Funding and operation of stadiums and arenas beside high-class leagues

Financing and operating stadiums and arenas beside the respective national high-class leagues are demanding tasks for those involved, mostly clubs or local governments. In the majority of cases, the affected clubs and teams heavily rely on ticket and catering revenues or sponsorships since the marketing of TV rights is of negligible importance. Nevertheless, the respective stadiums and arenas are often old and lack modern comfort on account of budget constraints impeding capital spending by clubs or governments. Starting from these observations and considering the features of the relevant sports facilities, we examine which funding and operating models could improve the endowment with stadiums and arenas in an efficiency-maximizing way and derive helpful recommandations for clubs, policy makers and private investors. For this purpose, we also establish four criteria to assess the efficiency of any stadium or arena construction and operation models, namely funding efficiency, cost efficiency, management efficiency and allocation efficiency. (Note: This paper is in German.)