Nashville, state spent billions of taxpayer funds drawing Super Bowl

By Jon Styf
The Center Square

Tennessee already has granted $10.8 million of taxpayer money from its special events fund toward luring Super Bowl LXIV in 2030 to Nashville in additional to the $500 million in state funding and $3.1 billion estimated tax capture to build new Nissan Stadium.

State and local lawmakers and Titans executives congratulated each other on the Super Bowl announcement at a Wednesday morning press conference hosted by CBS Sports sportscaster and Nashville resident Jim Nantz.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell, former Gov. Bill Haslam and Titans leaders and ownership also attended the event and spoke.

“Governor Lee, you stuck your neck out on this one,” Haslam said, referring to the state’s $500 million lump sum of taxpayer funds toward new Nissan Stadium and contribution to the $3.1 billion tax capture. “And speaker, you and the entire Legislature really came through. Thank you very much. We would not be sitting here if you had not done that.”

Tennessee lawmakers passed a bill that Lee signed into law in 2024 that will allow organizers to keep contracts and public records related to the Super Bowl hidden from the public for at least 10 years after the event.

That means that taxpayer funded items the NFL demands at a Super Bowl, including free lodging, parking, police escorts and more for a large number of guests will not be disclosed to the public until at least 2040.

Economists who have studied the Super Bowl and NFL host cities have said that event promoters consistently exaggerate the impact of the game on a local economy.

When lawmakers were pushing for taxpayer subsidies for the stadium, they repeated those claims with promises that the new stadium would bring the game.

Economist Victor Matheson previously estimated for The Center Square that the real impact numbers are closer to $30 million to $130 million of added economic activity while security and other costs increase in the host city.

“The reason hosting the game provides no tangible economic benefits is that it is a single game,” West Virginia University economics professor Brad Humphreys said as Las Vegas hosted the 2024 game. “While the game clearly draws a lot of people from out of town to the host city, the cities that host the Super Bowl are all large tourist destinations in their own right.”

Berry College Professor of Economics Frank Stephenson has studied hotel room occupancy related to the Super Bowl and large events across the country.

He previously looked at February hotel occupancy numbers in Nashville for The Center Square and found that Nashville has averaged around 65% occupancy in February compared to 75% in July.

He said that large events lead to crowding out other visitors in the host city and a hangover event with lower numbers of visitors after the event. His paper with Lauren Heller on the topic found that “nearly 90% of hotel room revenue gained is because of increased room rates which means concerns about leakages from host cities’ regional economies are salient.”

Those increased rates generally go to corporate offices in other cities rather than workers or the economy in Nashville or Tennessee.

The taxpayer costs of the new stadium include a $3.1 billion tax capture in and around the stadium to pay off bonds on the $760 million of taxpayer funds borrowed to be used on the $2.2 billion stadium project.

The tax capture includes all sales tax in the new stadium along with half of the sales tax along with the 130-acre development around the stadium.

“In Tennessee, the way we pay teachers more and the way we help people with mental health issues and the way that we build more affordable housing is we pay for all that through sales tax,” Haslam said. “And when the world comes to Nashville, we collect more sales tax.

“… There really is a bigger purpose to all of this.”

Haslam noted that “we were all in San Francisco for the last one and I think we all walked away going ‘OK, there is a whole lot to do here'” while observing the events around the Super Bowl.

Haslam and Nantz will head the city’s Super Bowl committee.