Here in the United States we love to watch sports, from America’s pastime baseball to football. But how much are these mega stadiums costing us? According to AthleticBuissnes.com “How Stadium Construction Reached the Billions,” the Indianapolis Colts “Lucas Oil Stadium,” cost 720 million dollars, the Dallas Cowboys “At&T Stadium” cost 1.15 billion dollars, and the New York Giants “MetLife Stadium” cost 1.6 billion dollars. All these stadiums were built in the last seven years, and paid for a majority the by taxpayers. Millions on millions of dollars have been spent in upgrading sports team’s stadiums.

I recently watched an episode of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” and was a little outraged with the main topic of this episode..

“Municipal bonds are a way for the city to take out a loan, which they then later repay with interest — although, through new or existing taxes. They’re supposed to be for things like roads or schools — public goods that private industry would not pay for. But they’ve been routinely misused to finance stadiums for decades, and often, cities do it because teams claim they can’t afford to build stadiums themselves.”

– John Oliver, “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”

Oliver talked about how the Miami Marlins baseball team, who has a giant fish tank around home plate, claimed poverty so that they could have almost $500 million for the new stadium. But it was later found that they had made $50 million in two years.

According to Oliver, teams are threatening to leave their current city and are forcing the hand of their local governments to pay big sums of money to finance their stadium upgrades Currently three teams are threatening to leave to Los Angeles in the NFL if they don’t get new stadiums. The St. Louis Rams, the Oakland Raiders, and the San Diego Chargers.  They mention that in fact it’s such a common thing that in the “EA Sports Madden 15-16” games you can control a team, and move to Los Angeles. The game even tells you it’s the easiest because they’ll pay half of the money for a new stadium.

So with this in mind, although we all love sports, most of us just watch from the couch in our living room, we need to stop paying for these extremely expensive stadiums, and make the teams pay. They should pay because the Miami Marlins made $50 million in two years alone, and that’s just one example.