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How much money from the Super Bowl will stay in New Jersey?

(Saed Hindash/The Star-Ledger)

OK, let's just get down to the question at the heart of any New York-New Jersey partnership: What's in it for us?

Listen to any of the promotional material for Super Bowl XLVIII and you'll hear something in the ballpark of half a billion dollars for the Greater New York metropolitan area, but it's not clear exactly how that figure is calculated, nor is it clear what chunk of that will stay in New Jersey.

Those numbers have been thrown around since at least 2010, and come from an organization called the Sport Management Research Institute. But when asked for details, the New York/New Jersey Super Bowl Host Committee would only release this statement:

Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist at Smith College, told NJ.com in a recent Q&A that the study that produces that $500-600 million figure is based on "false science":

There are other estimates out there that give us a sense of what benefits a Super Bowl brings, though apples-to-apples comparisons are tough because their methodologies vary.

(Some economists even say the net impact is zip.)

PricewaterhouseCoopers, which performs an annual direct spending forecast for the game, has estimated between $113 million and $202 million spent at each game over the last 12 years.

They haven't released their projection for this year just yet, but here's a look at their historical figures:

The Meadowlands Super Bowl is also a weird animal in that the nominal host city (New York City) and the actual host city — er, borough — (East Rutherford) are in two different states.

WE'RE GETTING A BETTER DEAL THAN MOST

Victor Matheson, a sports economist at the College of Holy Cross, is the co-author of several studies that have looked critically at the popular estimates of the big game's footprint. But he says the New York/New Jersey region is making out OK, for a couple of reasons.

For starters, the allure of hosting a Super Bowl is often used as a carrot by teams and the NFL to get cities to pony up and subsidize a stadium. That didn't happen here in Jersey, where the new stadium was privately funded.

"The New York/New Jersey area actually got a pretty good deal on this stadium compared to most stadiums around the country, where the NFL has convinced them to put in, on average, a little more than half the building costs," Matheson said.

(OK, OK, there have been complaints that the Met Life Stadium deal wasn't perfect, either.)

A winter Super Bowl in a cold weather climate also has its benefits to the host region, notwithstanding the looming specter of lousy weather.

"New York and New Jersey is not exactly a tourist wonderland in late January and early February," Matheson said. "So this isn't the same as sending a Super Bowl to New Orleans right at the beginning of Mardi Gras, or sending a Super Bowl to Miami Beach during February and January when their hotels are usually full of tourists anyway. This is sending a bunch of people to New York and New Jersey in the middle of the winter."

BUT IT'S STILL NOT A GREAT DEAL

Matheson says the rosy economic figures being offered by the NFL and host committees are flawed in part because the parties funding them have an economic interest in reporting big numbers. They also focus on economic activity created by the game without factoring in economic activity prevented by the game, he says.

"The way that the studies go wrong is that they do a pretty good job estimating all the economic impact that does occur because of the Super Bowl, but they don't do a very good job of estimating the impact that doesn't occur," Matheson said.

"They don't do a very good job measuring how many people are crowded away from the metropolitan area during that weekend because, you know, no one in their right mind goes to the Super Bowl city during Super Bowl weekend unless they're there for the game," he said. "Which means any regular business that normally would have happened gets crowded out."

Ex-post estimates — figures calculated after the confetti is swept away and the numbers are in — arrive somewhere between $30 million and $120 million dollars, he says.

"So nothing that you would turn down, but also a number somewhere between one quarter and one tenth what the NFL is claiming," Matheson said.

SO, WHAT'S IN IT FOR JERSEY?

Breaking down costs and benefits for New Jersey versus New York is difficult, but Matheson says the Meadowlands will likely bear the brunt of costs while the city will pull in most of the big spenders who attend the Super Bowl.

And while hotels and other service industry players in New Jersey will likely do better than average, many of them belong to national chains, which means the money they bring in from higher room rates is not destined to stick around in the Meadowlands.

What are the local businesses that benefit, then?

"Strip clubs tend to do well," Matheson said. "I think most of those are locally owned."

Local restaurants and limo services could also capture some of that money and keep it in the local economy, he says. But after the final whistle, New York will probably make out better than us schlubs across the river.

"This is probably a pretty poor deal for New Jersey overall," Matheson said. "The average person who spends four days in town for the Super Bowl is going to spend almost none of that time on New Jersey soil."