Economics of the Super Bowl

Working Paper Series, Paper No. 10-01

Victor Matheson

†

January 2010

Abstract

The Super Bowl is America’s premier sporting event. This paper details basic economic

facts about the game and examines the controversy surrounding the purported economic impact

of the game on host communities. While the league and sports boosters claim that the game

brings up to a $500 million economic impact to host cities, a review of the literature suggests that

the true economic impact is a fraction of this amount.

JEL Classification Codes: L83

Key Words: sports, stadiums, Super Bowl, impact analysis, football

†

Department of Economics, Box 157A, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA

01610-2395 USA, 508-793-2649 (phone), 508-793-3708 (fax), vmatheso@holycross.edu

Introduction

The Super Bowl, the season-ending championship game of the National Football League,

is by most measures the most significant annual sporting event in the United States. The game

routinely attracts a sellout audience willing to pay top dollar for seats. In 2008, the face value for

a typical Super Bowl ticket averaged $700, and ticket scalpers could expect to receive many

times that figure in the secondary market. Table 1 shows the average price for a Super Bowl

ticket sold on StubHub, a large secondary market dealer, between 2003 and 2009.

The Super Bowl‟s television viewing numbers are even more astounding. The Super

Bowl is far and away the most watched television program in the United States every year. For

example, 19 of the 40 most watched programs in U.S. television history are Super Bowls, and

more recently, the last 10 Super Bowls are the 10 most watched programs of the past decade.

Between 2000 and 2009, the average Super Bowl attracted just over 90 million viewers in the

United States. By way of comparison, over the same period the National Basketball Association

(NBA) finals drew 14.3 million per game, the World Series attracted an audience of just under 19

million per game, and the National Hockey League‟s (NHL) Stanley Cup drew a paltry 4.1

million viewers per game. The Super Bowl‟s television ratings also dwarf non-sports

programming. The Academy Awards drew an average of 39.7 million viewers over the same

time period, and even the top-rated non-football program of the entire decade, the series finale of

Friends, attracted only 52.5 million fans, barely half that of the typical Super Bowl. See Table 2

for a comparison of television ratings for various sporting and non-sporting events.

Of course, sky-high television ratings also mean sky-high advertising revenues. A 30-

second television spot during the Super Bowl is the single most valuable piece of real estate in all

of American broadcast television. In 2009, a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl sold

for $3.0 million, an 11% increase over the previous year despite the turmoil affecting the national

economy. As shown in Table 3, advertising rates at the Super Bowl have experienced a rapid

increase over the past two decades, far outpacing inflation as well as advertising rates for other

major television events.

Economic Impact of the Super Bowl

While the spectacle of the big game may be of the greatest interest to the media,

marketing experts, and the general public, the economic impact of the Super Bowl on host cities

has attracted the most interest from academic economists. Unlike championships in the NBA,

NHL, and MLB, the Super Bowl takes place in a neutral site rather than being hosted by the

participating teams. Furthermore, unlike the major bowl games played in college football, the

location of the game changes from year to year. In this sense, the Super Bowl is most similar to

major international competitions such as the Olympics or World Cup. The Union of European

Football Association‟s (UEFA) annual Champions League final, arguably the biggest annual

single day sporting event in Europe, also plays at rotating neutral sites in the same fashion.

The NFL and league boosters typically claim that the Super Bowl generates huge

economic windfalls for the cities lucky enough to be selected as the host for the event. For

example, a joint study conducted by the National Football League and the W.P. Carey MBA

Sports Business Program estimated an economic impact of $500.6 million from Super Bowl XLI

on the greater Phoenix economy in 2008 (W.P. Carey Business School, 2008). As noted by

Baade and Matheson (2006a), “If those (types of) numbers are accurate, „Super‟ is an apt

adjective for the event.” Few other events outside of the Olympic Games or soccer‟s World Cup

can generate such lofty claims of an economic windfall from such a short-term event.

The W.P. Carey MBA Sports Business Program is not alone in their heady claims.

