It was almost a foregone conclusion on the part of many NFL fans that the bid for Super Bowl LII in 2018 would go to the City of New Orleans. Everyone loves to go to New Orleans. But it wasn’t to be and now that the bid has ended up in Minnesota, where the stadium in question has not even been finished, it becomes all too clear that New Orleans was never really in the running.
The NFL almost reached ten billion dollars in revenue last year. Roger Goodell makes over thirty million a year as league commissioner and it is his job to watch the bottom line of all of the 32 team owners that pay his salary. The franchises must be protected and be rewarded from the revenue sharing model now in place.
Goodell and company know well enough that by rewarding their own teams and finding new ways of putting more and more money back into the collective coffers, the future of the NFL and their own jobs are safe and secure.
But the move is clearly logical. It makes perfect sense for the NFL to arrange to have Super Bowls played in any brand new stadium that comes into service in the league. Between the team’s owners and the local taxpayers, a massive amount of money is spent these days to put up one of these new facilities and the league is perfectly justified in rewarding those cities with a Super Bowl, which will bring in extraordinary revenues in and around the stadium and help to offset the cost of construction.
The Vikings organization recently convinced Minnesota taxpayers to put up considerable funding for their new stadium which now will host Super Bowl LII. Some might question why level headed taxpayers would give up their hard won funds to come to the aid of a family worth billions of dollars, but those folks must not be true football fans.
Fans in the Twin Cities should be all set for sports now with a new baseball park having been built as well as a new facility on the campus of the University of Minnesota and now the Super Bowl is coming to town.
The new home of the San Francisco 49ers, Levi’s Stadium, has also been rewarded with a Super Bowl to be played in their new state of the art facility and one is certainly already penciled in for the new stadium in Atlanta, probably in 2019.
