Photo by Jamie Schwaberow/Getty Images
Rumors have the Broncos leaving town, and local officials are trying to stop it early.
Taxpayer funding for stadiums is a scam. This isn’t a new revelation, and it’s something we’ve talked about extensively in the past. Owning a sports team is an incredible racket that allows for billionaires to buy extremely profitable businesses, regardless of in-game success, then use threats of relocation to reduce their facility overheard to almost nothing — acquiring the stadium outright in the process.
This tactic is common, and it appears the Broncos (who only came under new ownership over the summer) might already be laying the groundwork to put pressure on lawmakers. Despite Empower Field at Mile High being built just 22 years ago, there are already rumors that the Broncos could be following several other NFL franchises in planning a move out the suburbs.
It’s enough to have spooked Denver mayor Michael Hancock, who invested time this week to start pitching his plan for the Broncos to stay inside city limits, rather than potentially relocate to northeastern Aurora. Hancock took the podium to discuss his desire to keep the Broncos in Denver.
“The ownership team, their eyes are wide open right now in terms of their responsibilities and their hopes for the team,” Hancock said. “As we’ve talked, I’ve made it very clear that my hope is that, one, we will keep open lines of communication with regards to the stadium, and the future stadium, and hopefully, that it remain in Denver, Colorado.”
While Hancock stopped short of publicly addressing the rumored Aurora plans, the subtext was certainly there.
“I don’t want to address rumors… I happen to think it’s not a very good destination, because you have very limited access. So, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
In 2019 the Denver City Council approved a plan to drastically up-fit the area around the team’s current stadium, using $150 million in new taxation to develop parks, paths, and mass transit. This came with the promise of massive multi-use areas and affordable housing for the new neighborhood, to be built around the southern half of the stadium’s parking lot — limiting car parking in exchange for more mass transit access to Mile High.
However, that development has been on pause because of the pending change in ownership. This made perfect sense. Denver reached an agreement with the former owners, and didn’t want to break ground without having an agreement from the Walton-Penner ownership group, who bought the team earlier this year for $4.65 billion.
That $150M tax figure is still too much, but a drop in the bucket compared to other stadium deals around the United States. An additional hotel room tax in Las Vegas had the city paying $750M to help fund Allegiant Stadium for the Raiders, while the Buffalo Bills are set to get $850M in taxpayer funds to finance a new stadium.
There was a time where taxpayer funding made sense. The early owners of NFL teams weren’t multi-billionaires in their own right, with much of their worth being tied to the non-liquid asset of the team itself, making stadium financing an impossibility for all but the wealthiest of team owners. This led to a symbiotic relationship with a city, where the team would get new facilities, while citizens would benefit from the new upgrades and for fans and multi-use projects for the community.
This relationship no longer exists. Recent team sales have seen established multi-billionaires, who could easily foot the bill themselves, coerce local officials with threats of relocation either to friendly areas in-state who are willing to use taxpayer money, or more drastically move out of state. In both instances the threat is the same: Cause political pain for those not willing to back taxpayer funding. Nebulous financial figures like “tax revenue” and employment numbers are often thrown around by NFL owners, designed to make it seem as though their team’s financial benefit offsets forcing taxpayers to fund stadiums, but these figures are often overstated. It’s also been shown that sporting teams contribute less to the local economy by footprint than other businesses.
Michael Leeds, a sports economist at Temple University, used Chicago as case study of how little teams actually contribute to the local economy. In 2017 his figures showed that if sports team disappeared from Chicago overnight, meaning the Bears, Bulls, Blackhawks, White Sox and Cubs all ceased to operate, the net loss to the city would be 1 percent. In addition his study showed that the actual economic impact of a full MLB season on the local Chicago economy equated to the same as a mid-size department store.
Still, NFL owners know this is a hearts and minds play. No fan wants to see their team leave a city, even if it’s just relocating out to the suburbs — which puts local politicians in a difficult position. Capitulate to billionaires wanting to grow their assets at the expense of ordinary families, or take a PR hit for “not working hard enough” to keep a team local.
For now, Hancock and Denver are trying their best to stick to the 2019 revitalization plan, and it appears they’re willing to play hardball when it comes to giving more tax money to the Broncos.
Asked if he foresees the new owners asking taxpayers for money to pay for renovations, or a new stadium, Hancock said, “it might be a difficult proposition, quite frankly, in terms of what is happening today with our professional teams… I think it would be a very difficult ask.”
The Broncos have nine years remaining on their current agreement with the city, so this isn’t something that would happen overnight — but it is something to watch. It appears the city of Denver is at least laying the groundwork in preparation for the Broncos to potentially move out to the suburbs, and are doing everything in their power to stop it.
In the end it all comes back to one key thing: Whether you live in a large urban area, the suburbs, or a rural area — if your tax money is going to make a billionaire richer instead of improving the lives of citizens you need to elect new officials. Hopefully the Broncos stay in Denver, because they are part of the fabric of the city.