Consulting firms, local visitor and tourism bureaus, as well teams and the league annually

publish eye-popping estimates of the economic impact of the big game. For example, an NFL-

Sports Management Research Institute (SMRI) study attributed a $670 million ($863 million in

2009 dollars) increase in taxable sales in South Florida (Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach

counties) and an increase in economic activity of $396 million ($510.1 in 2009 dollars) to the

1999 event (NFL, 1999). As with other economic impact reports, this NFL-commissioned study

predicted that a horde of affluent tourists would descend on the three-county area. The NFL-

SMRI team reported that the average income of Super Bowl attendees is more than twice that of

the average visitor to South Florida during the peak tourist months of January and February

($144,500 compared to $40,000-$80,000), and they spend up to four times as much as the

average visitor to South Florida ($400.33 per day compared to $99-$199 per day). As noted by

Jim Steeg, the NFL‟s Vice President for special events from 1977-2005,

The Super Bowl is the most unique of all special events. Extensive studies by

host cities, independent organizations and the NFL all try to predict the economic

impact the big game will have on a community. They talk to tens of thousands of

attendees, local businessmen, corporate planners, media and local fans -- looking

to see how they are affected.

These studies have provided irrefutable evidence that a Super Bowl is the most

dramatic event in the U.S. Super Bowl patrons are significantly more affluent,

spend more and have more spent on them, and influence future business in the

community more than attendees of any other event or convention held in the U.S.

(Steeg, 1999).

Table 4 summarizes a variety of ex ante estimates of the impact of the Super Bowl

on the host city‟s economy.

There are reasons to be skeptical of such claims, however, since the league has

strong financial incentives to publicize studies that report a large financial windfall for

host cities. The NFL explicitly uses the lure of the Super Bowl as a carrot to convince

otherwise reluctant cities to provide public subsidies for the construction of new playing

facilities. For example, just days before Arlington, Texas voters narrowly approved a

$325 million tax increase to fund a new stadium for the Dallas Cowboys, NFL

commissioner Paul Tagliabue visited the area and suggested that the construction of a

new stadium would put the city in a prime position to host an upcoming Super Bowl.

Indeed, the new $1.1 billion stadium will host the 2011 Super Bowl. If the Super Bowl

really provides a $400 or $500 million boost to a local economy, then, in effect, the

benefits of the game could completely cover the public outlay. Of course, this logical

reasoning only holds if the big game does, in fact, generate substantial economic benefits.

Given the fact that over $5 billion in taxpayer money has been spent since 1995 on the

construction or refurbishment of NFL stadiums, obtaining accurate measurements of the

economic impact of NFL franchises and mega-events such as the Super Bowl is of

significant public policy importance.

Table 5 shows the hosts of the Super Bowl from 1967 through 2013. It is

interesting to note that during the early years of the game, it was common for the same

city to host the game multiple times. Fourteen of the first fifteen games were held in

either New Orleans, Miami, or the Los Angeles area. More recently, however, the clear

tendency has been to spread out the game. Over the fifteen year period from 1999-2013,

eleven different cities held games, and in at least 6 of these cases (Tampa, Dallas,

Indianapolis, Glendale/Phoenix, Houston, and Detroit), the game was awarded

immediately after the construction of a new publicly financed stadium. There can be little

doubt that the NFL would not place its premier event in Detroit or Indianapolis except in

exchange for a large public subsidy in the form of a new stadium for one of the league‟s

franchises.

On the surface, measuring the economic impact of a large sporting event is a

regularly straight-forward task. One simply needs to add up the number of attendees at the

game and estimate the average fan‟s expenditures in connection with the game. For

example, in assessing the impact of Super Bowl XXVIII on the City of Atlanta and the

State of Georgia, Jeffrey Humphreys (1994) estimated that the event generated 306,680

Avisitor days@ and that the average per diem expenditures per visitor was $252 to arrive at a

direct economic impact from the event of $77 million. The indirect economic impact of

an event is calculated by taking the direct impact and applying a multiplier to account for

the initial round of expenditures recirculating in the economy. While the magnitude of the

multiplier can be affected by a large number of variables including the sectors in which

the initial spending takes place and the size of the metropolitan area in which the event

occurs, typically for major sporting events, the multiplier effect doubles the size of the

initial round of spending. Humphreys estimated the indirect economic impact of the 1994

Super Bowl at $89 million for a total impact from the game of $166 million.

