The Role Sports Plays in Our Lives

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How many Americans spend their Thanksgiving Day watching football? The answer is Millions. Football games have been a tradition of Thanksgiving throughout the years. While high-school students have their own games on that day, many others spend the day at their city’s stadium or in front of television screens, watching a game of NFL or colleges' league while their precious turkey meals are getting prepared at home. I used that example to highlight the importance of the sports in our lives. Even on national holidays like Thanksgiving, American families find sports a rich topic to watch, talk about and gather all together around for some time. “Sports are bigger than life," as an old proverb says (Bradlee). It is something that captures the attention of students at schools and colleges, families at homes, and, of course, it brings millions in audience to media, print and television. Therefore, sports have always been on focus for economic investments, either by public or private sectors. Over the time, athletes have become celebrities. You can find their posters hung on walls of millions of children’s rooms, their advertisements all around the television channels, and their pictures everywhere on billboards around the cities. In other words, they have become a sort of investment for their teams and sponsors as well as the mass media. That is why; many cities have decided to make use of that cash cow. They realized the popularity of those athletes is getting bigger, and they knew that any city that hosts a bunch of those celebrities would attract thousands of fans to watch, meet and cheer for them; something, which would turn a city into a tourist hub with thousands of people going in and out, generating millions in revenues for loc... ... middle of paper ... ... occurred somewhere else around the city. Furthermore, the number of generated new jobs is not big enough to support spending half a billion of the city’s funds in order to establish the new mega project. In addition, the demographic factors and the relation between the city and its surrounding counties will have a call on the feasibility of the project and the projected revenues that may come turning the city into a tourist and sports fans' hub. Perhaps the only proponents for such a project are the local coalition groups that may influence the city to fund the project in order for their businesses to revive and in order to make use of the public funds to create new business for themselves. In sum, publicly financing a new stadium is not recommended, and their effect on the local economy is poor enough not to boost local economies and local government revenues.

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