Economist: NFL Lockout Would Make for $20 Million in Lost Economic Activity per Game on Average
By Zac Snyder
Dr. Jesse David:I believe players’ salaries are something on the order of about 40% to 50% of the total. It could be a little bit less but I’d have to – and I’d have to go back to check some of the studies. It may be as low as 30% in some cases.
Eric Edholm:Okay, thank you.
Operator:Our next question comes from the line of Mark Zinno with 105.7 Baltimore. Please go ahead.
Mark Zinno:Morning gentlemen. I guess my question is when you look at the landscape of the owners in the NFL, there are some owners who obviously aren’t doing well as others who would be more economically impacted by a lockout.
Is there a general consensus that in a sense it’s almost the rule by the few that the owners who are doing well financially are going to help push this train forward as far as a lockout is concerned?
George Atallah:Let me take that one and thanks for joining us on the call. I don’t know the answer to your question because we don’t have the information readily available on who’s doing well and who’s not.
So if we’re talking about publicly available figures such as the Forbes numbers, that tells us that every team is doing well. So it’s going to be hard for us to characterize or pick off or isolate owners to your question that are not doing as well, that can’t afford a lockout or anything like that.
It’s really tough to say in the absence of the information and I think I made that – I tried to make that point when I was a guest last week.
Operator:Our next question comes from the line of Eric Sturgis with Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Please go ahead.
Eric Sturgis:Good morning. I had talked to some experts who say that the economic impact of a lockout or who have looked at other sports work stoppages who say that, you know, in general that there is very little impact economically, because they say people will tend to spend their money on other activities.
And I was wondering if you’ve, you know, I was wondering if you could address that issue or those concerns.
Dr. Jesse David:Right, well there certainly is a range of opinion on these issues. The analysis that we did is based on studies commissioned either by the teams themselves, or by the organizations, the public organizations, that support those teams through stadium ownership or management.
And so we based our analysis on their opinions and aggregated them. I think you certainly have to go to each of those studies and see what the different level of assumptions are.
I know that there’s a range of assumptions in terms of how substitutable football is for other entertainment activities. Generally speaking so long as there are some folks who come to watch football games from outside the region who wouldn’t visit that region if there wasn’t a game, and if there are some folks within the region who spend money on football but wouldn’t spend that money locally if there wasn’t, as long as there are some of those you’re going to have some economic impact associated with the football game.
And I think every study that looks at that makes some different assumptions about that. A lot of them for example have surveys of visitors and ask them, “How much do you spend and what would you be doing if you weren’t here?”
But I think you’d have to go and look at the individual studies, but generally speaking these are ten different instances where the opinion was football is not substitutable for some other activity that the fans might undertake if there wasn’t a game.
Operator:Our next question comes from the line of Dashiell Bennett with Business Insider. Please go ahead.
Dashiell Bennett:Thank you. I was wondering if you could talk a little more about the types of jobs that would be lost of that 3000 that you mentioned. Are these mostly like the seasonal part-time jobs?
Do these people also like receive benefits that would then be lost as well? And could you also repeat what the – what you said the range was for per game?
You said $20 million was the average, but what was the range between the per game impact? Thanks.