THESE are heady times for sport in Las Vegas. The city has never had a top-tier professional sports team, in part because of fears that players and referees could come into contact with unsavoury figures from the gambling world. Soon it will have two: the Vegas Golden Knights will make their debut in the National Hockey League in October and, last week, the National Football League (NFL) voted 31-1 to allow the Oakland Raiders to move to Nevada too. The Raiders’ lease on their current stadium in California expires after the end of the 2018 season, and they are likely to play in a temporary stadium in Las Vegas in 2019, before moving into a new stadium there in 2020, with an estimated building cost of $2bn.

Las Vegas has been promised many benefits by having a new NFL team. One thing the city is not bracing itself for is more crime. Yet that is exactly what they can expect, according to a paper published in 2016 by David Kalist and Daniel Lee of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. Analysing the rate of crime in eight cities with NFL teams, the authors find that home games are associated with a 2.6% increase in total offences across the city, while financially motivated crimes such as larceny and motor-vehicle theft jump by 4.1% and 6.7% respectively on match days, with early afternoon home games proving particularly inflammatory. Each NFL home game costs $86,000 in extra crime, the authors estimate. The reality might be even worse, if misdemeanours are less likely to be reported on game days, as KIRO-TV, a broadcaster from Seattle, suggested in an investigation in 2013.

Why does an NFL team playing home matches make crime more likely? The authors suggest several reasons. It might be easier to commit offences on game days because there are more visible targets—in parking lots, say. Large gatherings of people could also make criminals less conspicuous and allow them to exploit the general chaos outside a stadium. As many supporters consume vast amounts of alcohol before and after matches, they are also less vigilant. The concentration of hostile fans from opposite teams in the same place might also increase tensions and the risk of hooliganism. And anger following defeat for the home team is associated with an increase in domestic violence against women, an earlier paper found. Male-on-female crime spikes by 8% on days when the local favourites suffer an unexpected defeat.

To bring the Raiders to Las Vegas, Nevadan taxpayers must contribute $750m, a record subsidy, of the costs for the new stadium, which will be collected by raising hotel taxes. This is in keeping with a history of billionaire owners demanding that municipalities pay for a new or improved stadium and then threatening to leave—as the Raiders have done in Oakland, making them the third NFL franchise to opt for relocation in 15 months—if their requests were not met. Indeed, local taxpayers still owe $95m for the renovation of the Coliseum stadium in 1995, which brought the Raiders back to Oakland after a stint in Los Angeles. From 2000 to 2010, 14 NFL stadiums were built, with the public financing 44% of costs for a total bill of $3.9bn. No other tax scheme redistributes money to billionaires in the same way.

There is no evidence of taxpayers gaining benefits to match this outlay, despite the extravagant claims of owners about the economic benefits of a city hosting a franchise. The executive director of the Coliseum Authority in Oakland recognises as much, saying that it would be “financially to our benefit” if the Raiders left as soon as possible, and that housing the team costs the stadium $1m a year, even excluding the renovations necessary to entice the franchise back in 1995. The notion that taxpayers funding stadiums is a “Field of Schemes” is well established; the extra crime associated with hosting an NFL team makes the case for publicly funding stadiums even weaker still. Oakland’s NFL fans might be in despair, but losing the Raiders should help the city’s economy—and make it safer too.