While this type of ex ante prediction of the economic impact of the Super Bowl

appears straight-forward, in fact there are numerous theoretical difficulties with this

method of estimation. Three prominent problems frequently cited by economists are the

substitution effect, the crowding out effect, and leakages.

The substitution effect occurs when consumers spend money on a sporting event

that would normally have been spent elsewhere in the economy. For example, if a parent

buys a child a Pittsburgh Steelers 2009 Super Bowl Champions sweatshirt for Christmas,

it is unlikely that this sweatshirt represents an additional gift but instead will be given

instead of another present. In this case, the Super Bowl has not increased total

expenditures on gifts but instead has simply rearranged spending patterns towards sports

paraphernalia and away from, say, ugly holiday sweaters. In a broader sense, spending on

the Super Bowl by residents of the host city reduces the money available for these

consumers to spend elsewhere in the economy. For this reason, most honest practitioners

of economic impact analysis exclude spending by local residents from final economic

impact numbers.

Of course, for mega-events like the Super Bowl, the substitution effect is likely to

be much lower than for a regular season game since a much larger percentage of the

attendees are from out of town. On average the NFL distributes 75% of the available

tickets to individual teams. Each participating team receives 17.5% of the tickets while

non-participating teams get 1.2% of the tickets and the host team receives 5% of the

tickets. The remaining quarter of the available tickets are retained by the NFL and

distributed to sponsors, the broadcast networks, media, VIPs and the host committee

(Tampa Bay Super Bowl Host Committee, 2009). Since few of the attendees at the game

are local residents, the substitution effect is likely to be low. On the other hand, the Super

Bowl has become a week-long event with numerous open events for fans that are more

accessible to the local population. Spending at these events by local residents must be

factored out of expenditure estimates in order to obtain an accurate assessment of the net

economic impact.

Crowding out occurs when the crowds and congestion associated with a sporting

event displaces regular economic activity. While there is no doubt that the Super Bowl

attracts large numbers of tourist, it is equally clear that others are dissuaded from visiting

Super Bowl host cities during the time period around the game. Indeed, the situation is

much like Yogi Berra‟s famous quote, “No one goes there anymore; it‟s too crowded.”

Traditionally, the Super Bowl has been held in warm weather cities that are popular

vacation destinations even when the Super Bowl is not in town. Therefore, even if a city‟s

hotels during a Super Bowl are full to capacity with sports fans, if the hotels would have

been 80% occupied anyway, the net effect of the Super Bowl is the incremental 20% of

additional rooms that are sold not the entire number of rooms sold to Super Bowl visitors.

A perfect example of this phenomenon occurred in January 2002 in the aftermath

of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The attacks caused the NFL season to be pushed

back by one week. Unfortunately, the host city that year, New Orleans, was initially

unable to accommodate the Super Bowl on the succeeding weekend because of the

presence of a large national auto dealers convention the next week. Only when the

convention was moved was it possible to host the Super Bowl on the desired week.

Therefore, while the Super Bowl filled every hotel room in the city, a large number of

these hotel rooms would have been full of auto dealers even in the absence of the Super

Bowl. Therefore, the economic impact of the Super Bowl should only include any hotel

rooms sold to sports fans over and above the number of rooms that would have been sold

anyway. Of course, the recent decisions to hold Super Bowls in cold weather locations

such as Detroit and Indianapolis are likely to reduce any potential crowding out effects.

The third major consideration is the problem with leakages. While a great deal of

money may be spent within a city during a mega-event, much of the money may

immediately leak out of the city and not end up in the pockets of local residents. In other

words, the event may generate economic activity for the city but not generate income for

its citizens. Of course, normal multiplier analysis as performed by software modeling

packages such as the Bureau of Economic Analysis‟ Regional Input-Output Multiplier

System (RIMS II) or IMPLAN (IMpact analysis for PLANing) does account for leakages

in its modeling. However, the complex input-output matrices upon which these models

rely are based on the normal inter-industry relationships that exist in local economies, and

during a mega-event these relationships may be anything but normal.

