Geoffrey Propheter, University of Colorado Denver

Broncos say their new stadium will be ‘privately financed,’ but ‘private’ often still means hundreds of millions in public resources

The Denver Broncos announced in early September 2025 their plan to build a privately financed football stadium. The proposal received a lot of attention and praise.

Across the five major sports leagues in the U.S. – the NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB and MLS – only 20% of facilities are privately owned.

I’ve studied the intersection of state and local public finance and pro sports for two decades. This experience has led me to approach claims of private financing with suspicion.

Private dollars are often masked as public dollars in these arrangements. https://www.youtube.com/embed/zwv34Lpo0ec?wmode=transparent&start=0 A Fox31 Denver news report aired in November 2025 about the Broncos’ plans for a new stadium.

Private vs public dollars

In theory, what counts as private or public dollars is uncontroversial. Dollars are public when government has a legal claim over them – otherwise, they are private.

The public versus private dollar distinction matters when accounting for who is contributing how much to a sports facility. When public dollars are allowed to count as private dollars, a project proposal looks more enticing than it is, in fact.

For instance, lawmakers regularly allow team owners to count public dollars as private dollars. The Sacramento City Council agreed to let the NBA’s Sacramento Kings count their property tax payments for the city-owned arena as private contributions to the overall cost of financing the arena. But property taxes are public dollars that in other instances go toward public services like schools and road repairs.

Team owners building private facilities also typically receive public dollars through tax breaks, which is government spending in disguise. Property tax exemptions, sales and use tax exemptions on materials and machinery, and income tax credits are common forms of government givebacks to sports team owners.

I’ve estimated that property tax exemptions alone, among facilities in the five major leagues, have cost state and local governments US$20 billion cumulatively over the life of teams’ leases, 42% of which would have gone to K-12 education.

Rental payments spent on facilities are not private dollars

Many facilities and their infrastructure are funded through public debt secured in part by team rental payments. Lawmakers, media and consultants often view projects secured by rents as privately financed, in part or whole.

However, rental income in exchange for use or operation of public property should not be counted as private dollars.

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Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose state lawmakers allocated the rent paid for use of campground sites in a state park to pay for new campground bathrooms. Are the bathrooms privately funded?

The flaw in concluding “yes” arises from a failure to appreciate that lawmakers, through policy, create legal claims over certain dollars. All dollars start as private dollars, but through the tax system, lawmakers transfer ownership of some dollars to the public.

It is the government landlord’s choice, a policy decision, to spend the rental income on the rented property, a choice available to them only if they own the rental income in the first place.

Yet lawmakers regularly allow teams, both professional and minor league, to count rental payments as private contributions. This accounting makes sports subsidies look less generous than they actually are.

Looking beyond construction

Facilities not only need to be constructed but also operated, maintained and eventually upgraded. Roads, sewer lines, overpasses, game-day security and emergency response and public policies to mitigate gentrification caused by a facility are all common taxpayer-funded touchpoints. In addition, facilities have preconstruction costs such as land acquisition, soil remediation and site preparation, as well as later costs such as demolition and remediation for the land’s next use.

Focusing on privately financed construction and ignoring all other aspects of a project’s development and operation is misleading, potentially contributing to lawmakers making inefficient and expensive policy decisions.

By way of example, the Council of the District of Columbia approved a subsidy agreement last year with the NFL’s Commanders. The stadium would be financed, constructed and operated by the team owner, who would pay $1 in rent per year and remit no property taxes. In exchange for financing the stadium privately, the owner receives exclusive development rights to 20 acres of land adjacent to the stadium for the next 90 years.

The stadium is expected to cost the owner $2.5 billion, with the city contributing $1.3 billion for infrastructure.

But the city also gives up market rental income between $6 billion and $25 billion,depending on future land appreciation rates, that it could make on the 20 acres.

In other words, the rent discount alone means the city gives up revenue equal to multiple stadiums in exchange for the Commanders providing one. It is as if the council has a Lamborghini, traded it straight up for a Honda Civic, and then praised themselves for their negotiation acumen that resulted in a “free” Civic.

The Broncos’ proposed stadium

As of January 2026, Denver taxpayers know only that the Broncos stadium construction will be privately financed and that public dollars will be spent on some infrastructure.

