LA Stadium Noise Is Subtraction By Addition

by Jeremiah Tittle

As March came to a close, so did the NFL’s rule against encouraging the stadium crowd to get roudy and loud when the visiting team’s offense is on the field. For many years, teams were actually penalized for pumping in crowd noise sound effects and emploring fans on jumbotrons to ‘MAKE some NOISE!!!’

The NFL owners got something right in their pursuit of improving the fan experience by allowing the 12th man to be, well, just that; having a real impact on the game. It’s a step in the right direction that will, NFL owners hope, increase revenue causing more fans to shell out 3 figures per ticket (plus parking and concessions) ultimately limiting the number of blackouts during the 2010 season as the economy recovers. A happy ending indeed.

Amidst all the decisions the NFL owners made, from the necessary to the more trivial, making fans feel more important should be at the top of the list. And it is that ‘feeling’ of importance which may help the league keep fans from embracing their true power.

Football fans pay for all the elements of the game experience, pay to watch the games on TV at home, join the office fantasy league, but the most overlooked factor in which sports fans fuel this sports league – which generated $8 billion last year – is the portion of tax money and tax subsidy which is provided to teams to build their modern day coliseums.

Case in point: A persistent story over the last 6 months has been Arnold Schwarzenegger’s perfection of the phrase ‘Come to California’. While he got his feet wet shooting California tourism board commercials, his true mastery of the phrase is a bi-product of his clarion call to all NFL franchises interested in a new stadium on the public dime.

With all the tax issues in California, it is difficult to imagine where that money will come from. That hasn’t stopped the suitors from lining up. Once it was made public that the politics and financing would take care of themselves, it was no surprise that Los Angeles businessmen Casey Wasserman and Tim Leiweke submitted Plan B on the heels of the Governator-endorsed Plan A which would use real estate developer Ed Roski’s bulldozers and cranes.

For all the noise echoing out of Los Angeles as the city attempts to lure an NFL franchise with a tax bankrolled new stadium filled with Hollywood stars in luxury boxes, it’s really subtraction by addition.

Subtraction by the addition of a new plan. Subtraction by the addition of pressure on Jacksonville, Detroit, and Minnesota as the team’s owners threaten to leave unless their current hometown taxpayer’s shell out big bucks for new stadiums to stay put. Subtraction of sports fans’ tax dollars by adding a stadium in LA for a team that doesn’t yet exist. That’s a lot of noise for nothing.

Jeremiah Tittle is the Managing Editor of SportsFansCoalition.org.