Should Ohio taxpayers give Jimmy Haslam $600 million for a new Cleveland Browns stadium? • Ohio Capital Journal

It’s budget season, so the lobbyists are out in full swing.

Tennessee Billionaire and Gas Station Tycoon Jimmy Haslam, known up here as the owner of the Cleveland Browns, is purportedly drumming up support among lawmakers for a $600 million subsidy for a new Browns stadium and that money could be proposed as soon as the Governor’s budget request.

For comparison, this is about as much as the state allocated for highway maintenance across the entire state in 2025. It’s a chunk of change.

So what will we get for this investment? Will the Browns be able to scrounge up more than three wins by a combined 13 points and a three-way tie for last in the league if we throw hundreds of millions of dollars at them?

To be fair, there have been no public promises that Haslam and Company will produce a team that avoids embarrassing the state if they get this subsidy. Public arguments have been pretty threadbare: the City of Cleveland has been hostile to the idea of a new stadium. This seems to have shifted Haslam’s eyes down I-71 to see what kind of success he can have under the dome in Columbus getting help to pay for the project.

So far, the reception has been tepid. New Senate President Rob McColley said he was opposed to a “handout” to the Browns when he heard about the proposal. Some policymakers are kicking around backing the project with state bonds, bumping the cost up to $3 billion and using some of that money to develop nearby hotels, restaurants, and housing.

So let’s get back to the meat of the issue: why would we do this? What is it about football stadiums that makes a businessman or a lobbyist think he can credibly waltz into a lawmaker’s office and shamelessly ask for hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars? I mean, these aren’t utility companies we’re talking about.

The case lobbyists make for stadium subsidies is fundamentally economic. With a professional football team, your state will get on television. People will travel from far away to visit your city, they will stay at your hotels, they will eat at restaurants, and you will become a destination.

The consensus among economists is that this story is a fantasy. Yes, economic activity will increase around a football stadium: it can be an anchor for a flurry of economic activity once a week twenty times a year. But where does this money come from?

Entertainment budgets are not flexible. If someone didn’t go to a stadium, they would probably go to a bar, restaurant, movie, play, or live performance somewhere else in the city. So new economic activity is not created, it simply is shifted from one part of the city to another.

A study published in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis just a few months ago underscores this economic consensus. For a professional sports team or stadium to be anything other than a net negative on the local economy, it needs to (a) attract visitors from other cities, and (b) get its owner and players to spend a significant share of their income in the area.

So if legislators are going to take this seriously, they need evidence of three things. First, they need to see that this new stadium will bring significant numbers of new visitors to Ohio. Second, they need to see that Jimmy and his team are spending a lot of their own money in Ohio. And third, they need to see that this is a better investment than transportation infrastructure, education, broadband, and the many other priorities they will have to put aside to give Jimmy a new place for his team to play.