Why a city should not build a stadium for an NFL team

There are constant one on one matchups of a dribbler trying to beat an attacker, or clever link up passes, or long balls contested by attackers and defenders, or, yes, shots on goal.

A fair number of NFL plays are just running up the middle for 1 or 2 yards gain.

So I really fail to see your point.

Some people enjoy the game. Those who do not enjoy it should not be forced to pay for the stadium. I would even oppose using eminent domain to acquire a contiguous area of land large enough to build one, with the sole possible exception of Green Bay, Wisconsin, where the Packers are very nearly a municipal corporation due to their "ownership" structure (non-voting, non-dividend-paying, restricted-resale stocks don't count as ownership, in my opinion).

Selling the naming rights to the stadium to the highest bidder is just twisting the knife in the back, really.

This article is similar in character to economic retrospectives of cities that hosted Olympics competitions. The IOC always promises an instant boost to prosperity, but that never seems to materialize. I have been to Turner Field (formerly the primary 1996 Olympic stadium), and the surrounding area does not look very boosted (although other parts of Atlanta are admittedly much worse). The stadium is coming down in 2017, as a 20-year-old building is apparently no longer good enough for the Braves to play baseball in it. Their previous home at Atlanta-Fulton Cty Stadium only lasted 30 years.

For reference purposes, Fenway Park and Wrigley Field are both more than 100 years old and still in use. Stadiums in Kansas City, LA, and Anaheim are pentagenarians. Milwaukee County Stadium made it to 50 before the Brewers traded up. Yankee Stadium retired at 85. Tiger Stadium lasted 87 years. Candlestick Park retired at 53. Memorial Stadium (Baltimore, 2nd) lasted 53 years.

From a cursory examination of history, a city is much better off building its own smaller stadium, sized for basketball, hockey, and rock concerts, than one that can only reasonably be filled by MLB baseball, NFL football, Olympic track and field, club soccer (in Europe), and musical superstars. Offering public subsidy to a privately owned single-sport stadium strikes me as brain-damaged beyond all reasonable measure, especially when the sports franchise seeking to build it is currently leasing a publicly-owned facility.

It is known that the cyber-ops team is based from there. There was a lot of astro-turfing going on, and in one of the wikileaks(?) post that came out - it was revealed that one of the founders of reddit was attempting to sell his services to the USG and others to show them how to drive/control/manipulate online sentiments (shilling).

There are a number of other cases about this online and in reddit in particular.

My comment was based on the fact that anything negative about GS appears to be immediately downvoted regardless of the veracity of the statement, if it even appears to be slightly negative.

My statement, then, is that I feel that GS is running/paying for a service to monitor any mentions of them and either (on social sites that allow votes) downvote these statements or, at times, post shill responses.

However, on a site like HN, any overly positive response to any denigrating response to GS would certainly be too transparent as astro-turfing, thus they simply downvote.

Though, since we're all humans, you'd think we have enough common ground with each other anyway, what with death, taxes, relationship problems, etc.