city or taxpayers.
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Sep 25, 2016 20:54
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Wasn't Allianz Arena in Munich created with public funds approved by a voter referendum? I seem to remember reading that on UEFA's site when Munich hosted the Champions League final.forkboy84 posted:It's odd that America has socialism for sports and capitalism for vital services like healthcare, while Europe goes for capitalism for sports & lots of state intervention in important things like health. Also, these cartels hardly ever open their doors to anyone, and you better make sure that you provide it with money if you want in. When the Las Vegas team in the NHL starts up next year, that will have been the first expansion team in the four major professional sports leagues in 13 years. Any league that tries to challenge the status quo is eventually defeated with their best teams absorbed- the All-American Football Conference was founded in 1946 because the NFL's owners didn't want to expand, and they ended up folding in 5 years with the Browns and 49ers joining the league (today's Indianapolis Colts are the second incarnation of the Baltimore Colts- the first team joined the other two but folded one year later). The same story happened with the ABA/NBA and the WHA/NHL- both smaller leagues made noise for a few seasons, couldn't sustain the momentum, and folded with four of their teams being absorbed by the bigger league. The original formation of clubs on your side of the Atlantic was far more socialistic, even if they're owned by Russian oligarchs, Middle Eastern oil barons, and Thai billionaires today. get that OUT of my face fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Sep 26, 2016 |
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Sep 26, 2016 06:09
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"Socialism" in American sports is a bit reductive, I assume they meant stuff like the draft where teams get to pick instead of having to compete, and players having strong collective bargaining. In Europe collective bargaining is meant for people earning pennies, not millions.
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Sep 26, 2016 08:32
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Antti posted:"Socialism" in American sports is a bit reductive, I assume they meant stuff like the draft where teams get to pick instead of having to compete, and players having strong collective bargaining. In Europe collective bargaining is meant for people earning pennies, not millions. The union for football players in England is older than them NFL, just because a lot of the collective bargaining it was involved in happened in he 50's - free movement and the removal of salary caps, injury pay and registration issues etc. doesn't mean it's not around and working today. I think the Belgian equivalent were also funding Jean-Marc Bosman through the infamous Bosman ruling on free movement throughout European football as well.
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Sep 26, 2016 10:53
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Y-Hat posted:Wasn't Allianz Arena in Munich created with public funds approved by a voter referendum? I seem to remember reading that on UEFA's site when Munich hosted the Champions League final. The stadium itself was paid for by a joint venture of its two occupants, However, stadiums are useless without infrastructure improvements and area development, and the costs for those always end up being borne by the public. In Munich, the costs were expected to be so large (they ended up in excess of 200 million euro) that the city government sought approval from the voters. Of course, this was effectively a kind of state aid (no infrastructure = no stadium), and cities all over Europe have found all sorts of ways to test the boundaries of EU state aid rules. In the Netherlands for instance, the city of Eindhoven bought the land under the stadium and training complex from the PSV football club to supply it with cash, and got away with it because they did so at market value, even though there was absolutely no economically sensible reason for the city to own the ground but not the stadium on the ground. Sometimes the cities own the stadiums themselves and accept reduced rents or payment delays if clubs are in financial difficulties (my local club wouldn't have survived without the city's forbearance - it loaned the club money to finance the stadium and now guarantees a large part of its debt), or they buy the stadiums outright. On the other hand, the city of Madrid was found to be in violation of state aid rules for a land swap deal with Real Madrid where it paid the club far above market value for its grounds. So to the OP: European sports teams (at least in football, and who cares about anything else?) don't use relocation to get money because they can usually already count on getting public money when they need it, within the flexible limits set by the EU. And beyond that, most teams are so tied to their local origins that they wouldn't be able to relocate, if just for their names. Look at the league tables for any European football league and you'll see that almost all clubs will have the name of their city or region in their name. Although there are exceptions (the Red Bull company seems to be trying to create franchises, but everybody hates them), mostly you can't just transplant AS Roma to Milan, SC Freiburg to Kiel, Lille OSC to Clermont-Ferrand or FC Twente to Limburg.
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Sep 26, 2016 11:43
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Football clubs are a business and I don't know many businesses where alienating your core customers seems like a good idea. Season tickets, local sponsoring and merchandising income is going to drop like a rock if you move. There's absolutely no point in doing that for a one time cash grab when you can just sell off your players if you need cash.
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Sep 26, 2016 19:31
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Using the free market on a product which you as a group have monopolized through a cartel. Yes private cartels, an element of socialism. I know you really wanted to get that great zinger in but "unfettered capitalism that has destroyed the free market"  is not an argument for it being socialism. HorseLord posted:I'm trying to conceive of how a football team could even move. Liverpool, right, their big thing is that they're from liverpool. They'd become what, the cardiff liverpools? how would that work? Anywhere to move to already has a team or two, and the fans aren't going to follow. Why would you convert a billion pound major team into a poo poo one that's located in the middle of nowhere, has no heritage and no fans? How would the liverpoolness be kept in? Talent scout in liverpool and go "hey 18 year old kid, want to move 100 miles away where you know nobody?" Said every fan of every long time US sports franchise ever right before the move was finalized. Though to be fair, it's usually not the league's marquee teams that move, it's the ones that are struggling.
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Sep 26, 2016 20:47
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Antti posted:"Socialism" in American sports is a bit reductive, I assume they meant stuff like the draft where teams get to pick instead of having to compete, and players having strong collective bargaining. In Europe collective bargaining is meant for people earning pennies, not millions. Pluskut Tukker posted:(the Red Bull company seems to be trying to create franchises, but everybody hates them) AAPsel posted:Football clubs are a business and I don't know many businesses where alienating your core customers seems like a good idea.
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Sep 26, 2016 23:37
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Y-Hat posted:How effective are players' unions in Europe at combating management? Players' unions vary in strength here (it's more or less a formality in the NFL but is quite strong in MLB and the NHL) but are all seen as important to the functioning of the game. On the other hand, the only time I heard of any kind of labor unrest over there was a potential work stoppage in La Liga in Spain, which has its fair share of clubs teetering on the edge of a cliff financially. Even though socialism in North American sports isn't as strong as some make it out to be, the labor/management struggle is very much alive and well, and you can't say that about other industries. I can't speak for Canada which always hitches its wagon to American sports leagues, but I can definitely say that about the US. there was very nearly a strike by players in the English professional leagues which got called off as per the link. But apart from that, it's been relative labour peace, partly because players can gently caress off all over Europe for similar money if they don't like it where they're playing at the time
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Sep 26, 2016 23:58
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Jarmak posted:Yes private cartels, an element of socialism.
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Sep 27, 2016 05:13
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Jarmak posted:Said every fan of every long time US sports franchise ever right before the move was finalized. Uh European soccer teams usually have one town where they are popular. Sometimes even less, like there's one traditional city district where all their real fans live. Moving the team would be in effect the same as dissolving it and starting a completely different team somewhere else. In comparison this is what the distribution of football fans looks like in the us  A bit more leeway, isn't there
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Sep 27, 2016 08:12
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steinrokkan posted:Uh that's a bit bollocks, many clubs have huge followings that overshadow a huge portion of an entire country except for small fringe clubs. What you speak of is really only the case in England. That said it's true that most clubs have the rabid following concentrated at a spot so  . But I bet the same is true of american football clubs.
dex_sda fucked around with this message at 10:11 on Sep 27, 2016 |
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Sep 27, 2016 10:08
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