Model Essay 16: Public Money: Sport or Health Care

It is sometimes argued that money spent on sport would be better spent on hospitals and schools. I agree in the case of large-scale, professional sport, but I disagree where ordinary local facilities are concerned.

The argument is strongest against spectacle. Hosting an international tournament or building a stadium for a professional club costs an enormous sum, and the promised benefits, such as tourism and national pride, are hard to measure and often short-lived. The same money would buy equipment for hospitals or pay teachers for years, and those benefits are neither hard to measure nor temporary. Several cities have been left with arenas that are expensive to maintain and rarely full.

Local facilities, however, are a different matter. A public swimming pool, a running track or a playing field costs a small fraction of a stadium and is used every week by ordinary people. Exercise of this kind prevents precisely the illnesses that later fill hospital beds, which means that spending on it is a form of health spending, simply paid earlier. Cutting it to fund hospitals would increase the demand on those hospitals in time.

The useful question, then, is not sport or health, but who uses the facility. If a few professionals use it and the public watches, its value is entertainment. If hundreds of local residents use it every week, its value is health.

In conclusion, I agree that governments should spend less on elite sport, where the returns are uncertain, but the small local facilities that keep ordinary people active deserve protection, because cutting them makes the health budget larger, not smaller.