Your City Will Never Get Rich Hosting the Super Bowl

Those Super Bowl economic impact studies are still bogus.

Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Along San Francisco’s Embarcadero, right in front of the restored Ferry Building, a fan village known as Super Bowl City is expected to draw at least 1 million visitors this week. Super Bowl Host Committee officials project that San Francisco will finish in the black after the nine-day event, which they say could generate anywhere between “a couple hundred million to $800 million” in economic output for the city. What’s more, a PricewaterhouseCoopers study projected that the Bay Area could see at least $220 million in direct revenue from business during the Super Bowl, the most ever. 

But where do those numbers come from, and how accurate are they, really? We reached out to two economists who study the impact of mega sporting events, and their assessment was less than rosy. Here are some takeaways:

Every year, the same studies come out. Every year, they’re wrong. When the NFL and its host committee estimate the event’s economic impact, they tend to forget how the city operates before the event, says Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College. For example, San Francisco’s hotel occupancy rate typically has hovered around 90 percent in February. So when Super Bowl fans flood area hotels, they’re likely just filling spots that would have already been filled. Additionally, residents can be reluctant to visit the Super Bowl City area over fear of traffic, congestion, and increased security, displacing typical economic activity and leaking money out of the city. Notably, on Super Bowl City’s opening day, only 7,000 people showed up.

“I’m expecting next year they’re going to come out and say the host city is going to turn into New York City. Not really. It’s silly,” Zimbalist says. “Every year they come out with the same stuff. The studies that they do are based on a false methodology and unrealistic assumptions.”

The host city’s Super Bowl committee usually keeps quiet about the projected economic benefits to the host city or the region. Previous analyses by university researchers, in partnership with the NFL and host committees, have measured the gross economic benefits anywhere between $400 million and $700 million. For instance, researchers at Arizona State University found that last year’s Super Bowl XLIX in Glendale, Arizona, brought $719 million of total economic impact to the state.

ASU would not release the entire study to Mother Jones under an agreement with the NFL and the host committee. But Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of Holy Cross who examined the study’s summary findings, told Mother Jones that researchers failed to take into account the region’s typical activity. Matheson argues that the true impact for the host city usually falls between $30 million and $120 million.

San Francisco gave up a lot to get Super Bowl City—and still needs to figure out how to pay for it. This year, Super Bowl City is 45 miles away from the actual big game, which will take place at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. But San Francisco’s taxpayers are on the hook for at least $4.8 million in city services during Super Bowl week. Why? An independent budget analysis found that San Francisco did not make a formal agreement with the NFL and the Super Bowl Host Committee to receive a reimbursement for those services. Or, as SF Weekly recently put it, “The Super Bowl is here on little more than a handshake deal.”

As Zimbalist notes, $4.8 million is a small number when you consider San Francisco’s $8.96 billion budget. Still, he says, “it’s $5 million not being spent on road repairs and schools.” Or on the city’s roughly 3,500 homeless, some of whom recently relocated from the Super Bowl City area to a growing tent encampment under a highway overpass in the Mission District. San Francisco magazine counted 100 tents in the area, though homeless advocates and officials say the encampment has grown over the course of a few months, even years. A host committee official told Bloomberg News in January that the group would invest $13 million of the $50 million it had already raised in charities addressing homelessness and poverty.

“The studies that they do are based on a false methodology and unrealistic assumptions.”

Meanwhile, as part of the Super Bowl bid, San Francisco’s police, fire, and emergency management departments “signed letters of assurance to not seek reimbursement from the NFL” for providing more services during the Super Bowl—an arrangement that Matheson said isn’t unusual. (Last year’s Super Bowl likely cost the city of Glendale at least $579,000 and as much as $1.25 million in security and transportation cost overruns.) Only two departments will earn money back from the host committee—the fire department (a 6.7 percent reimbursement) and parks and recreation (100 percent). Jane Kim, who sits on San Francisco’s board of supervisors and has called the city’s non-agreement “the worst deal ever,” pushed for a last-minute bill to make the city renegotiate with the NFL, less than a week before the events at Super Bowl City were set to start.  

The city’s municipal transportation agency and police department will spend a combined $3.8 million for services to Super Bowl 50 events; the transportation department will spend more than $700,000 on additional parking enforcement alone. The city will try to cover this by redirecting funds in different department budgets along with staff time from future projects “to support this extraordinary special event.” For now, some city workers will volunteer their time during Super Bowl week.

All told, it could’ve been worse. Take Super Bowl XLVIII, which left New Jersey residents with a $17.7 million tab. Or last year’s big game, which cost Glendale, Arizona—a city of 230,000 people that sets aside 40 percent of its debt to pay off sports facilities—more than $2.1 million to pay for security alone. And while Santa Clara’s taxpayers still have to deal with the public subsidies that helped fund Levi’s Stadium, the city did manage to make a deal to earn back roughly $3.6 million in service costs for the Super Bowl.

“In the big picture,” Matheson says, “this is one of the cheapest for the taxpayers that we’ve seen.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate