The real financial impact of moving the MLB All-Star Game

By Ben Abrams of Atlanta Civic Circle. Excerpts:

"After the MLB announced its decision to move the All-Star Game, one of the most common claims made by organizations like the Cobb County Travel and Tourism Bureau was that the county was going to lose $100 million for not hosting the game in the Braves ballpark. 

This estimate was also used by the conservative small-business advocacy group Job Creators Network as the dollar amount for damages they were seeking as part of their unsuccessful lawsuit to try and force the MLB to move the game back to Atlanta. While the $100 million claim was being made by many political and business leaders, financial expert J.C. Bradbury, who teaches economics at Kennesaw State, says that Cobb County would have ever experienced that kind of economic impact from hosting the game. 

“The All-Star game is one game. One game in a city where economic activity was already happening,” Bradbury said. “I understand there may be some other events that are happening in the area related to the game, but at most, you’re getting one week of [increased] activity.” 

Bradbury says that most of the people who attend events like the All-Star game are not tourists from out of town but season ticket holders for the home team. 

“These are not people traveling from out of town. They are people who live locally in the Atlanta area – largely in Cobb County.” Bradbury said. “So theoretically, this is just going to be a transfer of wealth within the community. I’m not sure whether this is or isn’t intentional or just directly spreading a falsehood, but the $100 million number is absolutely not credible.”

Disagreements about the economic benefits that host cities will reap from hosting major sporting events are nothing new in the U.S. When Minneapolis hosted the MLB All-Star game in 2014, the city’s tourism agency, Meet Minneapolis, projected that the game would bring $75 million to the local economy. 

Later in the year, though, an official from Minnesota’s revenue department told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that tax data was up by 9 percent, or $55 million, the month that the game was played compared to the year before. After factoring in Minneapolis’ rebounding economy, officials identified an increase of roughly $21 million that could be attributed to hosting the game.

In 2001 economists Robert Baade and Victor Matheson conducted an independent study on the game’s economic impact on cities from 1973 to 1997. The pair found in their observation of 23 different All-Star Games that the MLB’s estimates of the economic impact that the game had on its host cities were overstated."