The fact that sports teams can be bought and sold from one city to another without the approval of city government despite cities, counties, and states spending hundreds of millions if not billions of tax dollars to construct arenas and stadiums for them is genuinely insane.
Might not be the most popular opinion in my circles tbh, but I'm actually okay with the government spending money on sports. I agree there are better things to spend the money on, but major sports teams are big parts of community and city culture all over the world, and have been for absolute ages. It's good entertainment, it's a sense of identity and community, it's something for people to rally behind, I like it. I think we go way overboard with how expensive our sports complexes are, but in principle I don't think there's anything wrong with a city government spending money to build a large sports complex or two for major sports teams in their city, so long as it gets regular and frequent usage, and can be repurposed for other events when the sport is out of season or not actively being played on a given day. Large sports complexes also make for really good places to install public transit hubs, because they are places of new construction often near downtown cores and often in areas with existing rail connections, as inexpensive and largely available real estate for these projects is most commonly available in old industrial areas, and because they see high game-day traffic from people all over the region it's kind of the perfect place to build inter-modal transit hubs. You can even integrate them with shops and restaurants that will see large influxes of game-day traffic and then regular business from commuter traffic.
HOWEVER.
The fact that all of this public investment can be made for a privately owned sports team, a team which then gets to reap all the profits of on-property sales, food and beverage sales, and often even surrounding property leases, and which maintains the power to just pick up and move out of town any fucking time they like, is downright batshit. What the fuck do you mean they can just pick up and move? what the fuck do you mean they can be sold to another owner in another city and relocated? despite demanding all of this public investment and keeping all they money made from it?????? how are they not forced to sign a fucking 50-year contract with the city if they want so much taxpayer money???? how does the city not have any ownership of the team if they build all the infrastructure for them???? what the fuck???????????
