The numbers come first. Between 1970 and 2020, state and local governments spent $33 billion in public funds on major-league sports arenas across the U.S. and Canada, with the median public contribution covering 73% of construction costs, according to Fortune. That trend has only accelerated: in 2024 alone, teams across professional sports proposed more than $13 billion in taxpayer subsidies for new construction and renovations.
The Buffalo Bills' new $2.2 billion Highmark Stadium is the latest case study. New York State and Erie County committed $850 million in public funds — $600 million from the state, $250 million from the county — the largest public subsidy ever committed to an NFL facility. The result: the NFL's smallest venue, at 60,108 seats, down from 71,608 in the old stadium. That's 11,500 fewer seats, with personal seat licenses running as high as $50,000, and opening-night resale tickets already listed at $663.
The pattern holds across leagues. Average NFL ticket prices nearly tripled from 2015 to 2025, up 173% after adjusting for inflation. The Chiefs' planned stadium is expected to have roughly 15% fewer seats than Arrowhead. 'No one has ever built a new stadium and provided more affordable tickets after that new stadium has opened,' said Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross who has studied sports subsidies for nearly 30 years. 'It's, in fact, exactly the opposite.'
The incentive is structural: individual teams keep all revenue from premium seats and luxury boxes, while TV and merchandise money is pooled league-wide. 'The money is in super premium experiences, not in actually putting people in the seats,' Matheson told Fortune. 'You tear out a bunch of bleacher seats, and you put in a box with a handful of seats but a super-premium experience, because you can make a lot more money on a few seats to the right people than a lot of seats to the working class.'
FIFA has run a version of the same play at global scale. The organization raised prices on more than 90 of the 104 World Cup matches between October 2025 and April 2026, with the three main ticket categories rising an average of 34%. FIFA says it received 500 million requests for the 7 million tickets on offer, and President Gianni Infantino defended the pricing bluntly: 'If we are doing something wrong, everyone in North America is doing something wrong... we have to apply market rates.' FIFA did offer 130,000 tickets at $60 out of six to seven million total, which Infantino called 'the right thing to do.' The Football Supporters Europe coalition has filed a formal complaint accusing FIFA of abusing its monopoly position, and the New York and New Jersey attorneys general have subpoenaed FIFA over alleged seat-location misrepresentation and artificial price inflation.
Capital rewards clear rules, and stadium subsidies are the opposite of a clear rule. This is not free enterprise; it is government picking winners, with the taxpayer financing amenities that price out the very public that paid for them. When Erie County residents fund a stadium and then can't afford to sit in it, the deal isn't a market outcome — it's a transfer from the general taxpayer to team owners and premium-seat buyers, dressed up as economic development. The market has already voted on ticket prices. What it never got to vote on was whether $850 million of public money should have built the building in the first place.
