When Washington, D.C., agreed to hand over billions in land and tax breaks for a new Commanders football stadium, experts thought it would long remain an outlier in sweetheart deals for sports teams.
But just months later, attention turned to Kansas, where officials in December announced plans to fund 60% of a new stadium for the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. The state committed to spending up to $1.8 billion — the largest-ever professional sports subsidy.
Geoffrey Propheter, who studies stadium deals as an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver, thought the Commanders deal would stand out for years to come “for how ludicrous it was.”
The D.C. Council in September finalized a plan to dedicate more than $1 billion in public funds to move the Commanders some 7 miles from a suburb in Maryland to a new facility planned for the old RFK Stadium site.
The city’s deal, which offers free riverfront land and exclusive development rights, means the district could forgo between $6 billion and $25 billion in revenue over time, Propheter said. By his calculations, that makes the planned Commanders stadium project the most valuable package ever awarded to a sports team. The team is primarily owned by Josh Harris, an investor with a net worth above $11 billion who also owns majority stakes in the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers and the NHL’s New Jersey Devils.
The stadium deals in Washington and Kansas — both involving relocations within the same metropolitan area — have set separate records for taxpayer subsidies to sports teams. They serve as further evidence that public officials are uninterested in curbing giveaways to billionaire team owners, despite decades of research suggesting stadiums are a wasteful use of limited tax dollars.
And the deals could further push up the public price tag for projects in Chicago, Denver and Newark, New Jersey, all of which are discussing new or upgraded venues for NFL and NHL teams.
“Kansas lawmakers have done every NFL team and every pro-subsidy lawmaker everywhere else in the country a huge favor, because now teams can look at the Kansas deal and say, ‘Hey, what we’re asking for is not nearly as bad or as crazy or stupid as what Kansas is offering,’” Propheter said. “So now we’ve just pushed the expectation upward.”
Decades of research has found stadium subsidies are a poor investment of public dollars. Yet the median, inflation- adjusted stadium subsidy amount has ballooned over time.
The Chiefs deal is poised to surpass the $1.48 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars awarded to Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, opened in 1976, marking it as the costliest outlay ever in the U.S. and Canada, said J.C. Bradbury, a Kennesaw State University economics professor who researches stadium subsidies.
Adjusted to 2024 dollars, the median stadium subsidy for projects that opened in the 2010s was about $400 million. That increased to $605 million for projects slated to open in the 2020s. Already, 2030s-era projects have reached a median of $825 million, he said.
“There are many different ways we can measure these deals,” he said, “but by any metric, the recent Chiefs and Commanders deals are historically high.”