For example, it is common practice for hotels to raise their rates to 3 or 4 times

the normal level during the Super Bowl. Local hotel desk clerks and room cleaners,

however, don‟t see a 300% or 400% increase in their wages. It is not the local workers

but instead shareholders back at corporate headquarters who benefit from the event. Since

a smaller portion of visitor spending at hotels winds up in the hands of local residents

during the Super Bowl, multipliers calculated using average spending patterns are likely

to be biased upwards (Matheson, 2009).

Capacity constraints in cities also lead to leakages. The Super Bowl is a large

enough event that many services demanded by visitors, ranging from high-end catering to

exotic dancing, cannot be fulfilled solely by local providers. Therefore, labor and capital

must often be imported into the host city to meet the excess demand. Of course, payments

to these imported factors of production do not represent income for the city but instead

increase incomes of the guest workers.

An obvious illustration of this situation occurred in Jacksonville in 2005.

Jacksonville was a significantly smaller and less popular tourist destination than Super

Bowl venues such as New Orleans or Miami, and the city, therefore, had significantly

fewer hotel rooms available than most other host cities. To alleviate the shortage of hotel

rooms, the Super Bowl host committee arranged for six large cruise ships to dock in the

area, providing housing for up to 7,600 guests (Donovan, 2005).

Of course, after the big weekend, the ships pulled up anchor and sailed away,

taking any revenues they generated with them. In effect, all spending that occurred on

these ships was subject to nearly 100% leakage from the Jacksonville economy.

Other issues that may affect the true net economic impact of an event include

casual visitors and time switching. Casual visitors are tourists who attend a sporting event

while traveling but whose primary purpose for traveling is not sports related. For

example, a professor at a conference who attends a baseball game during his or her stay

would get counted into a typical economic impact study. However, the sporting event had

no influence on whether the individual visited the city, and the spending done at the

ballpark simply substitutes away from spending that would have taken place elsewhere in

the economy in the absence of the game. Of course, with a huge event like the Super

Bowl, casual spending is unlikely to play a significant role since crowding will preclude

large numbers of non-sports fans from being in the city during Super Bowl week anyway.

Time switching, however, may be an important factor when considering the

economic impact of the Super Bowl. Time switching occurs when an individual is

planning to visit a city but rearranges his or her schedule to coincide with a sporting

event. The sporting event does not influence whether the person visits the city but instead

only influences the timing. This factor can certainly be important for the Super Bowl. A

person may have long desired to visit a tourist destination like New Orleans, and the

Super Bowl is what finally prompts the individual to take that trip. But once the sports

fan has seen the city, the tourist has crossed the city off of his or her future vacation

destinations.

Empirical Studies of the Super Bowl

Given the theoretical shortcomings of traditional economic impact analysis as

well as public policy implications of publishing potentially inflated economic benefit

numbers, numerous independent scholars not connected with the NFL or any Super Bowl

host committees have examined the ex post impact of hosting the Super Bowl on a wide

variety of economic variables including employment, personal income, per capita income,

taxable sales, tax revenues, and visitor statistics. In general, these studies have all come to

the same conclusion: the Super Bowl generates a fraction the economic impact claimed

by boosters.

Porter (1999) examines short-term data on sales receipts for several Super Bowls

concluding,

Investigator bias, data measurement error, changing production relationships,

diminishing returns to both scale and variable inputs, and capacity constraints

anywhere along the chain of sales relations lead to lower multipliers. Crowding

out and price increases by input suppliers in response to higher levels of demand

and the tendency of suppliers to lower prices to stimulate sales when demand is

weak lead to overestimates of net new sales due to the event. These

characteristics alone would suggest that the estimated impact of the mega-sporting

event will be lower than the impact analysis predicts.

Baade and Matheson (2000) examine twenty-five Super Bowls from 1973 to 1997

and find that the game is associated with an increase in employment in the host

metropolitan area of 537 jobs. Based on simple assumptions regarding the value of a job

to a community, they estimate an average economic impact of roughly $30 million or

approximately one-tenth the figures touted by the NFL.

Baade and Matheson (2006a) update their previous results by directly examining

personal income in host cities. They find that for Super Bowls held between 1970 and

2001, the host city experienced an average increase in personal income of $91.9 million.

