Hosting Major Gladiatorial Events is Expensive

Minneapolis will be hosting the Super Bowl in 2018. In order to do this the city had to agree to a long confidential list of demands from the National Football League (NFL):

Free police escorts for team owners, and 35,000 free parking spaces. Presidential suites at no cost in high-end hotels. Free billboards across the Twin Cities. Guarantees to receive all revenue from the game’s ticket sales — even a requirement for NFL-preferred ATMs at the stadium.

Those requirements and many others are detailed in 153 pages of NFL specifications for the game. An official on the host committee that successfully sought the game — Minneapolis beat out Indianapolis and New Orleans — said the panel had agreed to a majority of the conditions but would not elaborate.

The document, which the Star Tribune obtained through sources, has not been released publicly but shows how the NFL will control the event and many of its public aspects. The NFL declined to comment on the document and host committee officials are declining to make it public, citing state data privacy laws.

It doesn’t appear as though the Star Tribune posted the document so I can only assume that making the lives of the homeless miserable was also stipulated somewhere in that contract.

It’s amazing what a bunch of wealthy NFL officials demand from a city in order for it to be allowed the “privilege” of hosting one year’s major game. City officials will justify paying for all of this with tax money by claiming the game will bring major economic activity. Of course there is no way for them to know that before, during, or after the event because such things are unknowable (sorry Keynesians but you can’t accurately predict such things as the continued failure of you school to accurately predict economic matters has demonstrated). And we also know that hosting these games has nothing to do with economic activity. They’re just ways for city officials to make their dicks look bigger to other cities that wanted to host the game.

One thought on “Hosting Major Gladiatorial Events is Expensive”

  1. See the problem that Cities find themselves in is that they Allowed the NFL to become the dominant side in negotiations, not realizing that they do not NEED the Superbowl in their city, but the NFL NEEDS somewhere to host it. What should be is the Cities offering th NFL the lower costs of having the game but still have it actually cost the NFL instead of the City.

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