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Being enamored with such a proposal is similar to being offered a $1 billion yacht at a 75% discount. In my experience, there are two types of public officials: one will want to spend $250 million to save $750 million, while the other will ask whether $250 million for a yacht is an appropriate use of taxpayer resources given existing needs elsewhere.

My hope is that lawmakers better appreciate the many ways government participation in sports facility development, including privately financed ones, imposes serious risks and costs for current and future taxpayers. What is the expected total cost of the stadium project over its life? How much of the life cost would public resources cover? Could public resources generate greater benefits in an alternative use? How much will it cost to mitigate or compensate those affected by a project’s expected negative side effects, such as gentrification, congestion, pollution and crime?

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Geoffrey Propheter, Associate Professor, School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado Denver

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

John Affleck, Penn State

When I first heard about the arrests of Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and former NBA player Damon Jones in connection to federal investigations involving illegal gambling, I couldn’t help but think of a recent moment in my sports writing class.

I was showing my students a clip from an NFL game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and Kansas City Chiefs. Near the end of play, Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence threw a perfect pass to receiver Brian Jones Jr. to secure a critical first down. Out of the blue, a student groaned and said that he’d lost US$50 on that throw.

I thought of that moment because it revealed how ubiquitous sports betting has become, how much the types of bets have changed over time, and – given these trends – how it’s naive to think players won’t continue to be tempted to game the system.

The prop bet hits it big

I’ve been following the evolution of sports gambling for about a decade in my position as chair of Penn State’s sports journalism program.

Back when legal American sports betting was mostly confined to Las Vegas, the standard bets tended to be tied to picking a winner or which team would cover a point spread.

But ahead of the 1986 Super Bowl between the Chicago Bears and the overmatched New England Patriots, casinos offered bets on whether Bears defensive lineman – and occasional running back – William “Refrigerator” Perry would score a touchdown. The excitement around that sideshow kept fan interest going during a 46-10 blowout.

Perry did end up scoring, and the prop bet took off from there.

Prop bets are wagers that depend on an outcome within a game but not its final result. They can often involve an athlete’s individual performance in some statistical category – for instance, how many yards a running back will rush for, how many rebounds a basketball center will secure, or how many strikeouts a pitcher will have. They’ve become routine offerings on sports betting menus.

For example: As I write this, I am looking at a FanDuel account I opened years ago, seeing that, for the Green Bay Packers-Pittsburgh Steelers game currently in progress, I can place a wager on which player will score a touchdown, how many yards each quarterback will throw for and much, much more. As the game progresses, the odds constantly shift – allowing for what are called “live bets.”

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Returning to my student who lost the bet on Lawrence’s pass completion: It’s possible he’d placed a bet on Lawrence to throw fewer than a set number of yards. Or he could have been part of a fantasy league, which is also dependent on individual player performances.

Either way, a problem with prop bets, from an anti-corruption perspective, is that an individual can often control the outcome. You don’t need a group of players to be in on it – which is what happened during the infamous Black Sox Scandal, when eight players on the Chicago White Sox were accused of conspiring with gamblers to intentionally lose the 1919 World Series.

In the indictment against him, Rozier is accused of telling a co-defendant to pass along information to particular bettors that he planned to leave a March 2023 game early – a move everyone involved knew meant he would not reach his statistical benchmarks for the game. They could then place bets that he wouldn’t hit those marks.

In baseball, meanwhile, Luis Ortiz of the Cleveland Guardians was placed on leave during the 2025 season and is under investigation for possibly illegally wagering on the outcome of two pitches he threw. MLB authorities are essentially trying to determine if he deliberately threw balls as opposed to strikes in two instances. (Yes, prop bets have become so granular that you can even bet on whether a pitcher will throw a ball or a strike on an individual pitch.)

An exploding market with no end in sight

The popularity of prop bets feeds into a worldwide sports gambling industry that has experienced explosive growth and shows no sign of slowing.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 ruled that states could decide on whether to allow sports betting, 39 states plus the District of Columbia have done so.

The leagues and media are more than just bystanders. FanDuel and DraftKings are official sports betting partners of the NBA and the NFL.

In the days after the Supreme Court ruling, I wondered whether journalists would embrace sports betting. These days, ESPN not only has a betting show, but it also has a betting app.

According to the American Gaming Association, sportsbooks collected a record $13.71 billion in revenue in 2024 from about $150 billion in wagers. A study released in February 2025 by Siena and St. Bonaventure universities found that nearly half of American men have an online sports betting account.

