With a new name and new players, the Washington Commanders are looking for a new home.

Owner Daniel Snyder is contemplating setting up shop in D.C., Maryland or Virginia after the lease on FedEx Field expires in 2027 — assuming he stays on as owner, given the mountain of scandals piling up on him. In the meantime, many economists say public subsidies to fund football stadiums are a windfall for wealthy team owners and a waste for taxpayers.

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Team owners say the investment pays off in the long run because stadiums provide an economic boost to a community.

But many economists say governments are better off investing that money — which often runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars — into schools, infrastructure and other public services that generate far more money for the community than stadiums do.

“Over the years, there have been tons of studies,” said Pat Garofalo, director of state and local policy at the American Economic Liberties Project. “Stadiums have been examined, up, down, backward, forward … and the nearly unanimous assessment is that they don’t provide broader economic benefits for the community. They don’t create jobs; they don’t boost incomes; they don’t boost GDP; they don’t do any of the things that the community should care about.”

Construction jobs, for example, are temporary, while others, such as in concessions, are low wage and limited.

Garofalo also said “stadiums don’t exist in an economic vacuum. If people aren’t able to go to a football game, it’s not like they will just like sit around in their basement doing nothing, twiddling their thumbs, wishing for a football stadium to exist so that they could go to a football game.”

People might go to the movies or a restaurant or some other activity that generates money for local businesses, he said. “Stadium proponents like to act as … if every dollar that is spent in there would not have been spent otherwise,” but “studies show that most of it is just shuffled-around entertainment spending,” Garofalo said.

He said that for a large metro area such as D.C., the economic benefits of a stadium are “sort of a blip.”

“Whereas if you could capture all of the tax revenue that was coming out of the stadium and apply it to things that really make a difference in people’s lives — health care, education, fixing potholes, rides on the Metro, whatever you want it to be — that money could just go a lot further.”