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Taylor Swift may boost the occasional game’s television ratings and entertainment value when she appears in a luxury box, but the pop icon is much more valuable to the NFL than the world’s most famous member of the WAGs club. It’s when she’s on stage at one of the league’s massive bowls that her impact is most felt.
According to an economic impact report on Levi’s Stadium commissioned and released by the San Francisco 49ers last week, Taylor Swift’s two concerts held there in July generated $33.5 million in financial impact. That includes $23.2 million in direct spending by concert-goers on things like hotels, meals and other entertainment options besides the concert itself, and excludes spending on the concert by fans and by the artist and her retinue. The average of $332 spending per attendee is one-third greater than what the typical football fan spent while attending last December’s Dolphins-Niners game at Levi’s, the most recent NFL game covered in the analysis. Overall, the $16.75 million per Taylor Swift show injected into the local economy by fans outpaces all seven of the NFL games analyzed at Levi’s in the study, including the $15.1 million created around 2020’s NFC Championship game.
Team-sponsored economic impact studies are open to a lot of reasonable criticism about how good stadiums are for municipalities, such as the argument that much of the spending may ultimately leave town since it goes to non-local enterprises or that similar amounts of spending may have happened locally anyway, whether there was an event or not. But for the teams themselves that have to justify the increasingly expensive costs of new stadiums, superstar concert events like Swift’s seem to boost their own economics significantly.
“The numbers I found for Levi’s were not that different from other stadiums in terms of percentage of visitors who come from out of town specifically for the football game or concert,” said Dan Rascher, author of many facility impact reports, including the one for the 49ers, and a professor of economics at the University of San Francisco.
It’s a little speculative to project out Swift’s Levi’s numbers across the league, but absent other indicators, Rascher’s figures suggest she has been a financial boon for stadiums. The star played 53 shows this year in the U.S. leg of her “Eras” tour, all of them at NFL stadiums. That suggests that her fans generated about $887 million direct spending going to the shows, money that generates some tax benefits for municipalities that are home to the venues. Swift has another nine shows at NFL stadiums scheduled next fall before the tour wraps.
Add to that spending inside the stadium, which is excluded from Rascher’s Levi’s analysis, and Swift probably helps teams even more. For example, Aramark CEO John Zillmer said in May that concession sales at Swift shows were producing “nearly $2 million” in sales a night, a figure he termed “very robust.” Venues also benefit from getting a cut of merchandise sales, likely sizable since Swifties have voracious appetites, leading to overnight lines just to buy T-shirts at some venues.
Taken together, large non-sports events may become key to the economics of paying for new facilities, especially as construction costs boom. Most of the league—21 of the NFL’s 32 franchises—play in stadiums that are older than 20 years.
“The reality is that over the last 30 years or so, the typical NFL stadium has hosted about five non-sports events a year, on average,” said Victor Matheson, an economics professor at College of the Holy Cross, in a phone call.
The past two years, however, have seen that average about double, which could be a sign venues are making more of an effort to drum up non-sports business, he said. That would be a meaningful development given the fact NFL stadiums are the least-used major league venues around. NBA and NHL arenas, which have smaller capacity, average 77 events a year compared to less than 13 for pro football bowls, according to Matheson. It is also possible the jump in non-sports events at NFL stadiums is just a temporary bump reflecting the pent-up demand from lack of events during the pandemic, he cautioned.
Ultimately, the biggest hurdle facing NFL stadiums seeking other events may be that they are so big—there are only a handful of artists who could hope to sell out 60,000-seat NFL stadiums consistently.
“I don’t think Taylor Swift is going to be on tour for 100 dates a year for the next 10 years,” Matheson said.
2023-10-11 09:58:07
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