That seems quite a bit different, it's a marketing/PR move that probably doesn't actually cost the government very much. Not sure I'm for that kind of thing, but it's pretty radically different from a single city spending a hundreds of millions on a stadium that they'll see little benefit from.

Marketing is a good framing here. It prompts questions like: How strong is the relationship between Fenway Park and the way that the city of Boston markets itself as a place to continue to live/work/play and pay tax revenue?

Fenway Park is actually a bit of an outlier. Wrigley Field also counts. Both of these stadiums are in dense urban neighborhoods and not surrounded exclusively by acres of surface parking lots.

Publicly financing a stadium in that setting might actually be a net positive (plenty of other factors) because all of the spectators are walking through the neighborhood with all the shops, restaurants and bars just to get to the stadium.

Baseball teams play 81 games per year in their stadium. American football teams play 8. That is also a huge difference. There are many stadiums that host both hockey and basketball and thus have 60-70 games per year - plus concerts and other events on top of that. Utilization matters! I don't know if they do anything in winter at Fenway Park, but at Wrigley Field there is a neighborhood ice rink in the winter time. The skate rental/lockers/bathrooms, warming station, concessions, and even Zamboni storage are all inside the stadium. Here's some rambling video showing what "hanging out at the stadium" looks like even when no sport is happening: https://youtu.be/-pgnR7FqkDo

Ooohh I think you’re on to something with utilization. From what I can tell in London, Arsenal stadium also has pretty high utilization. High utilization means that the “market” of people seeking food & urban amenities is higher.

A subsidy is a subsidy.

But some subsidies are smart, and others are not.

If cities were getting huge economic benefits from their subsidies to pro sports teams, I probably wouldn't be complaining. It's the fact that they get little to no benefit from enormous investments that make the subsidies here dumb.

Seems like the crux of the argument here is in who gets to decide what's a smart municipal investment. I agree with you that sports is a dumb investment.

Professional sports maybe, but grassroots sports for kids (and perhaps even adults) are a fantastic investment.

Parks are available and useful to everyone. I can get behind that, and all the activities people like to do in parks.

Stadiums have one use, and they're not generally available to everyone for other purposes at any time.

Australia has put millions into filming Marvel movies. US provides many film subsidies, too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_production_incentives_...

This is not the same as multi-billion dollar local municipality subsidies.

Thats not a subsidy, it's advertising. The best way to make a highly incompetent and ineffective organization (like the military) look good is by imagining it is good.

is there a difference except accounting?

The point is what you're getting back.

The studies on cities spending big on stadiums have been clear that the economic benefits are marginal at best, while the spending is big.

I dunno how big the benefits for the military are here, but they're probably not spending very much on letting movie makers borrow uniforms or use shots of F-35's in the background or whatever.