Civic Pride
Their success on the field notwithstanding, sports franchises can boost civic pride by becoming focal points for community involvement. Today, the clubs in the four major American sports leagues routinely are involved in large scale charitable and community programs. They typically raise millions of dollars annually for area charities, hospitals and schools. Professional athletes are also capable of generating great interest---and raising money---when they attach their name to a civic cause.
http://peopleof.oureverydaylife.com/benefits-having-sport-franchises-cities-8395.html
It may be that for some residents, public funding for stadiums is supported for reasons other than projections of income growth or job creation. Recently many economists who are critics of sports subsidies have also recognized that sports teams generate benefit beyond that typically measured. Baade and Dye (1988, p. 37) acknowledge that “measurable economic benefits to area residents are not large enough to justify stadium subsidies and the debate must turn to immeasurable intangible benefits like fan identification and civic pride.” Noll and Zimbalist (1997, p. 58) agree that these “immeasurable” benefits may be important: “whether the value of the external benefits of a major league team to consumers really does exceed stadium subsidies is uncertain, but by no means implausible.”
Despite acknowledging the existence and potential importance of such benefits, economists have been reluctant to actually calculate them, and for good reason. Baade and Sanderson (1997, p. 104) illustrate the current state of the debate:
The estimation of consumer surplus—and its complementary benefit or cost, what is termed (positive or negative) “externalities”—is (or should be) an integral part of any benefit-cost calculation where public policy decisions are concerned, constructing a parking garage, a dam, or any other project. It is also one of the most difficult to handle. Doing such a calculation for a sports franchise is well beyond the scope of this paper,
but we want to acknowledge the potential existence of this benefit to citizens and the role it could play in what may otherwise appear to be ill-informed or unwise investments in sports franchises.
Two findings indicate that the consumption value of teams is quite important in explaining why some citizens continue to support public stadium funding. First, interest in the team is important in determining the value of willingness-to-pay, which should not be the case if support was based solely on economic impact grounds. Second, while aggregate willingness-to-pay values are somewhat less than typical stadium subsidies, they are large enough to be considered an important factor in public funding for stadiums. The findings do not imply that cities should spend tax money on stadiums, but they suggest that the focus on economic impact, both by its advocates and critics, misses the true source of public support of subsidies to sports stadiums.
http://www.cas.unt.edu/~jhauge/teaching/sports/owen.pdf
