ABSTRACT
Some social and management science scholars might not regard the sustained findings that sports venues produce neither regional economic development nor fiscal returns for investor cities as a theory. Yet Abraham Kaplan (1973) defined a theory as a sustained relationship if it allows one to make ‘sense of a disturbing situation so as to allow us more effectively to bring to bear our repertoire of habits, and even more importantly, to modify habits or discard them altogether, replacing them by new ones as the situation demands’ (1973, p. 295). The research by numerous scholars produced in the 1990s sustained the view that the public investments in arenas, ballparks and stadia produced no real changes in regional economic development. Their findings became a principle of public policy for sport management. The research sustained Kaplan’s definition of a theory in that the research identified an undesirable outcome for taxpayers and the public sector that warranted a change. The changes prescribed included (a) a ban on public investments in the venues used by professional sports teams, (b) a change in laws, making it possible for professional sports leagues to limit the number of teams and (c) the use of eminent domain to allow governments to seize franchises that threatened to relocate when the public sector did not acquiesce to demands for a subsidy for a new venue (Kennedy and Rosentraub, 2000; Rosentraub, 1997).
