Hosting the Super Bowl is a huge source of excitement for a city.
The cameras, the teams, the fans. They’re all there. The world’s biggest sporting event is on your turf.
Las Vegas taking shape for the Super Bowl 📍 pic.twitter.com/I1QVr16j4y
— Sky Sports (@SkySports) February 6, 2024
While the excitement is indisputable, the excitement comes at a cost. Hosting the Super Bowl is expensive because doing so requires spending a lot of money.
That being said, hosting the Super Bowl does yield financial gains. So which side wins out – is it too expensive or is it worthwhile for a city to host the Super Bowl?
From the economic point of view, feelings like excitement are superficial in themselves – they only matter if they lead to profit.
Dollar amounts tell their own story and are ultimately what counts.
So let’s take a deep dive into the financial considerations involved in hosting the Super Bowl.
Benefiting From Tourists
Any skeptical consideration of whether the Super Bowl is worth hosting for a city needs to acknowledge the positives.
Besides the excitement that accompanies the year’s biggest event, there are financial advantages.
The Super Bowl attracts such a large number of people to the host city, many of whom will not actually enter the stadium. The city will benefit from the money that those people spend.
What you have here is a massive influx of people spending money on hotel rooms and on all sorts of other things – food, for instance – that help local businesses. Not to mention the substantial tax revenue made from the tons of wagers placed at the top-rated sportsbooks as well as retail shops.
Long-Term Gains
The Super Bowl also yields long-term benefits.
For example, the Super Bowl brings an increase in jobs to the city. Moreover, it enables the city to show itself to a greater multitude of people who might otherwise not have seen what the city has to offer apart from the Super Bowl.
CBS will have four studios at the Bellagio, two studios at Allegiant Stadium, and 1,000 staff members for its coverage of Super Bowl LVIII.
For the game’s first-ever trip to Las Vegas, the network is ready to go all out showcasing Sin City, says @MMcCarthyREV ⬇️
— Front Office Sports (@FOS) February 6, 2024
Ideally, many of those people return to the host city as tourists, giving the city more of their money.
Estimates
You will hear the NFL and other responsible officials assert that the Super Bowl leads to several hundreds of millions of dollars being spent in the host city.
However, it turns out that such a high estimate of the Super Bowl’s economic value for a host city is grossly exaggerated.
Why the Estimates Are Off
Cities are not profiting from the Super Bowl as much as people think because football is too easily being cited as a reason for the home city’s financial gains.
Let’s consider that consumers will spend money and that they have a limited amount of money to spend.
Whether they are spending that money on buying jewelry or on clothes, they are still spending that money. It comes to the same dollar amount if they are buying Super Bowl-related items.
So, the Super Bowl isn’t so much causing more money to be spent but simply causing consumers to rearrange their priorities, such that they now spend money on this and not on that.
Similarly, while the Super Bowl certainly attracts a lot of tourists to the host city, it can also deter would-be visitors from wanting to visit.
Football’s attraction of tourists thus comes at a cost.
And finally, if something like hotels would be close to being full anyway, then the Super Bowl would only deserve credit for some of the hotel action.
Hosting the Super Bowl Is Expensive
In addition to gains, hosting the Super Bowl also comes with costs. For example, public transit will suffer from having to convey so many fans to and from the stadium.
There are also several other issues that a host city will have to deal with besides transit.
With all of the visitors and with many of those visitors inclined to become drunk and often rowdy, a host city will need to increase its security. Police might become overwhelmed from a pure manpower perspective.
Parking and food are two other costly issues for the host city.
The NFL Eats Up The Gains
Many of the profits that are yielded by the Super Bowl go to the NFL.
For example, the NFL collects all of the revenue from ticket sales. It will also make tens of millions of dollars from the merchandise that gets sold.
So How Much Does It Come Down To?
While the Super Bowl itself nets hundreds of millions of dollars in profit, the host city collects just a fraction of that and incurs several hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses.
Instead of hundreds of millions, a host city will make maybe around 150 million dollars in the form of income that its residents receive directly.
The direct income figure for residents might also be substantially lower, reaching perhaps no more than 30 million dollars.
While it is difficult to calculate exact figures, the reality is that hosting the Super Bowl is not so worthwhile economically, but maybe such a perspective does suffer for undervaluing the human factor – even if not on the level of dollar amounts, it should matter that a city gains pride and other forms of excitement.
