Abstract
Professional North American sporting teams receive enormous public funding for new and renovated stadiums after threatening to depart their hometowns, or by actually moving elsewhere. In contrast, English sporting teams neither receive much public money for such projects, nor move towns. This Article argues that no inherent cultural or political transatlantic variations cause the differences; rather, it is the industrial organization of sports in the two countries—the structure of league control—that enables rent-seeking by American teams but not by their English counterparts. Cross-country time series data contrasting American professional football and baseball stadiums with English soccer grounds support our claim, as does data contrasting the stadiums of geographically flexible National Football League teams with those of functionally immobile major collegiate football teams.
Recommended Citation
David Haddock, Tonja Jacobi, and Matthew Sag,
League Structure &Stadium Rent Seeking— the Role of Antitrust Revisited,
65 Fla. L. Rev.
1
(2013).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/flr/vol65/iss1/1