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Originally Posted by SDCAL
Can you elaborate on what negative consequences you saw and in what cities? I've read and listened to various analysis on this, and they all seem to conclude that at least economically speaking the loss is not that great. Michael Leeds, a sports economist at Temple University said losing a major baseball team is about equivalent to a city losing a mid-sized department store in an NPR interview I listened to. Baseball teams have more home games than football teams do, so the assumption is losing a major league football team would have a very small financial impact. Perhaps you are talking about non-economic consequences like a feeling of lost identity or losing a major cultural institution?
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I think the most important thing to consider is not all cities are equal and comparing San Diego to any other city is faulty at it's core.
Also comparing baseball to football is a poor choice. As you pointed out, baseball has many more games than football. This is a huge difference.
Let's just look at the food and beverage industry in San Diego. Bars, outside of the ballpark area, do not staff differently for when a Padres game is on. But they do for Sunday football. Now a lot of this is based on people who are fans of other teams trying to watch their team play...but a lot of SD fans want to watch the game at a bar even if the Chargers are at home.
Beyond this if we look at other cities, you have even more variation. I know in cities like Buffalo were very concerned with the potential loss of the Bills. The Sundays during the NFL season make or break the year for many bars and pizza places. If you're not familiar with Buffalo, take all of the Mexican and Sushi places in San Diego and that's about how many Pizza and Wing places there are in Buffalo. And the region is a fraction of the size. The 'pizza and wings' production during Bills games is massive and there was a huge concern that most of these places would go under if the Bills left. Each of these places employed people, paid property tax and contributed to their neighborhoods. It would have been huge for most of these places to close.
Now San Diego is not Buffalo but that's the point. Maybe San Diego does not need the Chargers. Maybe the economy of San Diego would do better without the Chargers. But each city has their own special economy around their sports teams and unless the study is looking at the San Diego/Charger economy it does not mean much.
I don't know how much San Diego 'needs' the chargers but I do think comparing the loss of the Chargers to the loss of a baseball team in another city is pretty worthless.