Cleveland has never been to a Super Bowl. A Super Bowl could possibly come to Cleveland.
At Thursday’s groundbreaking ceremony for the Browns’ new stadium, Commissioner Roger Goodell opened the door to the possibility of the league’s premier event making an Ohio premiere.
“The stadium is clearly going to be suitable for a Super Bowl,” Goodell said, via Mary Kay Cabot of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “I think the real challenge is going to be how transformational this is here. The airport is important for us. Hotels are important for us. All of the facilities are the biggest challenge for hosting a Super Bowl now. We have probably close to 200,000 people coming in for a Super Bowl. It’s great for economic impact, but it’s hard for cities to be able to meet some of those requirements on the facilities. So that’s the biggest challenge.”
Hotel space may be the biggest challenge.
“I think the lowest we have is high 40s of hotels,” Goodell said. “And I don’t know what the number is here. I think it’s about half that, roughly. And it’s also the quality of hotels, but also the airport’s a really important issue. And I think the airport from what I understand is going to be part of the development here and part of that opportunity. So there’s a chance here for this to be the transformational type of project that converts and has more events that people need to come to and hotels start to develop. The airport expands and you get that kind of infrastructure.”
Here’s the problem with potentially doubling the number of hotels. If the area already justified that many hotels, they’d already exist. It’s a matter of basic economics, and an influx of 40 more hotels could eventually result in 40 of them going out of business.
That’s the biggest challenge for the cities that have stadiums good enough to host a Super Bowl. Everything else needs to be in place to absorb the event.
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