But those figures don’t begin to touch the worldwide sports betting market, especially the illegal one. The United Nations, in a 2021 report, reported that up to $1.7 trillion is wagered annually in illegal betting markets.

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The U.N. report warned that it had found a “staggering scale, manifestation, and complexity of corruption and organized crime in sport at the global, regional, and national levels.”

Who’s the boss?

In early October 2025, I attended a conference of Play the Game, a Denmark-based organization that promotes “democratic values in world sports.” Its occasional gatherings attract experts from around the world who are interested in keeping sports fair and safe for everyone.

One of the most sobering topics was illegal, online sportsbooks that feature wagering on all levels of sport, from the lowest levels of European soccer on up.

It sounded somewhat familiar. This summer at the Little League World Series, which my students covered for The Associated Press, managers complained about offshore sportsbooks offering lines on the tournament, which is played by 12-year-old amateurs.

And with so much illegal wagering in the world, the issue of match fixing was bound to come up.

One session screened a recent German documentary on match fixing. Meanwhile, Anca-Maria Gherghel, a Ph.D. candidate at Sheffield Hallam University and senior researcher for EPIC Global Solutions, both in northern England, told me how she had interviewed a professional female soccer player for a team in Cyprus. The player described how she and her teammates were routinely approached with lucrative offers to throw matches.

Put it all together – the vast sums of money at play and the relative ease of fixing a prop bet, let alone a match – and you cannot be surprised at the NBA scandal.

I used to think that gambling was just a segment of the larger sports industry. Now, I wonder whether I had it exactly backward.

Has sports just become a segment of the larger gambling industry?

John Affleck, Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society, Penn State

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Brian P. McCullough, University of Michigan and Edward Carrington, University of Michigan

If you go to a pro sports event today, there’s a good chance the stadium or arena will be powered at least in part by renewable energy. The team likely takes steps to reduce energy and waste. Some even claim to have net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, meaning any emissions they still do produce they offset by paying for projects, such as tree-planting, that reduce greenhouse gases elsewhere.

The venue upgrades have been impressive – Seattle’s hockey and basketball arena runs on 100% renewable energy, makes its rink ice from captured rainwater, and offers free public transit for ticket holders.

But how much of the teams’ offset purchases are actually doing the good that they claim?

It’s an important question, in part because fans may ultimately pay for those offsets.

The cost of carbon offsetting in sports varies by organization, with no industry standard for who pays. Some teams and leagues absorb costs through their operational budgets, treating carbon neutrality as a core responsibility. Others pass costs to consumers: Some teams add sustainability fees to ticket prices to offset each attendee’s carbon footprint. The payment model ultimately reflects whether an organization views offsetting as an institutional obligation or a shared responsibility with fans.

Carbon offsets in sports are also in the news, with scandals erupting around them in connection with sports from FIFA’s 2022 World Cup to basketball’s LA Clippers.

As sport management researchers, we have been following offset agreements and other sustainability commitments that teams and sports leagues such as FIFA have been making to see whether they translate into measurable environmental outcomes. We see lots of good intentions but also a disturbing amount of failures and outright fraud.

Where sports teams’ emissions come from

The vast majority of a sports team’s climate footprint comes from team’s and fans’ travel, which they have little control over. Leagues can reduce teams’ travel somewhat with creative scheduling, but unlike other industries, sports teams have few ways to reduce the bulk of their emissions.

What many of them do instead is offset those travel emissions by buying carbon credits.

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Carbon credits are generated by projects that reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or prevent greenhouse gas emissions. Many of those projects involve planting trees to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; others expand clean energy to reduce fossil fuel use. Each carbon credit is supposed to represent the reduction or prevention of one metric ton of carbon dioxide.

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However, carbon offset projects have come under scrutiny in recent years. Tree-planting projects, the most common type, take time to meet their promise as the trees grow, and wildfires and logging can wipe out the benefit. Studies have found that companies tend to buy cheap, low-quality carbon credits, which run a risk of exaggerating their carbon reduction claims or providing results that would have happened anyway, leaving no real climate benefit.

Unfortunately, several teams, perhaps unknowingly, have been purchasing fraudulent or low-quality credits.

Reputations at risk

FIFA brought the sports world’s carbon offset problem into the spotlight during the 2022 Qatar World Cup.

