Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit

by Joanna Cagan, Neil deMause

Are you a sports fan distraught over your home team's move to another city? Or someone whose city has just lured a team to your home turf with a brand new stadium? Or maybe you don't follow sports, but as a taxpayer are outraged over cutbacks in school funding and other services.
Forget about the false tales of "welfare queens" who supposedly rode around in Cadillacs. Field of Schemes introduces you to some real welfare kings.
A used-car salesman turned baseball owner promises to pay for a new stadium out of his own pocket, if the state government just agrees to move a highway to clear the land. Several backroom deals later, the state is raising a quarter-billion dollars towards the stadium costs - and the team owner is getting his stadium scot-free.
The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft wants to buy a football team, but only if the state will build him a new stadium first. So he pays the $4 million cost of a referendum - even as his camp spends millions more in advertising to make sure he wins. In exchange, he gets at least $300 million in public money to build his team's new home.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Politics, Nonfiction, Business

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Kevin Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Infuriating, but well worth a read. I'd recommend reading the work of some of the economists discussed in this book (Noll, Zimbalist, and others) for a more technical and complete description of how stadium subsidies are a bad deal. Sports, Jobs, and Taxes collects several articles on the economics of sports, many of them written by the experts featured in this book.

[Benjamin Kahn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book. It's rather disgusting how much the public ends up paying so that rich owners can get new revenue streams. I listen to a lot of sports radio, so I know that the narrative is that teams don't make money, that owners just buy them for the sake of getting to say that they own a team. This book makes clear how patently untrue that whole argument is. A fascinating read.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very detailed description of problems facing cities and states in regard to sports franchise demands, but would have liked to see more exploration of solutions.

[Peter Tubbs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don't read this book if you are a sports fan or taxpayer- it will cause you to look sideways at your local teams and the facilities you pay for.

[Marc · Rating 3 out of 5]

With too much repetition for the casual reader and not enough economics for the sports nerd crowd, just read the first chapter and you'll get the point