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.
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