Watching the Scoreboard

Most Super Bowl games have turned out to be yawners for spectators, but another kind of scrimmage--hard-fought and often more entertaining--usually erupts after the final whistle, when Monday-morning economists go head to head over the spectacle’s dollar benefits, the public expense incurred and whether the host city got its money’s worth.

Super Bowl XXXII, to be played Sunday in San Diego, is no different, and the opposing camps have already formed. On one side are local politicians and civic boosters who invested heavily to stage the event--mainly with a controversial, $78-million expansion of Qualcomm Stadium that the National Football League demanded before awarding the game.

Critics, while not disputing that the Super Bowl brings big dollars, complain that precious civic funds could be better spent elsewhere. They point to the $17.6 billion in TV contracts that the NFL signed last week as proof that the league is in no need of a public subsidy.

And they say big events, such as the 1996 Republican National Convention held here, rarely live up to the economic hype.

Mayor Susan Golding and tourism officials tout the 80,000 out-of-towners and the intense media attention that the Super Bowl will draw to the city as a windfall in image-building and visitor spending that will more than outweigh the cost.

Direct spending by visitors, the teams, the NFL and the news media at hotels, restaurants and shopping malls in recent Super Bowl host cities has been estimated at between $80 million and $100 million.

That figure doesn’t include the mysterious, hard-to-quantify but always impressive “multiplier effect” that boosters trumpet. That’s the impact of visitor dollars as they course through the economy, arguably generating jobs and tax revenue. Super Bowl boosters say such indirect benefits easily match the direct outlays. Altogether, San Diego is predicting a $238-million infusion from this year’s game.

Proponents also attach a value to the “intangible” effects of worldwide exposure that the city will receive by virtue of news coverage and the television broadcast, which was the most-watched program of 1997. That exposure will inevitably lead to future tourism and convention business that is impossible to measure now, they argue.

UC San Diego economics professor Ross Starr believes that the marketing of San Diego is the most tangible benefit of all.

“These kinds of events rarely pay for themselves. It’s the convention and tourism business that comes afterwards that brings the serious hospitality business,” Starr said.

“It’s unbelievable the exposure the city is getting, the number of first-time visitors, the stories that are being written,” said Jim Brown, a San Diego car dealer and chairman of the event’s host committee, a group of influential business people who raised $4.5 million in private money to promote the event.

“Hopefully, we’ll have great weather for the game when most of the country is weathered in,” Brown said.

But Bruce Henderson, an attorney and former San Diego city councilman who opposed public financing of the stadium expansion, said the Super Bowl is the last thing a cash-strapped city should be subsidizing.

“The sort of dollars the NFL is receiving for future broadcasting rights and the dollars that the networks are able to charge for Super Bowl advertisements all add up to the fact that this stadium expansion could have been fully funded by the private sector,” Henderson said.

Part and parcel of the Super Bowl expansion package was a deal to get the San Diego Chargers to extend their stadium lease to 2020. This entailed a guarantee by the city that a minimum of 60,000 general-admission tickets would be sold per game through 2020. That deal cost the city about $1.3 million in rent abatements this year, when Chargers fans stayed away in droves.

The guarantee could lead to an even bigger cost to the city next year, critics say, because the Chargers’ poor 1997 season--they finished with a 4-12 record--is expected to depress ticket sales for the 1998 season.

For Sunday’s game, San Diego is also donating more than $600,000 in police and other municipal services while relinquishing to the NFL all parking and concessions at the city-owned stadium. Those public services could be better spent on San Diego taxpayers, said attorney Michael Aguirre, a former City Council candidate and critic of the expansion.

“I’m not saying there is no economic benefit, I’m saying it’s vastly overstated,” said Aguirre, who criticized the NFL’s “gluttonous state. . . . I’d rather see the money used to subsidize the Super Bowl go to public day care, for example.”

Tim Hogan, director of the Center for Business Research at Arizona State University College of Business, said the Super Bowl held at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe in 1996 created a “huge injection in spending, but there are a lot of costs involved. It’s not just all profit.” And many argue that the multiplier effect of an event as short-term as the Super Bowl exists only in the minds of the hypesters.

How is the hotly disputed economic impact measured? After each game, cities typically sponsor studies that even the NFL admits are sometimes exercises in puffery. Communities may try to one-up one another in showing astronomical dollar impacts, often as a means of getting a leg up in the rivalry to host a future Super Bowl.

“One year, Miami said the economic benefit was $300 million, and the next year Phoenix said the game produced $350 million,” said Jim Steeg, NFL vice president of special events, adding that it was as if the two cities were “trying to outdo each other.”

A study of the 1993 Super Bowl in Pasadena by the Anderson School of Management at UCLA was relatively muted by comparison, finding a $180-million economic impact.

The NFL says it is trying to inject more objectivity into measurements of the game’s economic impact. For the San Diego event, the NFL is commissioning the most comprehensive Super Bowl study ever from Price Waterhouse Sports Group of Tampa, Fla. The consulting firm will put “more people into the field than ever before” to measure the game’s dollar impact, said the NFL’s Steeg.

Robert Barton, who heads a 60-person Price Waterhouse team of accountants that descended on San Diego on Wednesday, clipboards and calculators in hand, said he will try to determine the true “incremental” spending by Super Bowl visitors--that is, how many dollars are spent that wouldn’t have been spent otherwise this week in San Diego, which is in the midst of a tourist boom.

The researchers might also want to take into account the cost of tourism lost over Super Bowl week as a result of visitors’ being scared away from the city by a mega-event, said Alan Gin, an economist at the University of San Diego.

Such a loss occurred during the Republican convention in August 1996, although the event generally is thought to have been a plus in terms of tourism revenue.