Jacksonville Spends Millions on a Stadium It Won’t Use
When the Jacksonville Jaguars kick off against the Indianapolis Colts today, only about 42,500 fans will be inside EverBank Stadium. For a team sitting in first place in its division, boasting an MVP candidate at quarterback, and carrying legitimate Super Bowl aspirations, that is a shockingly small crowd. The cause is not fan apathy. It is the renovation of a 31-year-old stadium—the latest in the National Football League’s long line of taxpayer boondoggles.
Jacksonville taxpayers are committing $775 million to renovate the Jaguars’ stadium. Democratic Mayor Donna Deegan closed the deal, and the Jacksonville City Council approved it in June 2024. Yet the talks started under her Republican predecessor, Lenny Curry, whose administration negotiated a memorandum of understanding with the team in May 2023 that would have split the cost of the stadium and surrounding development 50–50. Curry later urged the council to pass Deegan’s version, calling it a “win for taxpayers.”
The Projections Behind the $775 Million Price Tag
An August 2023 study by Tourism Economics, commissioned by the Jaguars, projected $21.7 billion in economic impact between 2028 and 2052. That figure starts with $10.3 billion in direct spending such as team payroll, marketing, and event operations, then adds estimates of what suppliers and employees would spend in turn across the local economy. Deegan herself later touted a $26 billion impact over the 30-year lease. Neil deMause of Field of Schemes tells Reason that studies like these are often “PR missives meant to provide pretend numbers that elected officials can use as an excuse for handing over hundreds of millions of tax dollars to a private sports owner.” J.C. Bradbury, an economist at Kennesaw State University, called the study “propaganda” and said, “The goal is to concoct a big number, not an accurate number.”
Providing “incentives” to the billionaire owner’s hotels across the street is not defensible public policy. — J.C. Bradbury, Kennesaw State University
The study attributes about $700 million over 25 years to “mega events visitor & operator spending.” Its examples include the Super Bowl, the NFL Draft, and College Football Playoff games. Yet in October 2025, Jaguars owner Shahid Khan told the British sports outlet talkSPORT: A Super Bowl now has really graduated to [an] event where it needs infrastructure besides the stadium, hotel rooms, infrastructure, and so on, and Jacksonville doesn’t have that. It does have the ability to host other NFL events, maybe the draft, and maybe some other elements, but the city will have to develop before we can be in the mix.
That Jacksonville lacks enough premium hotel space for a Super Bowl is hardly news. The city docked cruise ships downtown to house visitors for Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005. Khan himself said in 2016 that a Super Bowl in Jacksonville was “absolutely not” happening. Putting the Super Bowl in the study anyway, years after the team’s own owner ruled it out, is exactly the kind of thing that makes people side-eye stadium economic impact projections.
Subsidies and Shifting Schedules for Local Fans
Downtown Jacksonville’s lack of premium hotel space was part of the reason the city gave Khan an incentives deal worth up to $82 million in taxpayer grants for a luxury Four Seasons hotel, part of a roughly $134 million incentives package for his riverfront development across from the stadium. The deal was first approved under Curry in 2021 and expanded again in 2025 under Deegan.
The study’s attendance forecast raises another question about the project’s economic promise. Tourism Economics projects 848,100 attendees a year, with Jaguars home games accounting for 62 percent of that total. That leaves roughly 322,000 annual attendees at other events. The annual Florida-Georgia college football game and Monster Jam would account for two sellouts of approximately 70,000 attendees each. The Gator Bowl, played around New Year’s, has fallen on hard times; its last two games each drew fewer than 32,000 fans. And in 2024, the stadium hosted three concerts that drew about 50,000 people each. At those attendance levels, pre-existing events alone would account for nearly all of the non-Jaguars attendance the study projects for the renovated stadium.
Perhaps the most galling fact is that Jaguars fans will see their team play only six regular-season games at home this season. This year, though, the team shipped not one but two home games overseas, using the renovation as an excuse. But for a Super Bowl contender in a crowded American Football Conference, a de facto 11-road-game schedule could be the difference between hosting a playoff game and traveling to one. Next year, the city gets no Jaguars games at all. The team will play its 2027 home games in Orlando during the stadium renovations, and the Florida-Georgia game, one of the existing events the study counts on, is in Atlanta this year and in Tampa the next. So here is what $775 million buys Jacksonville so far: six home games over two years and a $21.7 billion promise built partly on a Super Bowl the team’s own owner says the city can’t host.
