Redskins to DC

Spending a huge sum of money in order to build a stadium that tempts the Redskins back into DC would indeed be a terrible use of funds. Nationals Park hosts over 80 events per year. The Verizon Center is home to an NBA team, an NHL team, a WNBA team, and a smattering of other events. Those kind of usage levels are viable to help anchor a retail/entertainment district. And despite that stuff, cities still often wind up overpaying for sports stadiums. A football stadium, by contrast, features just eight home games in the regular season. That’s part of what makes the NFL so exciting. The games are rare enough that not only is every Redskins game important, every game played by the other NFC East teams is pretty crucial as well. But it’s just not enough games to be any kind of useful economic development tool.

That’s why decades ago we saw the vogue for combo stadiums. If you could build a single field and use it for baseball and football and MLS that’d be a pretty useful economic anchor. But people don’t like those combo stadiums and teams have been moving to dedicated single-sport fields. Which is find. But it means that football fields need to be exiled way out into the boonies where land is cheap and it makes sense to set such a large space aside for a facility that’s used so rarely.