No, WrestleMania isn’t going to bring $150-$175 million to Tampa

In case you missed it, I penned a piece for FloridaPolitics.com recently that explained how economic impact claims are mostly made up from bogus non-science and aim to trick taxpayers into supporting what might otherwise be an unpopular spend of public money.

Next year's WrestleMania in Tampa, which will likely benefit from millions in public subsidies, is no exception.

An excerpt from my piece:

The Tampa Bay Times broke the story, and it was a good scoop. WWE even gave the paper credit in its official news release!

Don’t be fooled; the attribution wasn’t because WWE is an upstanding institution that supports the Fourth Estate by properly citing good journalism.

The WWE mentioned the Times in its opening line because Joey Knight wrote: “Tampa never previously has hosted a WrestleMania, which often attracts live crowds of more than 50,000 as well as a sizable pay-per-view (and WWE Network) audience, and can generate $150-175 million in economic impact on the host community.”

The corporation is merely trying to legitimize its inflated economic impact claim; a claim the Times repeated in its breaking news article, without any citation of source or disclaimer of who paid for the economic impact report.

You can continue reading the rest here.

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