The $62m question: does a high school really need a professional-style stadium? | Sport

WThe television cameras take place around the most recent sports temple of the United States to show the cavernous stands, the elegant outdoor brick, VIP suites and massive video card, viewers might believe that they are considering a professional place.

However, the occupants of Phillip Beard Stadium, the Buford Wolves, are not a team by profession or even a collegial team. They are high school students. In the exorbitant world of football in high school, the arena of $ 62 million at $ 10,000 from BUFORD is not the student stadium funded by the largest or most expensive taxpayers in the United States. But it may be the most luxurious.

The Wolves welcome the Milton Eagles Thursday in the first regular stadium season match, which will be broadcast nationally on ESPN. With 13 Georgia State Championships from 2001 to 2021 and a long record of players who are progressing towards university scholarships and, ultimately, the NFL, BUFORD is a football power – and the new stadium is a noisy declaration of the school’s desire to keep it so.

If that feels that half of Buford is in the big game… they are probably. The city of the Atlanta region has around 19,000 residents and the deemed high school (rebuilt in 2019 for $ 85 million) has around 1,900 students. In 2010, another teaching establishment in the Atlanta region, Kennesaw State University, built an intelligent multi-user stage of $ 10,200 to $ 16.5 million. Over the past 15 years, however, construction costs have soaked, fans’ expectations have evolved, streaming and social media have changed the way we consume sports and university athletes are now allowed to gain significant sums by monetizing their personal brands. The trend is clear: more recent, more chic, more expensive.

The Phillip Beard Stadium has the typical benches discovered familiar to all those who saw the lights of Friday evening. However, it also has more than 1,500 premium seats, 15 suites, a double -sided video card of 3,600 square feet and an event space of 10,500 square feet with a trophy wall. Buford City director Bryan Kerlin told Atlanta Journia-Constitution that the stadium had been paid by the city’s general funds and that its funding “had no impact on teacher wages, class resources or any educational funding”. However, there may well be other parts of the city towards which the money could have been diverted.

In addition, the mixture of spartan spaces for students and high -end installations for companies and former rich students is increasingly common. This could be a financial meaning for schools to maximize income and recover some of the construction and exploitation costs, according to Victor Matheson, professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. “The economic term is price differentiation,” he says. It has long been common in professional sports because teams adopt an appreciated strategy of airlines, with their countless courses and prices: invoice extremely different quantities for the same product according to the variations in the customer experience.

While the masses of cheap seats generate noise, corporate boxes can deliver thousands of dollars in events by event, giant video screens call on advertisers, and perhaps the former students who have been wines and dined in air-conditioned comfort and appreciated a perfect view of the action will be inspired to make generous donations to Alma Mater.

The new high -end arenas are also a way to attract fans of the sofa at a time when it seems that almost all sports competitions, as obscure, are obscure. “Everyone knows that his biggest competitor is to be able to watch on television,” says Matheson. The climate -controlled installations diminish against extreme weather conditions, and with gargantuan video panels, televisions on competitions, the myriad of food and drinks and scores and sumptuous graphics on LED ribbon screens, fans can go to the stage, discover the live atmosphere and always look on the screens.

The Northwestern University in Illinois builds a new private funded stadium guided by the principle of “Premium for Everybody”, reports Fronter Office Sports. At a expected cost of $ 862 million, it will be the most expensive academic stadium of all time, but with only 35,000 seats, it will contain 12,000 people less than the place it replaces. The theory that underlies the design is that modern fans want a more intimate and luxurious experience, with changing tastes – and a changing climate – making sites even relatively recent obsolete.

In 2020, the Texas Rangers of the Major Baseball League left their outdoor stadium of 48,000 inhabitants, which opened in 1994, for a new building of 40,000 inhabitants with a retractable roof. This season, a minor league baseball team, the Salt Lake Bees, left Smith’s Ballpark, which also opened its doors in 1994, to a new home, to the price of ticket prices and to the reduction in half their capacity in the process. The concentration of high -end customers, of course, price, fans who cannot afford to spend strongly on an evening at the game.

“In all, premium seats represent a sixth of the seats at the new stadium, when it has contributed to only 3% of Smith’s Smith’s capacity,” said Salt Lake Tribune. “The seats closest to the action are not available for sale on a base by ticket; Instead, it is consequences at the level of the field which must be reserved in their entirety. ” The growing accent of sports on high -end customers reflects a change in the American economy as a whole: this year, an analysis study of Moody’s has revealed that the American economy now depends deeply on the richest households, the highest the highest of employees representing 50% of consumer spending, a strong increase in recent decades.

Logically, better installations should raise better players, with victories leading to larger participations, inflating civic pride, adding to the attraction of fast -growing suburbs where large high school stadiums are often located and stimulate the prospects of children who dream of reaching NFL. The delayed effect of professional and collegial ranks to secondary schools is not only a question of more chic installations. It is also visible in potential financial incentives.

College players have been authorized to earn money from their names, image and resemblance (Nile) since 2021. In June of this year, a former secondary player has filed a prosecution in progress in California stimulating the restrictions on the ability of student-and-state students to take advantage of their Nile rights. He could pave the way for high school stars in the United States to gain income and transfer to other schools for sporting reasons. “Companies see a lot of unexploited economic value in secondary athletics,” said Yaman Salahi, a lawyer representing the player named in the costume, in a press release from the front-office, “and we want to make sure that the value is fairly shared with the athletes who create it.”

Like teenage football starlets in professional clubs in other countries, American football players aged 16 and 17 could one day be rich and famous, with a status to correspond to the size of their stadiums of origin. “The difference here is that the local public school is developing,” said Matheson.

For the moment, the stadiums as important and expensive as Buford remain rare outside of Texas, the state which is the epicenter of the arms race for the football infrastructure of the high school. In 2017, the independent school district of the suburbs of Houston, Katy, opened a stadium of $ 70 million and 12,000 inhabitants adjacent to its existing and still operational place of 9,800 seats.

According to the Texasbob.com website, more than a quarter of the 1,267 secondary football stadiums in Texas can contain more than 5,000 people, with eight seats at least 16,500. The combined capacity of 4.4 million is larger than the populations of 24 states. About a quarter, video dashboards and 27 secondary stadiums have opened in Texas since 2020. A versatile place of $ 56 million in the city of Houston de la Porte should host its inaugural match this month.

Texas produces more NFL players than any other state, found a study of the data analysis companies ranges, with Houston the main city. On the other hand, Texas is classified 34th for the level of education by US News & World Report, is much lower than the national average for the remuneration and expenditure of teachers per student, and according to a study, this year, Texas teachers expect to spend an average $ 1,550 of their own money for class supplies. Many would say there are better things to spend money than school sports.