Sports Bribery



Sports Bribery

Introduction

Sports in the United States have always served to reflect the best and worst the culture has to offer. The big-money wheeling and dealing of professional sports and the increased professionalization of amateur athletics since the end of World War II were, after all, reflective of an American society that was maturing in its new role as a political and economic world power. During the 1970s, however, the image of Americans mirrored by their participation in and obsession with sports was far from pretty indeed, had never before been more disturbing. The frightening rise of violence at all levels of American sport during the decade seemed to be not only tolerated but also embraced.

On the other hand, the commercialization of sport creates an exclusionary effect, with all negative reactions that can lead, as the violence on the part of supporters. It also opens opportunities for Corruption, always present when large sums are at stake will be found further examples of bribery in the sport. It attracts doping, traffic or sports recoveries policies. Although it is very difficult to assess the extent of bribery in sport, it seems, given the enormity of the sport, than it affects a fraction. There is however a fairly visible, since it is mediated and located mostly in the high-level professional sport.

Discussion

The policy issue that has attracted the most attention from economists is the growth of public funding of stadiums and arenas in the United States, funding that is based on the proposition that professional teams have a significant economic impact on a city. The sports industries argue that teams raise incomes and employment in host cities and that publicly funded facilities, and perhaps tax concessions, are a good investment for an urban area. If these benefits are the carrot, the stick is the threat to move a team to a more hospitable city. To make this a credible threat, leagues typically keep in reserve at least one city that is anxious to host a team.

As a result, many cities have provided subsidized facilities, with price tags in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Economists have undertaken many studies of whether these subsidies are warranted. There is little difference in their results, which conclude that teams have either a slightly negative or no discernable impact on a city's economy. Rodney D. Fort discussed some of these studies in his book Sports Economics (2006). A number of factors explain these findings. Perhaps the most important is that team-related spending by local residents is still spent, but on other goods and services, in the absence of a local team. In addition, professional sports as a tourist attraction are overrated; while visitors attend games, they usually come to the city for other reasons and enjoy games while they are in town. Finally, much of a team's revenue is spent outside its city, both for away games and for the earnings of players who live elsewhere in the off-season.

A second major area of interest to economists is the analysis of the markets for ...