While this amount is not statistically significant at any generally accepted level, Baade

and Matheson also calculate confidence intervals for their point estimate and conclude

that there is less than a 5% probability that the true impact of the Super Bowl on personal

incomes in host metropolitan statistical areas exceeds $300 million, and the chance that

the true impact exceeds $400 million is less than 1%.

Coates and Humphreys (2002) look at all post-season play in American

professional sports, not just the Super Bowl, and find that hosting the Super Bowl had no

statistically significant effect on per capita income in the host city. Interestingly, however,

they do find that the city of the winner of the Super Bowl experiences statistically

significant increase of roughly $140 in per capita income. They attribute this finding to

possible higher labor efficiency due to a “feel-good” effect although they concede that the

most likely answer is simply spurious correlation. Matheson (2005), on the other hand,

arrives at a figure of between a $50 and $60 increase in per capita income for winning

cities, a figure that is not statistically significantly different from zero at the 5%

significance level.

Davis and End (2009) extend the results of both of the previous papers. While

their paper focuses on the effects of team winning percentage on citywide wages and

income per capita, they include variables for both hosting and winning the Super Bowl.

Under various estimation methods the coefficient on winning the Super Bowl is nearly

always positive and is statistically significant at the 5% level in roughly half of the

estimations. Interestingly, the coefficient on hosting the Super Bowl is nearly always

negative and is again statistically significant at the 5% level in roughly half of the

regression models suggesting that there is evidence that hosting the Super Bowl may

actually have a significant negative impact on income per capita in host cities.

As noted previously, a major difficulty of measuring the economic impact of

events like the Super Bowl is that even the effect of largest sporting events may be hard

to isolate within the large, diverse metropolitan economies in which they take place. For

example, even if the Super Bowl does result in a $500 million boost to the host city, this

is less than 0.2 percent of the annual GDP of a large metropolitan area like Miami, the

most frequent Super Bowl host. Any income gains as a result of the big game would

likely be obscured by normal fluctuations in the region‟s economy. This problem is

further compounded by the fact that the Super Bowl, even with its surrounding activities,

lasts for only a few days. Even if the effects of the event are large in the time period

immediately surrounding the Super Bowl, this impact is likely to be obscured in annual

data. All of the ex post studies described previously utilize annual data.

If a data source that covers a smaller geographical area or a shorter time-frame can be

uncovered, however, any potential impact is more likely to be identified. For example, while the

presence of the Super Bowl might have a large effect on neighborhood businesses, the overall

effect on a state or country‟s economy will be minuscule and hard to identify. Furthermore, these

same economic effects may be large for the time period immediately surrounding the event, but

over the course of an entire year, the impact of a single week-long period is not likely to show up

as an important change.

For this reason, several researchers have turned to taxable sales which are often available

monthly and frequently cover areas as small as individual cities and counties instead of entire

metropolitan areas. Furthermore, general sales tax collections or specific increases in the sales

tax rate have been used to finance many publicly funded sports facilities making an examination

of taxable sales especially relevant from a public policy standpoint. For example, of the 23 new

stadiums constructed for NFL franchises between 1992 and 2009, 7 were funded, at least in part,

through increases in the local general sales tax rate while another 8 were funded through

increased excise taxes, i.e. sales taxes on specific goods and services such as rental cars or hotel

rooms (Baade and Matheson 2006b). In addition, the single largest component of gross domestic

product is consumer spending, much of which is captured by taxable sales, and therefore taxable

sales are a good proxy for overall economic activity.

Baade, Baumann and Matheson (2008) examine monthly taxable sales in Florida

counties between 1980 and 2005. Three Florida cities (Miami, Tampa, and Jacksonville) hosted

seven Super Bowls during this period. Six of the seven Super Bowls show no significant increase

in taxable sales during the event, and the authors calculate that a typical game increased taxable

sales by roughly $99 million.

Coates (2006) performs a similar analysis on monthly sales tax collections for the city of

Houston finding that the Super Bowl increases tax revenues by roughly $5 million. Given a tax

rate of 5%, this approximates an increase in taxable sales of roughly $100 million, confirming the

results of Baade, Baumann and Matheson (2008). Coates and Depken (2006) extend this analysis

to cover multiple cities in Texas again finding a significant increase in taxable sales associated

with hosting the Super Bowl although the estimated increase is only roughly half that estimated

by Coates (2006).

