Extract

Sports facility franchises and hosting of major sports events have often been claimed to be associated with a positive impact on growth, tourism, employment and wages. The empirical literature has, however, clearly rejected the presence of direct benefits to the host community and has seriously questioned these arguments (Siegfried and Zimbalist, 2000). A relatively new strand of the related literature has focused on the impact professional sports facilities have on prices of proximate properties. The main result is that stadia have a positive impact on the desirability of the location, thus inflating sales and rent prices in their vicinity. The existing evidence is based on stadium-specific case studies, where it is unclear whether the positive impact on prices is attributed to the fandom, area regeneration/accessibility, the stadium’s architectural design, or neighbourhood trends that might be correlated with the effect of the stadium thus biasing its impact.