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PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES (SPORT FANS) |
By Conor Dougherty Christopher Slinde, a lifelong Minnesota Vikings fan, has endured decades of heartbreak and lots of overpriced food to support his team. For him, the experience of being a Vikings fan is priceless. According to economists, it’s worth $530.65. “This is deep,” said Mr. Slinde, a 33-year-old X-ray technician, looking at a recent economics paper that attempts to place a value, in dollars, on the joy and pain Minnesotans get from the Vikings.
“Don’t economists spend their time on more serious stuff?” he asked. PRIDE AND PURPOSE Actually, this is pretty serious stuff. Placing a value on the fan experience may seem like a theoretical, or even silly, exercise for an economist. But it’s important for teams like the Vikings, who want Minnesota taxpayers to help them pay for an $870 million stadium to replace the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis. The Vikings’ Metrodome lease runs out next year, and the team says it won’t sign an extension without a deal for a new stadium. The team hasn’t explicitly said it will leave town without a deal. But it insists that the aging Metrodome cannot support a modern NFL franchise. So, many fans are convinced that without a new stadium, the Vikings will take their quest for football greatness someplace else. Sports teams tout their facilities as economic-development projects that create jobs and generate tax revenue. But several studies have shown that publicly subsidized stadiums—usually funded by selling bonds and using tax revenues to pay off the bonds with interest—rarely generate as much money as the governments put into them. Teams continue to argue, often successfully, that they deserve subsidies anyway because they are a source of civic pride and purpose. But what is that worth? Economists Aju Fenn and John Crooker tried to answer that question in a study published last year in the Southern Economic Journal. The two economists used “contingent valuation methodology,” a technical way of saying they surveyed people and used statistical models to turn the answers into an average price that Minnesotans would place on the Vikings. ‘WELFARE VALUE’ The result: The Vikings’ “welfare value” is $702,351,890—$530.65 for each of the roughly 1.32 million households in Minnesota. The study was conducted in 2002, and the figures are not adjusted for inflation (or for the Vikings recent playoff run with quarterback Brett Favre). As a fan, you couldn’t touch that money. It’s an abstract figure meant to account for everything from the joy of donning blond braids and Vikings horns to the feeling of pride that even nonfans get from living in a “major league” city. In the broadest sense, Mr. Crooker says, “welfare value” represents the worth Minnesotans place on having the Vikings in Minnesota. It’s tough putting a price on feelings, which is why some economists are skeptical of contingent-valuation studies. Mr. Fenn, chair of the department of economics and business at Colorado College, got the idea for his Vikings study 10 years ago, while teaching a sports economics class at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. The Vikings had a new owner then, too, so fans were worried the team would leave town. Other economists have used contingent valuation to measure the social benefits of professional teams. But Mr. Fenn believed fears of a Vikings departure would produce a more accurate tally of the value Minnesotans get from their team. ABANDONED BEFORE Minnesotans are no strangers to sports abandonment. In 1960, the Minneapolis Lakers basketball team moved to Los Angeles, a city not known for its lakes. The Minnesota North Stars hockey team became the Dallas Stars in 1993. (Both the NBA and NHL have since returned to the state.) So, on a fall evening before a 1999 Monday Night Football game, Mr. Fenn and some students went to a Metrodome parking lot to survey tailgaters. Some fans whipped out their checkbooks to make the point that they would pay on the spot to keep the Vikings in town. (No donations were collected.) Survey questions were fine-tuned by the Metrodome experience. In the 2002 off-season (to minimize in-season emotions), Messrs. Fenn and Crooker mailed 1,400 surveys to households across Minnesota, capturing both fans and nonfans. The study’s figures were based on the mail surveys, which had 30 questions ranging from demographic information to how much time the person discussed the Vikings at home and at work. But the so-called welfare value was generated from a single yes or no question: Would you be willing to pay $X out of your own household budget for the next year to make a new stadium possible? There was one price on each survey (it ranged from $5 to $100). Mr. Fenn cautions that the $702 million welfare value doesn’t mean that helping the Vikings with a stadium would be the best use of the state’s tax dollars. “We’re not suggesting that the state of Minnesota act a certain way, or that voters support [a new stadium], or not support it,” he says. “We’re just pointing out that the Vikings mean a lot to the average Minnesotan.” ‘A VIKING STATE’ You don’t need a doctorate in economics to discover that the Vikings mean a lot to Brian Sand, a Minneapolis police officer. He watches games in a basement lair he calls “Jerseys,” for the four framed and autographed Vikings jerseys hanging on the walls. One Sunday this past season, Mr. Sand was seated on the Jerseys couch with his fiancée, Emily Johnson, eating cookies and chuckling as the Vikings’ archrival, the Green Bay Packers, lost their championship hopes on an embarrassing fumble. If he had to, Mr. Sand guesses he would spend up to $500 a year to keep the Vikings around. As a kid, he devoted his Sundays to church and the Vikings, and the team still helps him get through the cold winters. “This state is a Viking state,” says Mr. Sand. Mr. Slinde, the X-ray technician, says he’d be out of a hobby if the Vikings left town. No more tailgating in the cold or watching games at bars or at friends’ houses. No point in listening to sports talk radio. The only benefit Mr. Slinde can see: If the Vikings left town, he’d save a lot of money.
SIDEBAR: Q&A This season, the Minnesota Twins move into the new Target Field, which taxpayers helped pay for. The Wall Street Journal talked about the economics of sports stadiums with Jerry Bell, president of Twins Sports, which owns the Twins. Here are edited excerpts: WSJ: Economists are starting to study the “welfare value” of sports teams—the dollar value of the emotional benefits fans get from their team. What do you think of this idea? Mr. Bell: That’s like saying, “What would you pay for a memory?” Most people attend their first professional baseball game with another family member. If you go to your first game with your father or grandfather, what you paid for you ticket you won’t remember, where you sit you might remember, but you will never forget who you went with. WSJ: Do you think publicly funded ballparks make sense on the economic argument alone, meaning they create new taxes and jobs? Mr. Bell: It does have an economic impact in a targeted sense. It benefits this neighborhood. Does that make a ripple effect in the state economy? Probably not. WSJ: Which do you think resonates more, the economic argument or civic pride? Mr. Bell: Clearly the social aspect. Ten years from now, no one will know what this ballpark cost and they won’t care. They’ll either like it ... or they won’t, and they’ll judge it on that. WSJ: What’s your response to people who say the public shouldn’t subsidize private businesses? Mr. Bell: That’s virtually everywhere. Everybody believes a farm subsidy helps the family farmer. The family farmer is now a corporate farmer and the subsidies are going to corporations. WSJ: How much public money did you get? Mr. Bell: We paid $200 million and [the public] paid $350 million. WSJ: Do you expect your stadium will return the tax money put into it with taxes and/or economic benefits? Mr. Bell: It depends on the economy. Does the real estate value around the ballpark go up and ... contribute to construction and further development, and what kind of real estate taxes does that produce? If all of those things come together ... maybe.
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What It's worth to have 
