Go, Rams! The economy needs you
Here’s something St. Louis doesn’t want to hear after the Rams’ opening-day debacle: A city’s economic fortunes may rise and fall with the record of its football team.
That’s the conclusion reached by Michael C. Davis, an economist at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, and Christian M. End, a psychologist at Xavier University in Cincinnati. After studying data from 1969 to 1998 for a new paper, they conclude that the “winning percentage of the local professional football team had a significant positive effect on real per capita personal income.”
The authors wanted to build on earlier research, which found that cities got an economic boost from having a winning Super Bowl team. They figured that if postseason success is beneficial, regular season success probably is too. They crunched the numbers, and there does seem to be a strong effect.
Davis and End suggest several reasons why a metropolitan economy could be boosted by something as insignificant as a football team. Here’s one:
If a sport team’s performance influences judgments of personal competencies, mood, self-esteem, etc., one could argue it is possible that the outcome of a sporting event may influence one’s performance at work.
Here’s another:
Team success can also impact the economy via increased consumption spending.
Are the results convincing? Not entirely. One troubling thing is that they couldn’t find a similar economic benefit from baseball or basketball teams. (Too bad for St. Louis, which has had a lot more winning baseball seasons than winning football seasons.) But the findings do provide a good excuse to watch the Rams on Sunday instead of doing something more productive, such as cutting the lawn. Hey, honey, I have to watch this game — the economy depends on it.
(3 votes, average: 2.67 out of 5)
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David Nicklaus has covered St. Louis business for more than 25 years. His column appears three days a week on the Post-Dispatch business page. 
Cities that hinge their future on sports teams are doomed to fail
But here’s the solution. There should be several “dummy” teams established by the league, consisting of mediocre players. They would travel to each city to play the home team, and lose. By the end of the season, all teams (other than the dummy ones) would be winners, and all cities could thus prosper.
As silly as this is, it’s no sillier than the possible reality of an area’s economy being dependent on the success of professional sports teams, whose players typically don’t even come from the city they are representing.
For an economic study to conclude that the success of a sports team influences personal income, it would need to consider ALL factors that might influence it, such as the size of the metro area, its population growth rate, its location (especially between south and rust belt), the age and education level of its population, and various measures of its tax structure. That’s complicated, but possible with multi-variable regression analysis.
So I guess St. Louis’ economy sucked between 1988-94 when we didn’t have football? Hardly. We don’t need football because it’s good for the economy. That’s what they said about casinos too. I don’t see the economy helped by them.