Probably not a whole bunch, but that doesn't mean it isn't the right thing to do, and yesterday. Patrick Hubry rants about the sporting world's welfare queens over at Sports on Earth:
They're the team owners sitting in luxury boxes built with taxpayer dollars, charging PSL fees for seats constructed with the same. They're the athletes writing off fines for bad behavior. They're the multimillion-dollar professional leagues, Ozymandias-shaming college athletic departments and—ahem—charitable bowl games all enjoying lucrative and dubious non-profit status. Their ranks include Tiger Woods, whose namesake foundation once received a $100,000 federal grant; the Baseball Hall of Fame, which pocketed $1.57 million in federal funds between 2002 and 2006; and the Greater Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame, which seven years ago was given $75,000 as part of a larger appropriations bill funding the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development. (Additional point of incredulous outrage: the Greater Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame doesn't even include Jim Brown.) They are the underserving beneficiaries of inappropriate, unnecessary public subsidy, feathering their overstuffed nests of downy-soft private profit, adding to America's astronomical charge card bill all the while. They are the Welfare Kings (hi again, Jeffrey Loria!) and Queens (rest in peace, Georgia Frontiere!) of sports, crying poor while grifting and lifting society's collective wallet, perpetually grabbing for more, more, more. […]
According to Harvard professor Judith Grant Long and economist Andrew Zimbalist, the average public contribution to the total capital and operating cost per sports stadium from 2000 to 2006 was between $249 and $280 million. A fantastic interactive map at Deadspin estimates that the total cost to the public of the 78 pro stadiums built or renovated between 1991 and 2004 was nearly $16 billion. That's enough to build three Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Or fund, in today's dollars, 15 Saturn V moon rocket launches—three more than the number of launches in the entire Apollo/Skylab program. It's also more than what Chrysler received in the Great Recession-triggered auto industry bailout ($10.5 billion), and bigger than the 2010 GDP of 84 different nations. How does this happen?
An excellent question. Many more horrifying examples (including: did you know that the National Guard pays more than $20 million a year to sponsor a NASCAR team, or that the National Football League is classified as a non-profit in order to avoid taxes?) at the link, which I found through Will Leitch's Twitter feed.