FIFA claimed the event would be carbon neutral, but that claim relied on creative accounting that understated the event’s construction and travel emissions. Organizers also used low-quality offsets. Many of those offsets were renewable energy projects with a high likelihood of being built anyway.

A year after the tournament, FIFA had completed offset purchases for less than a third of the World Cup’s estimated emissions, the nonprofit Carbon Market Watch found. And Switzerland’s advertising regulator ordered FIFA to stop claiming the World Cup had been “carbon neutral.”

The Clippers and baseball’s Boston Red Sox ran into problems when they publicly partnered with Aspiration, a now-bankrupt finance technology company and carbon credit broker, to meet their “carbon neutral” claims.

The Clippers had a US$300 million partnership with Aspiration that included paying the company at least $56 million for carbon credits in mid-2022, The New York Times reported. Both teams also had plans with Aspiration to offer fans a way to buy carbon credits to cover their own travel when purchasing tickets.

However, Aspiration officials claimed to have supported millions more tree-plantings than what had actually happened, a ProPublica investigation found. Aspiration co-founder Joe Sanberg pleaded guilty in 2025 to wire fraud involving false statements about financing to secure loans and attract investors, who lost at least $248 million.

The Aspiration partnership is also under investigation by the NBA over an endorsement deal the company made with Clippers all-star Kawhi Leonard at about the same time and questions about whether it was used to violate the league’s salary cap. Team owner Steve Ballmer, who personally invested at least $50 million in Aspiration, told ESPN he and the team did nothing wrong. “They conned me,” he said.

While the scandal focused on financial fraud and the salary cap, it also raised questions about the team’s sustainability claim.

Without verification, who knows?

In some cases, the value of offset projects is difficult to verify, even when trees are being planted nearby.

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The Seattle Sounders FC declared itself the first carbon-neutral professional soccer team in North America in 2019 by cutting its waste, water and energy use and offsetting its remaining emissions through the nonprofit organization Forterra, which plants trees in the Puget Sound region.

While the effort positioned the club as a sustainability leader, the offsets lacked what’s known as third-party verification. Similar to how organic food must be certified by reputable agencies, third-party validation of carbon credits ensures credits truly represent the removal of carbon from the atmosphere or avoided emissions.

Without verification, it’s unclear whether claimed emission reductions are permanent, accurately tracked and transparently reported.

Potential legal consequences

Even the most prominent venues are susceptible to issues with unreliable credits.

Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle has been celebrated as the world’s first “zero-carbon” certified arena, with electric Zambonis, recycled materials, renewable energy and free public transit. It represents one of the most ambitious pushes to develop sustainable sport infrastructure globally.

To offset unavoidable construction emissions, the arena’s owner relied on carbon credits tied to projects meant to reduce rainforest loss in Colombia. However, an analysis by the carbon rating company Calyx Global found that while the arena’s credits may prevent some deforestation, the numbers likely overstate the benefits.

A 2023 report suggested that over 90% of rainforest carbon credits from the leading certifier of offsets lack evidence that they reduced deforestation. The certifier disputed that conclusion but is working to revise its review process.

When credits fail to offset real emissions, that erodes public trust and can expose organizations to potential legal consequences.

Delta Air Lines, for example, is facing a lawsuit over its carbon neutrality claim. The suit alleges that Delta misled passengers by describing itself as a “carbon-neutral airline” while relying on carbon offset projects that were ineffective or “junk.”

Time for some strategic reassessment

These and other failures in the carbon credit market suggest the industry needs to fundamentally reassess how sports teams achieve their climate goals.

To provide meaningful sustainability commitments, sports organizations and facilities can start at home by lowering their fossil fuel use and increasing their energy efficiency. Many arenas do this.

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Leagues can design game schedules to reduce team and fan travel. Many of the Paris Olympics venues in 2022, for example, were connected by subway or bus. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, in contrast, has venues hundreds of miles apart across North America, meaning potentially higher emissions from fan travel.

Where offsets will still play a role, teams can ensure that they partner with verified carbon credit providers that deliver measurable, transparent carbon reductions.

In a field where public trust and reputation matter as much as performance, the sports industry cannot afford foul play on climate. We believe a shift toward strategies that cut emissions first, and then use only the most credible offsets, will be the difference between striking out and leading the sustainability game.

Brian P. McCullough, Associate Professor of Sport Management, University of Michigan and Edward Carrington, Assistant in Research in Sports Management, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.