The NFL draft brings economic gains – and hidden public safety costs
- Written by Adam Annaccone, Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Kinesiology, University of Texas at Arlington
When the NFL draft comes to town, the host city’s hotels, bars and restaurants fill, while its downtown gets three days of national exposure.
Detroit’s 2024 draft drew more than 775,000 fans[1] and generated a reported US$214 million in economic impact, including $161 million in visitor spending, according to The Associated Press. Visitor spending is the money directly spent by visitors coming into the city for the event, whereas the economic impact[2] includes the ripple effect of money circulating before, during and after the event – like restaurants buying more food from suppliers, hotels hiring extra staff, and vendors purchasing additional inventory.
Pittsburgh is set to host the 2026 NFL draft April 23-25[3]. According to Steelers executive Dan Rooney III, the event could bring to the city 500,000 visitors and an economic impact of $200 million[4].
Economic impact almost always leads the news when a city lands the NFL draft. The first numbers that people tend to hear come from team officials, city leaders and local boosters who project visitors, spending and exposure.
My academic work[6] examines emergency planning and safety in different sporting environments. The question I often ask is not how much money an event like the NFL draft brings in, but what it takes to deliver it safely?
Preparing for an event of this scale requires careful planning and real public costs.
A mass gathering with intense preparation
The NFL draft is not just a fan event. Like a marathon, a championship parade or a major outdoor concert, it is a mass gathering that must be planned as a public safety and emergency response operation.
Research shows that such large-scale events can increase demand for emergency services, strain local systems and require careful coordination[7] across agencies far in advance.
Ahead of the 2026 draft, Pennsylvania officials[8] have described months of preparation[9] involving emergency management, law enforcement and transportation agencies. That means walk-throughs of event spaces, traffic planning, risk assessments, scenario-based drills and testing how agencies would communicate during a disruption or emergency. One public example came in January when Pennsylvania State Police landed a helicopter at Point State Park[10] for training.
In my experience, large crowds in dense public spaces require more than a security presence. They require systems that can handle routine medical issues such as dehydration, falls or minor injuries, while preserving enough ambulance, emergency department and first-responder capacity to respond if a serious emergency occurs. They also require agencies to coordinate quickly when conditions change. Most of that work unfolds before the cameras arrive.
What sports medicine reveals about event preparedness
Protocols used in sports medicine can offer a clear example of what reliable preparedness looks like.
Emergency action planning[11] in athletic training revolves around everyone knowing their jobs, knowing how to communicate and how to find equipment and transport patients. The aim is a response that is coordinated, rehearsed and dependable under pressure.
It is this system that allows the roughly 30 medical personnel[12] on an NFL sideline to function as one unit rather than as individual responders. Scale that logic up to a city like Pittsburgh, filled with hundreds of thousands of people, and the same questions emerge: Where will care for fans be delivered? What can be treated on-site, and what requires ambulance transport? How will patients reach a local hospital when roads are closed or crowds disrupt access? And if weather, security concerns or a serious medical incident interrupts normal city flow, who communicates what, and to whom?
Detroit’s draft showed how large and complicated that operating system can become. The event covered roughly 2 million square feet[13] (186,000 square meters), or about 46 acres – roughly the size of 35 football fields.
At that size, the draft is better understood as a temporary urban system layered onto an existing city than as a traditional fan festival. Crowds have to be directed, access points controlled, medical teams positioned and emergency routes protected. The challenge, then, is not merely attracting visitors. It becomes designing a citywide plan capable of absorbing them without overloading the systems responsible for keeping them safe.
For example, road closures and congestion are often treated as inconveniences or side effects of a major event, but they are also part of the emergency response environment. Gatherings of hundreds of thousands of people disrupt normal traffic, which can complicate emergency medical services operations[15]. Transportation planning is therefore less about convenience than about clinical risk management because time to care depends in part on whether access routes remain usable when they are needed most.
A staffing plan can be excellent on paper, but if emergency vehicles cannot move efficiently, response times slow down. Traffic design can affect care delivery just as much as placement of medical teams and first responders does.
Hidden costs behind the headlines
Once the draft is understood as a public safety operation, the question of how much it costs looks different, too.
Pittsburgh City Council approved $1 million in funding[16] for the 2026 NFL draft. State and local agencies[17] have also been planning security, transportation and emergency response operations well in advance.
Ahead of the 2025 draft in Green Bay, Wisconsin state lawmakers[18] sought $1.25 million to reimburse local law enforcement and fire departments in the Green Bay area for part of their event-related costs. After the draft had ended, Gov. Tony Evers announced that the state would give an additional $1.8 million[19] to the city of Green Bay, the village of Ashwaubenon and Brown County to cover security and other public safety costs associated with hosting the event.
Those figures do not cancel out the economic upside of hosting the NFL draft, but they do show that significant public resources are used to make that upside possible. Staffing, overtime, EMS staging, traffic control and interagency coordination are integral to the event, not background details.
What makes the full public cost harder to pin down is that not every expense is disclosed or presented in one place. In Pittsburgh, for example, state, county and city officials have collectively earmarked at least $14 million[20] for the official nonprofit tourism agency responsible for planning the draft, VisitPittsburgh. The nonprofit is required to provide a $5 million match.
Detroit’s draft drew more than 775,000 fans to the city in 2024.
Aaron J. Thornton via Getty Images Entertainment[21]
Pennsylvania State Police said they, too, are coordinating security planning, traffic tactics, risk assessments and interagency exercises, while declining to provide an estimated cost for that work, citing security reasons. That means the public cost of hosting the draft may be visible only in part.
The headline economic impact figure is designed to measure the event’s upside. It is not a net figure that subtracts the full cost of security, emergency response and other public operations required to make the event possible.
In my view, the deeper story is not simply that the NFL draft brings money into a city; it is that an event of this scale depends on systems that are built, staffed and tested well before the first draft pick is announced. When those systems work, the headlines stay focused on visitors, spending and exposure. If they are strained by a medical emergency, security incident or breakdown in crowd flow, attention shifts immediately to the infrastructure underneath it.
The economic story matters. But without the hidden work that supports it, it cannot exist on its own.
References
- ^ drew more than 775,000 fans (apnews.com)
- ^ economic impact (www.sfasu.edu)
- ^ 2026 NFL draft April 23-25 (www.visitpittsburgh.com)
- ^ 500,000 visitors and an economic impact of $200 million (www.bizjournals.com)
- ^ Icon Sportswire via Getty Images (www.gettyimages.com)
- ^ My academic work (www.uta.edu)
- ^ increase demand for emergency services, strain local systems and require careful coordination (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
- ^ Pennsylvania officials (www.pa.gov)
- ^ months of preparation (www.cbsnews.com)
- ^ landed a helicopter at Point State Park (www.cbsnews.com)
- ^ Emergency action planning (doi.org)
- ^ 30 medical personnel (www.cnn.com)
- ^ 2 million square feet (www.axios.com)
- ^ Icon Sportswire via Getty Images (www.gettyimages.com)
- ^ complicate emergency medical services operations (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
- ^ approved $1 million in funding (triblive.com)
- ^ State and local agencies (www.pa.gov)
- ^ Wisconsin state lawmakers (www.wpr.org)
- ^ give an additional $1.8 million (wedc.org)
- ^ earmarked at least $14 million (www.publicsource.org)
- ^ Aaron J. Thornton via Getty Images Entertainment (www.gettyimages.com)
Authors: Adam Annaccone, Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Kinesiology, University of Texas at Arlington