Interestingly, the NFL itself has also examined the effect of the Super Bowl on taxable

sales. In one of the few examples of a league-sponsored ex post study, the NFL reported that,

“Thanks to Super Bowl XXXIII, there was a $670 million increase in taxable sales in South

Florida compared to the equivalent January-February period in 1998.” (NFL Report, 1999)

Indeed, a cursory examination of the data shows that the three county region of Miami-Dade,

Broward, and Palm Beach counties did experience an increase in taxable sales roughly the size of

that claimed by the league. Unfortunately for the NFL, their study is woefully inept as the league

neglected to account for factors besides the Super Bowl, such as inflation, population growth,

and routine economic expansion, that could account for the rise in taxable sales. As noted as by

Baade and Matheson (2000), over 90% of the increase can be accounted for by these variables.

Of further interest is the fact that if taxable sales are further broken down by county, both

Broward and Palm Beach counties actually experienced lower than expected taxable sales in

1999 (by $14 and $16 million respectively) despite the presence of the Super Bowl. Only Miami-

Dade county (the actual location of the Super Bowl) experienced an increase in taxable sales (of

$67 million) beyond expectations. This is further evidence that mega-events merely tend to shift

resources from one area to another rather than generating new economic activity.

Finally, it is worth noting that taxable sales in the area during January-February 2000, the

year after the game, were $1.26 billion higher than in the same months during the Super Bowl

year. Strangely, the NFL never publicized a story announcing, “Thanks to the lack of a Super

Bowl, there was a $1.26 billion increase in taxable sales in South Florida compared to the

equivalent January- February period in 1999.”

Non-monetary Benefits

If the monetary benefits of the Super Bowl generally fail to materialize at the level

predicted by ex ante estimates, it is often claimed that the Super Bowl brings indirect or non-

pecuniary benefits to host cities that add substantially to the direct monetary benefits. For

example, in assessing the impact Super Bowl XLII in Glendale, Arizona, Michael Mokwa,

chairman of the marketing department at the W. P Carey School of Business stated, “„The money

is just the tip of the iceberg. Thousands and thousands of people who came here for the Super

Bowl, of whom many had never been to the Valley before, took away powerful memories and

good feeling about Arizona.‟ This translates, he said, into coveted return visits, family and

business relocations, and word-of-mouth marketing throughout the country. Priceless, as

MasterCard is fond of saying.” (W.P. Carey School of Business, 2008)

Alan Sanderson, a University of Chicago economist counters, however, that anyone who

claims that the intangible benefits of an event like the Super Bowl are “priceless” or

“immeasurable” either are “too lazy to go find the correct answer or are afraid of what the true

answer might be.”

Certainly the game brings potential intangible benefits to the host city. The game can

serve to advertise the city to future conventions, businesses, and individual tourists. But here too,

estimates of potential benefits can be inflated by the league. Overhead television shots broadcast

during the game are often assigned a value at the same rate as commercial during the game. Thus,

a 30-second shot of downtown Miami is valued at the same rate as a 30-second commercial spot,

which sold for $3 million in 2009. Given the large number of times the stadium or the city is

shown during the game, such advertising can easily add up to tens or hundreds of millions of

dollars of imputed value. But such calculations must be flatly incorrect.

First, this technique implies that a simple 30-second overhead shot has the same effect on

the consumer as a targeted and professionally-designed commercial. Such an implication is both

unlikely and would invalidate the raison d'être of the entire advertising industry. Next, this

technique assumes that advertising the city is not subject to diminishing marginal returns. While

the first shot of the city may have an advertising effect, it is almost certainly not the case that the

thirtieth panoramic scene would have the same impact. Finally, when city tourism bureaus state

that the Super Bowl provides more advertising for a city than the city would be able to purchase

on its own, in fact revealed preference suggests that the game provides more advertising than the

city would willing to purchase on its own. The very fact that cities rarely have tourism

advertising budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars suggests that cities typically don‟t

value such advertising very highly.

