Use in The NFL
Most notable in their use of luxury boxes is the National Football League. Under the NFL's current revenue sharing agreement, teams must forfeit a large portion of their ticket revenues so that the funds can be redistributed among all the teams, particularly those in smaller markets. However, the luxury boxes, quickly becoming a top source of revenue for the franchises, were exempted from this sharing requirement. Because of this as well as the NFL's blackout rule, there has been a rush in recent years to sacrifice seating capacity in favor of the luxury boxes. Teams have used the threat of relocation to press state and local governments for financial assistance to either build new stadiums or renovate older venues. These new stadiums and renovations generally cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars; the two newest NFL stadiums, Cowboys Stadium and MetLife Stadium, each cost over $1 billion.
The luxury box conundrum is one of the reasons why Los Angeles, which has two older stadiums (the Rose Bowl and the LA Coliseum) that both seat over 90,000 but contain no luxury boxes, still does not have an NFL franchise 16 years after both the Rams and Raiders departed in 1995.
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