In football watching the game does not do anything for the team directly. It helps the league. In baseball and other sports it helps the team, but only based on advertisers and they pay more for higher income viewers.
Even in cities that don't have a team people watch sports, buy merchandise and gain some joy from being a fan.
I have to disagree with Mott. The tax subsidy does not subsidize tickets. The teams charge what the market will bear for tickets. They don't reduce the price of tickets because the stadium was built for them. While some deals do require a certain amount of tickets be provided at a lower price that's mostly a smoke screen. You are going to have cheap seats anyway simply because some seats will be further away.
Where does the subsidy go? Well mostly into building the stadium (though some teams are even ripping cities off to guarantee a certain amount of ticket sales). The teams will spend more on building the stadium than they normally would. Oftentimes it will be inefficient. If a team can build a feature that will increase revenues by, say, 40 million over the life of a stadium and costs 50 million to build and maintain, then they would not likely do it with their own money. But if taxpayer are paying for it then every bit of increased revenue is a bonus. They might even add features that don't increase revenues at all, because... fuck it, it's not their money.
So that money goes into the pockets of the owners and leagues and probably leads to an increase in pay for players and coaches. The poor are being taxed to help millionaires and billionaires.