There are several other considerations that should be mentioned. First, while the Super

Bowl may generate some repeat visitors, if time switching is occurring, as discussed previously

the Super Bowl may actually lead to less future tourism. Next, while it is frequently claimed that

mega-events like the Super Bowl serve to “put a city on the map,” most Super Bowl hosts are

large, popular tourist destinations that are already homes to multiple Fortune 500 corporate

headquarters and are frequent convention sites. By any definition, cities like Miami, New

Orleans, and Los Angeles are already on everyone‟s map. Furthermore, not every host city comes

away from the game with an enhanced reputation. Many visitors left Jacksonville, the host of

Super Bowl XXXIX, with the impression that the city had little to offer in the way of excitement

or cultural amenities. Finally, while it is possible that a company could decide to locate its

corporate headquarters and production facilities to a new city based on the favorable impressions

its CEO had while in town for the Super Bowl, there isn‟t even anecdotal evidence of any major

corporate relocations associated with this or any other mega-sporting event. While there is no

denying that intangible benefits from the Super Bowl may exist, there does not appear to be

much empirical evidence that they are very large.

Conclusion

There is little doubt that the Super Bowl is at the center of the American sports universe.

It is the most watched sporting event, or any event for that matter, in the country every year. The

game also has the highest priced tickets and the most expensive sponsorships among spectator

sports. If one believes the ex ante estimates of economic impact provided by the NFL and civic

boosters, the event also generates many hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits for the host

city, and the league uses these promises of riches to convince cities that the construction of a new

NFL stadium at significant public expense is a profitable investment, especially if it includes the

promise of a future Super Bowl.

Because lure of the Super Bowl is used to extract public financing from cities, however,

this creates ample reason to be skeptical of any claims made about the reported economic impact

since the sponsors of the impact studies have a financial interest in results that show large

economic benefits from the game. Aside from the inherent incentive problem associated with

impact assessments, there are numerous theoretical reasons to be wary of economic impact

statements. Such reports do a notoriously poor job of accounting for the substitution effect and

the crowding out effect. In short, while ex ante economic impact studies often do a good job

measuring activity that does occur because of an event, they do a poor job at measuring any

economic activity that does not occur because of an event. In other words, economic impact

studies typically measure gross economic activity when what is really desired is a measure of net

economic activity. Furthermore, standard multiplier analysis may give misleading and inflated

results when applied during mega-events.

Ex post economic analyses of the Super Bowl by scholars not financially connected with

the game have typically found that the observed effects of the game on real economic variables

such as employment, government revenues, taxable sales, GDP, and personal income, while

generally positive, are a fraction of those claimed by the league and sports boosters. When

considering optimal public policy with respect to sports infrastructure, it would be wise to take

any claims of super benefits from the Super Bowl with a grain of salt. It appears that most

economic impact reports are “padded” at least as well as the players on the field.

Table 1: Secondary market price for Super Bowl Tickets

Date

Teams

Average

Price

2/1/09

Pittsburgh Steelers v. Arizona Cardinals

$2,790

2/3/08

New England Patriots v. New York Giants

$3,536

2/4/07

Indianapolis Colts v. Chicago Bears

$4,004

2/5/06

Pittsburgh Steelers v. Seattle Seahawks

$3,009

2/6/05

Philadelphia Eagles v. New England Patriots

$2,659

2/1/04

New England Patriots v. Carolina Panthers

$2,290

1/26/03

Oakland Raiders v. Tampa Bay Buccaneers

$2,767

Source: Darren Rovell, CNBC.com

Table 2: Average television audiences for various programming

Event

Years

Rating

Households

Viewers

Super Bowl

2000-09

41.7

62.6

45,115,000

90,421,000

World Series

2000-09

12.1

20.3

13,161,000

19,053,000

NBA Finals

2000-09

8.4

9,957,000

14,320,000

Stanley Cup

2000-09

2.6

4.9

2,778,000

4,081,000

BCS Championship

2000-09

16.4

17,385,000

26,448,000

Academy Awards

2000-09

23.9

37.4

25,753,000

39,719,000

American Idol Finale

2002-09

n.a.

