Super Bowl cities: Is hosting a boon or a bust?

This Sunday evening, virtually all eyes in the United States will be on the Giants and the Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI. They will also be on Indianapolis, the city charged with hosting this year’s big game.

For a small city, it seems like a golden opportunity: A Super Bowl means a huge spike in tourist dollars, a week of national exposure, and a featured spot in what is far and away the most-watched television event year after year. In 2008, the NFL estimated that host city Phoenix could expect to see a $500 million windfall during the four-day Super Bowl weekend. For Miami’s 2010 turn as host, the estimate was $400 million. But is playing host to the Super Bowl really as sweet a deal as it sounds?

Yes, it’s good, but maybe not that good. The windfall for Indianapolis will be closer to $150 million, according to Jack Ablin, an economist and the chief investment officer at BMO-Harris Private Bank, based in Chicago. “That’s based on 150,000 people spending a thousand dollars each,” he says. “And hopefully those numbers are a little conservative for Indianapolis.”

He points to Dallas, which enjoyed a $200 million boost from hosting the Super Bowl last year just as the city was recovering from a damaging ice storm.

 [$150 million] is a pretty nice number,” says Victor Matheson, a professor of economics at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. “Over the past decade we’ve had an escalation of these economic impact figures. Consultants dueling with one another to get a higher number, $400 or $500 million.  That number is much more honest.”

According to Dr. Matheson, Indianapolis has a few things going for it that mean the Super Bowl will be a welcome boost. For one, it isn’t normally a winter destination, so the influx of tourism is actually a bonus. In warm weather destinations, like Miami, the tourism that comes from the Super Bowl would generally be replacing tourism that was already there.

"No one is in Indy in the middle of February,” he says. “In Miami and New Orleans, you’re displacing other tourists.”

Indianapolis’s small size (population: 829,718) also means a bigger relative boost. “Generally the amount of people that come to the Super  Bowl is the same from city to city, so it will have a bigger economic impact [in a smaller city] than in a larger city,” Matheson states.

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