… what? Association football competes in the UK, Italy and France with two flavors of rugby; in France, Spain and Italy with basketball; in the UK with cricket, and so on.
Dr Cube:
Hockey has minor leagues, and basketball has one minor league. Football has no associated minor leagues, although arena football fills a niche in cities too small for NFL teams.
How much of that is an actual “competition”?
Do you have a lot of reports of UK kids being really conflicted about choosing between soccer, rugby, or cricket or some trying out professional cricket before going back to soccer? I mean some of the biggest pro football stars in the US were courted by other sports - John Elway famously used it (the Yankees were offering him quite a lucrative deal) to create leverage for his trade from the Colts to the Broncos.
For example, from the wikipedia entry on Rugby League in England:
Sure. Geoff Hurst, most famously, but there are plenty more. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, if you want an example with rugby.
I think if we’re going to go any further than this we should probably start a new thread, though.
And Rugby Union in England:
It’s not competition in the same way as actors competing for a role or interviewees competing for a job, but athletic kids grow up playing the sports that are popular. And as they progress, they start specializing. And somewhere along the line they have to make a choice of what sport to specialize in. This is all long before the talent scouts see them, but it’s important.
For example, the US no longer medals in Olympic weightlifting. We used to be the best, in the days of York Barbell and Strength and Health magazine. China, with a hundred million kids they can funnel through the system like a sieve, eats weightlifting medals like candy these days. USA Weightlifting, on the other hand, has to settle for whichever athletes couldn’t make it in the NFL or MLB. High school kids don’t want to be the next Norbert Schemansky. They want to be the next Michael Jordan, or Tom Brady, or Albert Pujols. So the competition is there, it’s just not visible, because it happens in high school, before kids make it to the professional level.
Agreed on all points, and there is no better example of all of this – both the good and the bad – than the Skydome in Toronto, now the Rogers Centre and home of the Blue Jays. It cost $570 million to build decades ago – almost $1 billion in today’s dollars – which was a huge cost overrun. The majority of it was public money. It then had a history of financial problems and was finally bought by Rogers for the astoundingly cut-rate price of just $25 million, which is less than the selling price of some upscale Toronto homes.
OTOH, it’s an icon of the city and an integral part of its skyline along with the CN tower. Except it’s of more practical value – besides Blue Jays games, it’s a venue for lots of large-scale events and was the site of many of the events of the recent Pan Am games.
Right.
This should be illegal because it results in moving job around the country, disrupting families, with no net benefit. I’m not sure exactly how to word the law, but I do favor some sort of commercial taxation uniformity clause that bans cities and states giving companies a break for reasons such as building new facilities or threatening to leave town.
A likely side effect is that they couldn’t subsidize stadiums. Fine with me.
The only tax payer money that should be used is minor road changes. Stadiums should be built with private money. If a team wants a new stadium then they can build it. Using tax payer money to build a structure that the profit from activities there goes to private industry is wrong. If a stadium is going to be built for a team the team should sign a contract paying rent until the cost of the stadium is paid for and if the team moves to another stadium they should have to still pay until the stadium is fully paid off.
Also why should the citizens of a city pay for a stadium for the people that live around the city and do not pay taxes in the city. The citizens of Oakland got stuck with a large bill when Jerry Brown as mayor signed the contract with the Raiders. But a large number probably over half the people that attend Raiders games live in other cities and counties.
You’re all such unimaginative Americans. Even you Canadians. 
That would technically be to the BENEFIT of Oakland, not its detriment. If people from outside the city come into it to spend money, that’s good for Oakland, not bad.
It still doesn’t make a stadium a positive financial investment, but this is a strange argument.
Hey there DrCube
Gym class, as part of the curriculum, doesn’t concern me.
The taxpayer money spent on fielding varsity sports is money that could be much better spent on educational resources available for all of the students rather than the select few of the more popular and athletic kids.
You want your kid to play varsity football? Then you pay for it. Don’t dig into my pocket for it.
I’m having an ongoing conversation about this topic with a new co-worker from Slovakia, who is astounded at the amount of time and expense spent on sports in our public schools.
I think making athletic activities as publicly available as possible is a worthwhile endeavor; I just don’t think the schools are the best venue for doing so for lots of reasons.
Where I live there are team sorts available for any level, age and ability. All of them are available outside of taxpayer funded schools. My Nephew plays select Baseball. He practices year round, and plays three or four games a week all spring and summer. His parents pay for this. My daughters played fast pitch softball from age 8 to 16. I paid for it and served on the board of the organization sponsoring the teams.
Let the schools educate.
Stadiums and sports teams bring in gobs of money for the city, GOBS.
No, they absolutely do not.
Read the thread, then do some research. Look, I know this is sort of a common belief, and it’s how cities sell you on the stadium, but they are absolutely not moneymakers for a city. They never have been. There isn’t an iota of evidence that building a stadium is a good investment.
Perhaps more to the point, they are a terrible investment in terms of marginal utility. A $500 million baseball stadium creates some jobs for sure - someone has to build the stadium. But presumably, $500 million in, say, mass transit or highways or water treatment plants would ALSO create jobs. Furthermore, those are things that facilitate economic activity in a city; a sports stadium basically just facilitates the sports team making money, but a better expressway helps almost every business in a city make money. It helps the citizenry spend less time in traffic and more time being productive.
Do stadiums cause people to come spend more money in the city? According to the evidence, not to a significant degree; it simply diverts money that would already have been spent on something to being spent on something else.
Of course, in the case of professional sports, you also have the fact that much if not most of the money being spent on jobs is being paid to professional athletes, who’re unlikely to spend most of their money locally.
http://americansforprosperity.org/florida/article/the-true-economics-of-taxpayer-funded-stadiums/
I could post 100 other links if you like.
Other posters have touched on a rather excellent question; if the city building a business a new facility was economically logical, why do you rarely hear of cities building facilities for other businesses? If some machine shop goes to the city and says “I’ve got a nice little shop, I employ 50 people, for just a million bucks I’ll relocate into your city” they’d be laughed at. A city like Cincinnati or Boston wouldn’t give them the time of day, since they would correctly conclude that if it’s worth it, the business owner will himself build it.
I think he was being facetious.
It’s easy to measure, since people going to Raiders games spend money in the stadium and no place else. There isn’t a lot of places to eat around there, and the airport is on the other side of 880, and I doubt if people go downtown on game days. I suspect the city knows they are losing money on the deal.
Arlington, TX voted to spend $135 mil in the 90’s to build a new stadium for the Texas Rangers. The increase in sales tax allowed the debt to be paid off in 10 years instead of 20. So when the Cowboys were looking for a new home, the citizens of Arlington voted to build them a new stadium in Arlington. It’s paying off again.
http://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/arlington/article10754984.html
Paying off the bonds earlier than expected says nothing about whether the stadium was a good investment in the first place.