(The Center Square) – The 2027 NFL Draft will be on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump announced on Monday.
The draft was recently held in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and is scheduled to be in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2026 after being hosted in Detroit in 2024.
“It’s going to be beautiful,” Trump said. “It’s going to be something that nobody else will ever be able to duplicate.”
The draft is regularly touted by its hosts, tourism departments and the NFL as an economic boon but economists believe the event’s benefits are overstated.
Wisconsin sent $2 million in funds to tourism for the event in its budget and released $5 million of opportunity attraction and promotion funds to tourism agencies in the state while lawmakers have proposed sending more than $1 million to Green Bay area law enforcement for additional time related to the event.
“Every year these bogus economic claims about the NFL draft come out,” economist J.C. Bradbury wrote about the Green Bay tourism estimates. “Economists haven’t studied it directly because it makes no sense. But we really could use an actual serious study to counteract this BS PR.”
Inflated claims are often a part of funding requests related to sports stadiums. But economists say the numbers are often flawed because they include only the revenue and not the lost revenue from the crowding out of other events, diverted spending from elsewhere in a region, and costs related to hosting an event.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell stood next to Trump at the announcement, along with D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser and Washington Commanders co-owner Josh Harris.
Goodell claimed that 600,000 people attended the draft in Green Bay, nearly 800,000 did in Detroit and said the NFL expects nearly 1 million to attend the draft in D.C.
“We think that we can have a tremendous impact on this community,” Goodell said. “And it will not just be an event, it will be something that will show the world how far the nation’s capital has come and where it’s going.”
The trio announced a deal to build a $2.7 billion stadium project touted at a press conference one week early as mainly funded by the team that actually includes more than $2.5 billion worth of subsidies, according to the stadium financing blog Field of Schemes.
That deal includes $500 million through a Sports Facilities Fee with a tax capture at the stadium that would be created to pay off bonds, along with $175 million for the parking structure. Events DC, which is partially funded through taxpayer money, will put $181 million toward parking garages on the property and D.C. will pay $202 million for utilities infrastructure, roadways and a WMATA transit study.
The stadium deal also includes a reported $429 million property tax break because the city owns the stadium, $1 a year in rent over the 30-year lease term on federal land where the city has control of development that is estimated to be worth $1 billion.
