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Old Posted Nov 6, 2016, 4:02 AM
LouisVanDerWright LouisVanDerWright is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2012
Posts: 7,443
Was at the All Blacks and Ireland game today, the crowd was probably more than 50% foreign, mostly Irish, but I heard a lot of different accents (Again a shit ton of Irish accents) and the group in front of me in line to go through the metal dectors came down from Canada for it. The atomusphere got pretty awesome as the Irish team held strong towards the end and then ground out a last try to ice the game.

Again, it's not a "permenant difference in local consumption", but if you have a rugby game that results in a historic victory for Ireland and let's say 500,000 diehard Ireland fans watch it or are at the game, if even 5% of them are motivated to swing through Chicago some day, that's a huge boost. But nothing ever happens in vacuum, if you have 10,000 more people visit Chicago over the next five years, that can become 10,000 people each recommending Chicago to their friends in turn. Again, not necessarily a concrete capital improvement directly resulting from a single event, but the positive ripples from such things add up quickly in my opinion.

Also the group I was with was a development authority from Ireland's government that recently opened a new office here because they've noticed Chicago has become the emerging hub for back office functions for massive tech companies in much the same way as Dublin. They've had offices in NYC and SF for years, but have decided to open a non-costal office because of what they've heard of Chicago's tech scene and consolidation of large corporate HQ's.
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