When the Buffalo Bills open their $2.2 billion Highmark Stadium this September, they will be opening the NFL's smallest venue: 60,108 seats, down from the 71,608 the old stadium held. Making that happen required New York State and Erie County to pay $850 million in public funds, producing 11,500 fewer seats, with personal seat licenses—the mechanism granting holders the right to buy season tickets—running as high as $50,000 per seat. Get-in prices for opening night have already been listed at $663 on the resale market.

The stadium was built, in significant part, with the money of the very fans being priced out of it. New York State contributed $600 million and Erie County $250 million, collectively the largest public subsidy ever committed to an NFL facility. But the Bills Mafia's new home is not unique in its funding model. Deal after deal across American sports follows the same playbook: the public funds the venue, and the owner uses it to serve a smaller, wealthier crowd.

How much did local and state governments spend on sports?

On the opening day of the FIFA World Cup, FIFA President Gianni Infantino held a press conference in Mexico City and offered this defense of his tournament's sky-high ticket prices: "If we are doing something wrong, everyone in North America is doing something wrong." It was a more forward argument than his comments at the Milken conference in April, where he blamed the U.S. market's design for encouraging exorbitant prices: "We have to look at the market—we are in the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world, so we have to apply market rates."

Between 1970 and 2020, state and local governments spent $33 billion in public funds on major-league sports arenas across the U.S. and Canada, with the median public contribution covering 73% of construction costs. That pace has only accelerated: in 2024 alone, teams across professional sports proposed more than $13 billion in taxpayer subsidies for new construction and renovations.

"No one has ever built a new stadium and provided more affordable tickets after that new stadium has opened," said Victor Matheson, a professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross who has studied sports subsidies for nearly 30 years. "It's, in fact, exactly the opposite."

How much do new stadium tickets cost?

Individual teams in most leagues do not have to share revenue from premium seats and luxury boxes with the rest of the league—while TV and merchandise revenue is pooled. That incentive pushes every owner in the same direction: rip out the cheap seats, build suites, constrain supply, and extract maximum value from fans with the deepest pockets.

Average NFL ticket prices nearly tripled from 2015 to 2025, up 173% after adjusting for inflation. The new Chiefs stadium is expected to have roughly 15% fewer seats than Arrowhead. New stadiums across the NFL, NBA, and MLB consistently follow the same pattern: fewer general seats, more luxury suites, higher prices throughout.

"The money is in super premium experiences, not in actually putting people in the seats," Matheson told Fortune. "The old model was: Build an 85,000-seat stadium and sell cheap bleacher tickets and hopefully they buy some peanuts and Cracker Jack. That's not the way anyone sells things anymore."

"We make stadiums and arenas smaller, but we make them nicer," Matheson continued. "You tear out a bunch of bleacher seats, and you put in a box with a handful of seats but a super-premium experience, because you can make a lot more money on a few seats to the right people than a lot of seats to the working class."

The incentive structure reinforces itself: because teams do not have to share premium revenue with the league, it is the one revenue stream they can maximize entirely on their own terms.

FIFA raised prices on more than 90 of the 104 World Cup matches between October 2025 and April 2026, with the three main ticket categories rising an average of 34%. FIFA claims it received 500 million requests for the 7 million World Cup tickets on offer. Infantino offered 130,000 tickets at $60—out of a total of six to seven million—and called it the "right thing to do." The Football Supporters Europe coalition filed a formal complaint accusing FIFA of abusing its monopoly position, and the New York and New Jersey attorneys general subpoenaed FIFA over alleged seat-location misrepresentation and artificial price inflation.

How much do cities spend in tax subsidies?

The stadium subsidy race has a direct parallel in the broader economy: cities competing with one another using public money to offer companies better tax incentives and attract their business.

In 2018, Amazon solicited bids from 238 cities for its second headquarters. New Jersey offered $7 billion if Amazon located in Newark. Maryland pledged $8.5 billion. New York ultimately offered $3.5 billion in tax incentives—less than half of Newark's package—yet Amazon still chose New York. Amazon executives said the decision was based primarily on where employees wanted to live, not on incentives, meaning Newark's $7 billion was never really in the running. New York eventually pulled out of the deal due to community opposition.

Economists say cities with structural advantages that would win regardless are essentially throwing money into the void, because these companies and stadium owners were always going to pick them. Buffalo was never realistically going to lose the Bills; the $850 million was, in effect, a ransom paid to prevent a departure that was never truly on the table.

A similar auction is playing out with data centers. States have been offering hundreds of millions in tax breaks to attract the AI infrastructure boom, and the costs are exploding beyond any projection. Ohio's data center tax exemption, initially projected to cost $136 million in fiscal 2025, came in at nearly $1.6 billion—more than 11 times the estimate. The state has since suspended the program. Illinois followed, with Gov. JB Pritzker pausing data center tax incentives after the legislature failed to make facilities pay for their own electricity costs. Pritzker argued, as one of many voices in the debate, that the buildings bring few jobs relative to their footprint, consume enormous power and water, and face growing community opposition.

Who wins when the ticket supply is this scarce?

Judd Kessler, a professor of business economics at the Wharton School and author of Lucky by Design, said the stadium subsidy dynamic is a hidden market failure at the structural level. When public money builds a venue that an owner then deliberately constrains while adding amenities and premiums, the taxpayer is funding the creation of a scarcity they will personally be priced out of. When venues price below what the full market would bear, the surplus moves sideways into bots, queues, and resale platforms—and there, between 25 and 35% gets extracted in fees on every transaction.

"We as customers and fans should look at those fees and be annoyed by them," Kessler told Fortune, "the same way—potentially even more so—than we are annoyed by very high initial ticket prices." That fee structure was central to the Ticketmaster-Live Nation antitrust case, in which a jury ruled in April that Live Nation held an illegal monopoly over the live events industry. It is one reason, Kessler argues, that innovation in ticket market design has stalled: too many players in the system profit from the opacity.

The pattern surfaced in sharp relief at Madison Square Garden earlier this summer. Mayor Zohran Mamdani paid close to $1,000 for a standing-room-only ticket to Game 3 of the NBA Finals while simultaneously announcing a free watch party for 5,000 fans at Bryant Park who could not afford to attend. The same dynamic played out in Central Park in July, when the state of New York spent $6 million to host a free watch party for 50,000 residents who cannot afford a World Cup ticket at MetLife Stadium, less than 10 miles away across the river.

Do tax incentives for sports stadiums ever work?

Every new stadium deal is sold with some version of the same promise: jobs, tourism, civic pride, economic revitalization. The economic literature is nearly unanimous that those promises do not materialize. A 2017 survey found that 80% of economists believe the costs of stadium subsidies outweigh the benefits. Economists typically attribute the gap to a substitution effect: money spent by local fans at a stadium largely replaces spending that would have gone to other restaurants, bars, and entertainment in the same region, so the net gain to the local economy is small even when a venue is full. The dynamic also persists because leagues tightly control the supply of franchises, leaving cities to bid against one another for a limited number of teams rather than competing on the merits of existing local economies.

"This profit-maximizing concept, when you're simultaneously asking for handouts from regular taxpayers, is appalling," Matheson said. "Asking blue-collar workers to pay higher taxes so the wealthy and upper-middle class can go see games in shiny new stadiums is absolutely one of the worst pieces of public policy out there."

A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on June 11, 2026.