Opinion · Sports, Cities & Social Psychology
At the Browns’ last home game in Cleveland in December 1995, fans pulled out seats and threw them onto the field. The team was leaving for Baltimore. The stadium was old, and the economics of the move were already settled. People tore it apart anyway.
Economists have spent decades showing that losing a pro team rarely sinks a city’s economy. I think they are right about that. This piece looks at why the argument still never ends, and why fans and taxpayers can look at the same stadium and see two different things.
What is actually being discussed?
- The Chargers left San Diego for Los Angeles in 2017.
- In 2020, San Diego State University bought the 135-acre stadium site from the city for $88 million.
- Snapdragon Stadium, a $310 million venue, opened there in August 2022.
- A 621-apartment project broke ground next to it in August 2025. The full plan includes up to 4,600 homes and a 34-acre river park.
- A newspaper series on six cities that lost NFL teams found little sign of broad economic damage. What lingered was stadium debt and land.
Sources: Press-Republican via Yahoo Sports, NBC San Diego, Snapdragon Stadium (Wikipedia)
The money argument is mostly settled
A 2023 review by economists John Charles Bradbury, Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys looked at more than 130 studies over three decades. Teams and stadiums had little effect on local income, jobs or growth.
The main reason is simple. A family that skips a game still spends that money somewhere. It goes to a restaurant, a movie or a weekend trip instead.
That doesn’t mean nothing is lost. The same newspaper series notes that bars, parking lots and shops near a stadium can feel a real hit. The trickle from game-day crowds is real. It is just too small and too local to show up in a whole region’s numbers.
So a city doesn’t collapse when a team leaves. But the people on the block next to the stadium may notice on the very next Sunday.
What the spreadsheet can’t count
Here is where the money argument runs out. A team with a city’s name on it isn’t only a business renting a building. It is something people say “we” about.
Robert Cialdini and his colleagues showed this in a set of 1976 field studies. After their football team won, students wore more school clothing. They also said “we” more often when describing a win than a loss. Psychologists call it basking in reflected glory. A team lends its wins to the people who claim it.
That claim depends on the team being ours. When the name moves to another city, the “we” goes with it. I think most fans would cool off fast once the team stopped being their local team. The players might be the same. The feeling wouldn’t be.
Cialdini’s work has a mirror image, too. People pull away from a team that lets them down, a habit researchers call cutting off reflected failure. A team that moves away is the biggest letdown there is. Fans don’t just stop cheering. Many go out of their way to stop caring, and that is hard to undo even if a new team arrives later.
Economists have tried to price this. In a 2001 study of the Pittsburgh Penguins, Bruce Johnson, Peter Groothuis and John Whitehead asked residents what the team’s civic pride was worth to them. The value was real and could be large. It was also far less than the cost of a new arena.
Two groups, one stadium
That study captures the whole debate. Both sides are looking at real things.
For many fans, the team is part of who the city is. Losing it feels like a loss of identity, not a line item. Loss aversion makes that hurt heavier than the same amount of gain would feel good. Paying to keep the team can feel like protecting something that can’t be bought back.
For many taxpayers, the question is fairness. A private owner earns the profits, while the public carries the debt. Every dollar spent on a stadium is a dollar not spent on schools or roads. Asking why public money should hold up a private business is a reasonable question, not a cold one.
Each side tends to see the other as the extreme one. I wrote about that pattern in the naive realism piece. Here it plays out in a simple way. Fans hear “it’s only money.” Taxpayers hear “it’s only a game.” Neither group is describing what the other actually cares about.
What Cleveland, Seattle and Los Angeles fought to keep
Past moves show what cities actually value. Often it isn’t the building.
Cleveland kept the name
After the seat-throwing and the lawsuits, the NFL reached a deal in February 1996. The team could move, but the Browns name and colors stayed in Cleveland, with a promise of a new team by 1999. Baltimore got the players and became the Ravens.
The city then built a $247 million stadium. By 2021, it had paid nearly $278 million in stadium debt, per the Press-Republican series. Cleveland paid heavily for a “we” that could carry on.
Seattle kept the history
When the SuperSonics left for Oklahoma City in 2008, the owners paid Seattle $75 million to end the arena lease early. The settlement also kept the team name, colors and 41 years of history in the city.
Seattle let the team go but held on to the identity. It treated the name as something it might want to use again.
Los Angeles lived without it, then got the big night
The Rams and Raiders both left Los Angeles after 1994. The NFL didn’t return for 21 years, and research found little sign of real economic harm. That is the clearest evidence for the money side.
Then the Rams came back. In February 2022, they won Super Bowl LVI at their own home stadium. It was the second year in a row a team won a Super Bowl at home. That is the scene many fans imagine: your team, your city, the biggest game in the country.
The money from a night like that is smaller than promised. Victor Matheson and Robert Baade studied Super Bowls from 1970 to 2001. The average host gained about $92 million in income, roughly a quarter of what NFL-backed studies claimed. Hosting is also decided years in advance, so a home team playing in it is a rare bit of luck.
But the mood is the part I’d bet on. A city with its own team in that game doesn’t feel like a city counting income. It feels like a party.
Where I come down
I don’t think a team carrying a city’s name can be judged by the stadium’s value alone. Nothing collapses when it leaves, and stores don’t suddenly go under. But the trickle from fans coming to games isn’t zero, and the “our team” feeling is worth something.
I also see the taxpayer side clearly. That feeling has a price, and it is usually lower than the bill. Houston spent about $67 million upgrading the Astrodome, and the Oilers left anyway. Oakland was still paying off its stadium bonds years after the Raiders moved.
San Diego’s old site makes the trade-off visible. Gina Jacobs of SDSU said the project “was going to be more than a football stadium.” Those parking lots are becoming homes and a park. Something was lost, and something else is being built.
Even here, the economic loss is hard to pin down. The pandemic hit just three years after the Chargers left, which muddied any attempt to measure the effect on its own. What is easy to see is the land. A site that sat mostly empty between game days is turning into a place people will live every day.
That doesn’t settle the argument. A fan can look at the same apartments and still feel the empty Sunday. Both reactions are honest.
Questions for the next stadium vote
When your own city argues about a team or a stadium, these questions can help separate the two kinds of value:
- Which part of the pitch is about jobs and income, and which part is about pride? Judge each by its own evidence.
- Would I still say “we” if the team played under the same name in a suburb 20 miles away?
- If the team leaves anyway, who is left paying the debt?
- What could the same land or money become instead?
None of these answers will be the same for every city. But asking them keeps “it’s only money” and “it’s only a game” from being the whole conversation.
Editorial note: This is an opinion piece based on public reporting as of October 10, 2026. Stadium funding is a policy debate with reasonable views on both sides, and this piece looks at the psychology behind each side without endorsing either position. The featured image is AI-generated.