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Forum nameOkay Sports
Topic subjectLosing big sports events cost Tampa Bay some $360 mil (swipe)
Topic URLhttp://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=8&topic_id=2713281&mesg_id=2713826
2713826, Losing big sports events cost Tampa Bay some $360 mil (swipe)
Posted by Marbles, Fri Mar-27-20 01:01 PM

And the Super Bowl was supposed to be here in 2021.

I'm not posting this to mourn the loss of money. The big wigs are gonna get theirs. I'm not thinking about them. To me, what's more important is the economic impact on the workers in service industry. We're a heavy hospitality region and a ton of workers are gonna be affected by this.

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https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/03/27/losing-big-sports-events-cost-tampa-bay-some-360-million-in-economic-impact/

In successive announcements earlier this month, the coronavirus pandemic wiped out five major sporting events in the Tampa Bay area — March Madness, WrestleMania, the Valspar Championship golf tournament, the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg and the final days of spring training.

The empty seats stood to mean fewer tourists to stay in hotels, dine at restaurants and shop at stores.

The total in lost economic impact: somewhere between $290 million and $390 million, according to a Tampa Bay Times analysis.

“It hurts a lot,” said Michelle Gacio Harrolle, director of the Vinik Sport & Entertainment Management Program at the University of South Florida. “When there’s no sports, there’s no events. It really trickles down to everybody.”

To quantify that trickle-down effect, the Times looked at economic impact estimates for all five events from previous years. Then we ran the numbers by Harrolle, who has studied spring training and the Valspar before.

Add up all the best guesses, and you get a back-of-the-envelope estimate of around $360 million in missed economic opportunities through direct or indirect spending.

Economic impact from sports events is best measured afterward, many experts say. And critics in the academic world say impact reports often are exaggerated, anyway, varying so widely that questions arise about their accuracy. In 2018, for example, Clearwater estimated the Phillies’ spring training impact at $70 million, then a year later put the figure at $44 million.

What’s more, the five sports event cancellations announced in early March came just as the impact of coronavirus was spreading across all segments of society. Now, hundreds of millions in potential losses from the five events pales in comparison with the widespread shutdown of all local restaurants and some hotels.

Still, the biggest financial blow would have been the loss of WrestleMania 36, moved from Raymond James Stadium to a closed set at the WWE Performance Center in Orlando. The April 5 event would have brought the region 50,000 hotel-visitor room nights, said Rob Higgins, executive director of the Tampa Bay Sports Commission.

Previous economic impact estimates for the event ranged from $165 million (last year in New Jersey) to almost $182 million (Orlando in 2017).

“The reason it’s so high is because everyone is from out of town,” USF’s Harrolle said. “They spend a lot of money, and they’re here for multiple days.”

Long stays from out-of-town Valspar and NCAA Tournament visitors never materialized, either; both were called off well before competition was set to begin March 19.

In 2015, Harrolle estimated the local impact of the PGA Tour event at $51 million. March Madness hasn’t visited Amalie Arena since 2011, but Jacksonville and Orlando each brought in an estimated $10 million as hosts for recent first- and second-round games, according to Jacksonville University and the Central Florida Sports Commission. Higgins expected the Tampa Bay area to net 13,000 hotel nights from the NCAA Tournament.