30,938,000

Source: TVbythenumbers.com, 2009

Table 3: Super Bowl 30-second advertising spot prices

Year

Super Bowl

ad price

Real price

% change

Academy

Awards ad price

Real price

% change

1990

$ 700,000

$1,164,882

n.a.

1991

$ 800,000

$1,264,136

8.5%

n.a.

1992

$ 800,000

$1,229,478

-2.7%

n.a.

1993

$ 850,000

$1,265,241

2.9%

n.a.

1994

$ 900,000

$1,306,791

3.3%

n.a.

1995

$ 1,000,000

$1,411,577

8.0%

n.a.

1996

$ 1,100,000

$1,511,663

7.1%

n.a.

1997

$ 1,200,000

$1,600,554

5.9%

n.a.

1998

$ 1,300,000

$1,709,315

6.8%

n.a.

1999

$ 1,600,000

$2,069,285

21.1%

$ 1,000,000

$ 1,293,303

n.a.

2000

$ 2,100,000

$2,631,263

27.2%

$ 1,305,000

$ 1,635,142

26.4%

2001

$ 2,050,000

$2,481,047

-5.7%

$ 1,450,000

$ 1,754,887

7.3%

2002

$ 1,900,000

$2,273,670

-8.4%

$ 1,290,000

$ 1,543,702

-12.0%

2003

$ 2,100,000

$2,436,355

7.2%

$ 1,355,000

$ 1,572,029

1.8%

2004

$ 2,250,000

$2,567,037

5.4%

$ 1,503,000

$ 1,714,781

9.1%

2005

$ 2,400,000

$2,657,052

3.5%

$ 1,503,000

$ 1,663,979

-3.0%

2006

$ 2,500,000

$2,669,261

0.5%

$ 1,647,000

$ 1,758,509

5.7%

2007

$ 2,600,000

$2,710,053

1.5%

$ 1,666,000

$ 1,736,518

-1.3%

2008

$ 2,700,000

$2,701,865

-0.3%

$ 1,689,000

$ 1,690,166

-2.7%

2009

$ 3,000,000

$3,000,000

11.0%

$ 1,400,000

-17.2%

Source: Advertising Age online, 2007 and TNS Media Intelligence, 2009.

Table 4: Estimates of ex ante economic impact of Super Bowl

Year

Author

City

Estimate in millions of $

and (millions of 2009 $)

1994

Jeffrey Humphreys,

Georgia State University

Atlanta

$166

($240.7)

1995

NFL and Kathleen Davis, Sports

Management Research Institute

Miami

$365

($515.2)

1998

PriceWaterhouseCoopers

San Diego

$295

($387.9

1999

NFL and Kathleen Davis, Sports

Management Research Institute

Miami

$396

($510.1)

2000

Jason Ader,

Bear Stearns

Atlanta

$410

($513.7)

2000

Jeffrey Humphreys,

Georgia State University

Atlanta

$292

($365.9)

2003

Super Bowl Host Committee

San Diego

$375

($435.1)

2006

David Allardice,

Lawrence Technological University

Detroit

$302

($322.4)

2007

PriceWaterhouseCoopers

Miami

$390

($406.5)

2008

W.P. Carey MBA Sports Business

Program

Phoenix

$500.6

($500.9)

2009

PriceWaterhouseCoopers

Tampa

$290

($290.0)

Source: various news sources

Table 5: Super Bowl Locations 1968-2013

City

Number

Years

Miami

1968, 1969, 1971, 1976, 1979, 1989, 1995, 1999,

2007, 2010

New Orleans

1970, 1972, 1975, 1978, 1981, 1986, 1990, 1997,

2002, 2013

Los Angeles/Pasadena

1967, 1973, 1977, 1980, 1983, 1987, 1993

Tampa

1984, 1991, 2001, 2009

San Diego

1988, 1998, 2003

Houston

1974, 2004

Detroit/Pontiac

1982, 2006

Atlanta

1994, 2000

Phoenix/Tempe/Glendale

1996, 2008

Palo Alto

1985

Minneapolis

1992

Jacksonville

2005

Dallas/Arlington

2011

Indianapolis

2012

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