But what seems to infuriate people is that orchestras and ballets are typically not owned by billionaires, and they are not part of a league with a multi-billion dollar budget.
Naturally; orchestras and ballets would struggle to exist without taxpayer money. Sports teams do not have this issue, which is why people complain; essentially every dollar spent by the taxpayers on a stadium is another dollar in the pocket of the team owner. I don't know about football, but no owner in the history of baseball has lost money on their team; even those operating at a negative cash-flow have seen net increases due to the increasing value of their team.
With orchestras and ballets and performing arts centers everybody knows up front you have an ongoing financial liability. And the numbers are smaller.
It's primarily a transfer of money to players. In the next ten years players will earn around $50 to $55 billion in income. That's drastically beyond anything owners will either earn via operations or extract through capital gains via a sale.
Take the Houston Texans for example. They're stated as the 7th most valuable NFL franchise per Forbes, generating $114m in operating income (not net income) annually - the salary cap is $143m. Green Bay? Tenth most valuable, they only generate $63m in profit - every 10 to 12 years, the Green Bay players earn more total than the entire franchise is worth. The bottom 20 teams? Forget about it.
Most leagues are the same, the players overwhelmingly extract the value. The top 450 NBA players are set (with the new TV rights money) to earn more than all of the Fortune 500 CEOs combined in terms of salary (~$17 trillion in market cap of the companies those CEOs operate).
Fans paying high ticket prices, parking, meh whatever, make them pay more instead of begging from taxpayers though.
The big stadiums and sports teams don't come even close to such an intimate level of involvement with the community.
I'm happy to see my tax dollars go to schools, parks, community arenas and playfields, and, yes, performing arts centers.
For profit, successful (or at least extremely valuable) sports franchises ... not so much.
Also, I doubt there are as many concert halls where the public has sunk anything near the kind of money that frequently gets sunk into NFL stadiums
That doesn't seem too bad for an entire parking lot (ducks)
This rests on the premise that is is reasonable for taxpayer money to fund any cultural activities at all, "high" or "low".
In any case, even accepting this premise, the difference is that the examples of "high" culture you cite are, unlike professional sports stadiums, generally not promoted on the basis of claims that they will contribute to the economic development of their communities; rather, they are generally promoted on the basis of unfalsifiable claims that they will have a positive cultural and educational impact.
There's also the fact that the cities are basically footing the bill for some rich people to make more money.