ABSTRACT
That governments spend a lot of money on major league sports facilities is hardly breaking news. Analyses of public funding for sports facilities are ubiquitous in public policy circles and newspapers, with many offering the same assessment of spiraling costs. Yet such largess on the part of governments has not always been the case. Over a century of building major league sports facilities, the nature and magnitude of public involvement in these projects has varied widely. Most research on the subject organizes these variations into three phases. Phase I, from the late 1890s through to the 1940s, begins with the earliest examples of purpose-built ballparks, mostly provided by private actors, and with minimal public participation. In Phase II, from the 1950s to the 1970s, the roles of private and public actors reversed, as most new facilities were provided by the public sector with minimal participation from teams. Phase III, from the late 1980s to the present day, ushered in the era of the public-private partnership as the primary means of paying for new sports facilities, and is characterized by varying degrees of cost-sharing between governments, teams, leagues, and other partners.
