What an incredible coincidence! On the identical day, America’s Cup Occasion CEO Grant Dalton broke cowl to trace at early negotiations with Auckland to host the subsequent AC, the America’s Cup Media operation he controls pumped out a prolonged launch claiming an enormous monetary profit to Barcelona from AC37. How handy!
We all know this recreation. It’s not fairly bait-and-switch, but it surely’s shut. First, you make unsubstantiated assertions in regards to the financial advantages of internet hosting an occasion; then you definitely hit potential venues for a whopping “rights payment” for the privilege. Unwary coastal cities, hungry for vacationer {dollars}, have fallen for that trick since Valencia in 2007. However as soon as bitten, they not often come again for extra.
These are very candy offers for the AC industrial entity. The host metropolis charges they demand cowl the price of staging the sequence. That leaves sponsorship, TV, ticketing, and merchandising income as pure gravy. Good work if you may get it!
It’s revealing that this ritual boasting in regards to the “worth” of internet hosting the Cup has deserted any pretence at quoting actual {dollars}. As an alternative, they now depend on one thing they name “optimistic financial GDP profit”. All this implies is that the estimated worth of a rustic’s items and providers produced inside a given interval was increased than within the earlier interval. Strive shopping for a hamburger with that.
Nor was the calculation finished by a authorities or perhaps a metropolis company. We’re informed the figures have been derived from an “exhaustive post-event financial influence research” performed by the College of Barcelona and one thing referred to as the Barcelona Capital Nautica Basis. The BCNF occurs to be a industrial curiosity group based to advertise marine-based ventures within the Catalonia area. You may hardly name these unbiased sources.
The metrics that purportedly help a monetary return to the town in extra of €1.034 billion are straightforward to claim – however not possible to show.
“460,819 distinctive attendees to Barcelona that got here particularly to be a part of the thirty seventh America’s Cup occasion.” How on earth may they arrive at that exact determine? Did they interview everybody who arrived on the town from late August to October final yr?
“€1.367 billion whole gross media model worth related to all occasions on the thirty seventh America’s Cup.” Gross media model worth is an invented and completely subjective measure, not possible to quantify.
“A complete TV viewers of 954 million.” Claimed viewers figures are all the time a cheat – they quote whole potential TV viewership in all markets, not the precise numbers of units tuned in to a selected program.
And what the gushing media launch in some way forgot to say is the hefty payment the town of Barcelona paid for the pleasure of internet hosting AC37. That determine has by no means been confirmed however is regarded as round $70 million – greater than half the claimed “optimistic financial return”. (And we are able to make sure that Dalton & Co have been paid in actual {dollars}, not estimates of theoretical worth.)
However most revealing of all is that Barcelona has already declined to host the Cup once more. It will appear that somebody in Spain has finished the actual numbers – not these legendary “optimistic financial GDP returns” – and realised they’ve been suckered.
– anarchist David
