Indeed, the essential professional sports business model is to push governments to use public subsidies to cover as much of the cost as possible. Louis sports stadium.īut professional sports owners are constantly agitating for bigger, better, more profitable stadiums, and that was hardly going to change with the passage of a mere referendum or two. In 2002, angered by the prospect of large public subsidies for a new baseball stadium being planned for the Cardinals, the voters in the city and the far wealthier and more populous county passed referendums that required voter approval to use taxpayer funds for a St. The difference was being paid out of the city’s coffers, meaning that those were tax dollars not going to the police or teachers or city services. In recent years, those game-day taxes have consistently fallen short, amounting to around $4.8 million a year, according to Andrew Arkills, a financial analyst who dissected the numbers for stadium opponents.

Louis, a city of fewer than 320,000 people, with a shrinking tax base, simply couldn’t afford to help finance the $1 billion stadium that the Rams’ billionaire owner, E. Louis and the State of Missouri tried to put together to keep the Rams would have been financially ruinous. history - set the city on its ear, winning two Most Valuable Player Awards as the Rams’ quarterback and leading the team to a Super Bowl victory after the 1999 season.īut the economics underpinning the recent deal St.

From 1998 to 2003, Kurt Warner - one of the greatest undrafted players in N.F.L. Though they have been bad in recent years, they had some great seasons in St. Sure, fans of professional football in St. The departure of the Rams to Los Angeles, whence they came two decades ago, is something for the city’s residents to cheer, not bemoan.

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