Comment by ghostbrainalpha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghostbrainalpha | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

ghostbrainalpha

Yep... but 25 years from now they will have "Kaepernick Day" once a year, and give everyone a free bobble head and everyone will be free to celebrate the NFL guilt free.

Despite the fact that most of the teams will still be owned by the same individuals, and definitely the same families....

IF I was a conspiracy guy I would almost think that all the flag waiving and controversial decisions are designed to distract us from the fact that the NFL is the world's sketchiest non-profit. Not only does it not pay taxes as an entity despite its CEO's $31 million dollar salary, but the teams receive billions in tax payer funds to build the new stadiums they require.

And they must have these new stadiums to stay competitive with the other NFL franchises... who just got new stadiums. It's a crazy arms race to keep your NFL team, and no one is talking about that fact that we could also level the playing field by having all the states agree NOT to build stadiums with tax payer dollars, instead of letting the NFL play different tax bases off each other to extract the maximum dollars from us.

The NFL dropped its tax-exempt status a few years ago (in order to make compensation - and other business practices - secret). Furthermore, the non-profit status only applied to the NFL League Office, not to the teams themselves, thus the vast majority of revenue was taxable.

The NFL isn't the only sports league who once rocked the not-for-profit status, NHL is currently a nonprofit and MLB was formally one.

I can think of much. much sketchier non-profits.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2015/04/28/t...

The public is starting to lose interest in subsiding for-profit teams, thankfully.

The NFL isn't as bad of a tax scam as you make it out to be. The central coordinating organization doesn't pay taxes, but that's because they distribute all the money they make to the teams, which DO pay taxes, and lots of them. That's why cities are happy to subsidize them. Because with the revenue sharing, they get taxes on money that wasn't even made in their state.

Building stadiums with public money and then charging the public to enter is really crappy, but in the end it does in fact benefit the location in some cases.

And you can see the pushback already starting. San Diego and Oakland wouldn't build new stadiums, so those teams moved. One went to LA, where they are building a new stadium with Olympics money which will be used by the Chargers, and Las Vegas was happy to bring in all the extra people to gamble. So in both cases those stadiums will probably be net positives for their cities.

I'm from Las Vegas and that's not a great description of the situation.

The vote to approve the stadium will rank as one of the top 5 most corrupt things to ever happen in our city... which was formerly ran by the mob.

And think about this... the capacity of the stadium is 65,000. If all 8 games are SELLOUTS, and every single attendee looses $100 to the casinos after every single game, that's 52 million dollars. So it would take about 20 years to pay for the Billion dollar stadium.

Obviously thats disastrously simplified, but if you think we can pay for this stadium with just a small tax on the increased revenue.... that's way way off.

Presumably that person coming to the game is not only betting, but is also staying at a hotel, eating a few meals, flying into and out of the airport, and gambling at the hotel. It's how you guys make most of your tax base, so I'd assume an increase in the tax base would be good.

Now the new traffic on the other hand...

That's why I was saying my model was over simplified.

Obviously those people will spend a lot of money, but even if they ALL fly here Airport visitation stats won't go up 1%.

If we wanted to bring more visitors to Las Vegas pretty much any other way to spend a Billion dollars would have been more productive. The politicians never even tried to make that argument, at least to a sophisticated audience.

It's all about legacy, and home town spirit. Apparently a lot of people can't really be proud of a city that doesn't have an NFL team to root for.

Bottom line is we spent more to get an NFL team than any other city, and we are getting less out it than most cities, because we already have to many things to compete for a tourist's dollar and we didn't need a "star attraction" to revitalize an aging downtown or some of the other rationalizations other cities have used.

As a Raiders season ticket holder, I can assure you that their division games (Chargers, Chiefs, Broncos) don't draw well. The visitors that draw, when you get them, are Steelers, Pats, Cowboys, maybe Chicago if their uptrend continues. But being Vegas is a wild card; there will be an attraction to Vegas, though not necessarily the stadium, on game weekends.

The stadium can be used for non-NFL events during the other 6 days of the week or 8 months of the year. That’s what every other stadium does.

That's what other cities do, but we already have 4 other stadiums of that size which are competing to book those events... and nobody has that much stuff going on, so it will be empty a lot more than your thinking.

And a bunch of awesome venues all over town.

Levi's Stadium doesn't get much non-football use. Even the Pac-12 Championship is moving elsewhere.

  So it would take about 20 years to pay for the Billion dollar stadium.

Except it's actually a two billion dollar stadium. Double the fun!

> ...in the end it does in fact benefit the location in some cases.

This is a really low bar for redistributing money from taxpayers to wealthy owners. It also ignores opportunity costs.

The Inglewood stadium isn't being built with Olympics money— it's privately funded. However the stadium will benefit from some rail and other infrastructure projects that are having their timelines accelerated due to the Olympics.

While technically correct (the best kind of correct), the owners expect to make back a good chunk of the construction cost from the Olympics licensing fees that they will get and from the tax breaks they are getting, which were justified as being funded in part by the Olympics. So yes, it's private money, but private money backed by Olympics money.

From the numbers I've seen, the proposed tax subsidies* are gonna cover _maybe_ 5% of the construction costs of the stadium.

As far as Olympic revenue, I wonder how the stadium's income from a day of the Olympics will compare to a Rams game or a Taylor Swift concert? Supposedly LA isn't giving the stadium any money for capital improvements, just whatever they get for renting it out and a few million for a temporary archery building. Maybe the stadium gets a cut of the $2,000 opening ceremonies tickets, but I imagine that'll be less than they make from the 2022 super bowl. I know a lot can change before 2028, but I'm cautiously optimistic that LA won't screw anything up too bad.

*which IMO are pretty tame— Inglewood pays for police overtime, shuttles to train stations, utilities improvements, etc but only for the first 5 years that the city makes $25+ million from the stadium

> "The NFL is the world's sketchiest non-profit."

While I don't disagree with the rest of your post, I'd like to point out that the NFL is no longer a non-profit:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tax-season/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2015/04/28/t...

> Not only does it not pay taxes as an entity despite its CEO's $31 million dollar salary

I'd never shy away from ragging on the NFL for being a shady organization, but:

a) The NFL gave up its tax-exempt status in 2015 (and even then, it was only the head office [~$10M in new taxes paid], not the teams, that was tax exempt).

b) What does the CEO's salary have to do with it? The salary itself is taxable as income. Non-profit employees don't get to dodge the IRS. (Of course, I expect Goodell to do his best to avoid paying income tax as many wealthy people do.)

> Not only does it not pay taxes as an entity despite its CEO's $31 million dollar salary

So it operates like every single partnership out there, tax-wise.

> "... the NFL is the world's sketchiest non-profit"

Ehh, broaden your perspective.

At its absolute worst, the NFL can't begin to touch the corruption of FIFA at its absolute best.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com