You would think that the city hosting an event as big as the Super Bowl would at least get a piece of the profits from ticket sales, but no, it ain’t necessarily so.
The Sports Illustrated cover of Roger Goodell sitting on the Throne is becoming more and more apropos every day. Apparently ten billion bucks a year is not enough for the NFL owners and administrators. Why else would they be so greedy as not to share even one penny of revenues for the next Super Bowl with the taxpayers up in Minnesota who put up the billion dollars to fund the new facility.
Nothing to the people who designed and built the stadium, nor to the people running the show there in Minneapolis, not even a dime to local charities. The NFL keeps every penny. Blatant and shameful greed on their part.
But that is really only the beginning of the list of hoops that the league is making city and stadium administrators jump through if they would like to host a Super Bowl. It is the Super Bowl after all, televisions biggest single event of the year and the going price for hosting the spectacle keeps going up and up.
In fact NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s office sent out a list of requirements and specifications to prospective cities that ran to 154 pages. There are even rules governing vendors and game-day revenues, the league wants a piece of that too.
The closer you look the more ludicrous it gets. The NFL also requires hosting venues to provide free police escorts, erect billboards, furnish courtesy cars, nice ones, of course and then Goodell and his cronies will need high end hotel suites as well, all provided by the hosting city, at no cost to the league.
All of that by itself would be enough for someone to stand up and cry enough, but there is still more to follow. The folks who run the Minnesota Super Bowl Bid Committee, people from local business, are talking back to the commissioner’s office with some very logical responses.
They recently released a statement saying, “Neither the city nor the state will be responsible for additional public costs such as increased security, public infrastructure or police”.Of course the city of Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota will both profit tremendously from hosting the next Super Bowl. The event will draw worldwide attention to their brand new billion dollar facility and introduce millions in tax revenues to the local economy.
