Nov 12, 2013 3 min read

If all the bloated player contracts, inflated ticket prices and supersized TV deals weren’t evidence enough of the greed and profligacy in professional sports, look south to Atlanta.

Not long after the ownership of the Atlanta Falcons managed to wring concessions from the city in order to build a lavish $1.2 billion football stadium with a retractable roof, eight-sided design and 62,000-square-foot video screen, the Atlanta Braves announced Monday that they would be pulling up stakes from their home at Turner Field in the city’s downtown and relocating to Cobb County, a northern suburb thick with well-manicured subdivisions, glitzy shopping centers and epic levels of traffic congestion.

The Braves said they want to move out of the city so they can develop the land around the proposed 40,000-seat stadium, and turn it into a year-round attraction. The baseball team’s president, John Schuerholz, said in a videotaped message the new stadium, projected to be completed in time for the 2017 season, would provide a “first-rate game experience” and that staying put would “do nothing to improve access or the fan experience; these are issues we simply cannot overcome.”

But it’s not as if Turner Field, or the Georgia Dome, are 87 years old, as Detroit’s Tiger Stadium was when it closed in 1999, or 60 years old, as Forbes Field was when the Steelers and Pirates decamped to Three Rivers Stadium in 1970.

The Georgia Dome opened in 1992 and Turner Field became a baseball park in 1997, after being used the year before for the Summer Olympics. To put this in perspective, both Tiger Stadium and Forbes Field opened when William Howard Taft was president; both the Georgia Dome and Turner Field opened, lo those many years ago, when George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were the keyholders at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

That the two Atlanta stadiums are now “obsolete” is indicative of either a tremendous lack of foresight by the designers of those facilities or, more likely, the avarice of team owners who can use the threat of moving to the suburbs – or another city – to get a shiny new place to play, with taxpayers picking up a large share of the tab.

The county that will be the new home for the Atlanta Braves will, according to some reports, be contributing $450 million of the proposed stadium’s $672 million cost – just about two-thirds.

While promises of job creation and economic development usually come attached to such public-private deals, they often prove to be chimerical.

Neil deMause, one of the authors of the book, “Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money Into Private Profit,” told The Atlantic magazine’s website, “The notion of stadiums as an economic catalyst are a complete myth. The notion that you are somehow going to get economic benefits from a new stadium and a baseball team in your county that is going to make up for a loss of $450 million … Any economist in the country is going to say there’s no possible way to earn that back.”

And since Atlanta’s MARTA public transportation system does not extend out to Cobb County, many are anticipating levels of gridlock that could pose an impediment to fans, rather than the improved access the team’s owners are promising.

We can only hope that Heinz Field and PNC Park, the latter of which is considered to be one of the best stadiums in sports, enjoy much longer lives than their Atlanta counterparts.