I lean towards no. One of the things that made me less trusting of centre-left politics (not that the right is free of this guilt, especially giving tax breaks for rather limited corporate investment, but I find that in Canada this criticism applies more to the Liberal Party in particular) is justifying massive public spending on niche infrastructure on the premise of jobs/revenue down the line.
If a company finds it profitable to build a stadium or arena, they will do so. A profitable stadium/arena will naturally generate jobs, tourism, and tax revenue. A stadium/arena that is unprofitable in the market will not do the same, unless they are given advantages by the government of the day. At that point, it's not the corporation creating that economic activity, it's the taxpayers funding it while allowing a large portion of our money to go to the corporation in question.
More broadly, creating jobs is not a valid reason for public expenditure into infrastructure (except in periods of extreme economic turmoil). Government should build infrastructure when it is necessary, to serve the purposes that said infrastructure naturally serves. Roads exist to get people from point A to point B, for example, not to employ construction workers. In the same way, a sports venue will bring in revenue and benefit the surrounding community if the venue is able to raise revenues by the virtue of its attendance and licensing rights. Bringing benefits to the surrounding community at the expense of the surrounding community is circular logic, and ultimately only leads to our tax money being funneled to some private shareholders.
There are two political problems that lead politicians to ignore what I think are my pretty straightforward and non-partisan economic arguments:
1. Sometimes, taxpayers
want to spend on sports venues, because they just think it would be cool. There are many NFL fans in Toronto, a city which already has a bunch of American sports teams like the Raptors and the Jays. Say an NFL franchise wanted to come into Toronto, and asked the City for funding or tax breaks. If there are enough NFL fans who want a team and don't care what it costs the taxpayers, or if the majority of voters are indifferent to what the NFL is asking, then it would only be democratic for the City of Toronto to foot that bill - I still think it would be wholly unjust, but it is what it is.
2. The franchise system of sports in North America makes it so that teams can threaten to move somewhere else. With European soccer teams for example (and yes that's what I call it, suck it Euros
) you would never have a situation where FC Barcelona threatens to move to Madrid, or Bayern Munich threatens to move to Berlin. The teams are too attached to the local identity and culture to use that leverage. The new franchise-style teams that have come up, like the Red Bull soccer empire (most infamously RB Leipzig) are hated by fans and a major exception. But in North America, things don't work that way. Franchises can and often do change cities, and there's a decent benefit-cost argument to be made that, for example, the State of New York was better off spending $1.4 Billion on the new Bills stadium and keeping Bills revenue in Buffalo, instead of refusing to contribute and having the Bills move to, say, San Antonio, and take all their revenue with them.
But I think this is all still unjustified. To point 1, I think the recent boondoggles with FIFA and the Olympics has prompted people to be more skeptical about footing the bill for sports venues, and I hope this extends downstream into major league sports too. A race to the bottom with taxpayers' money or specialized tax breaks can only logically conclude to a situation where those "investments" have a smaller return than the original investment.
Point 2 is harder to address in the context of North American teams, because it's just how the sports industry here is set up. If all state and local governments work together on combatting this kind of extortion, then it wouldn't be a problem anymore, but it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the bunch.
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