Perhaps both. But that doesn't mean that the Salt Lake County Council should buy.

In politics as in sport, it's important to keep your eye on the ball. Regardless of how it's pitched, the debate about a soccer stadium in Sandy for Real Salt Lake is all about tax subsidies for private business.

The question that the Salt Lake County Council must answer is who, besides the owners of Real Salt Lake, would benefit, and whether those benefits justify the investment of valleywide tax dollars.

We believe that County Mayor Peter Corroon was right to reject Sandy's first proposal for the county to help finance the stadium because the $87.5 million cost for a $35 million bond was far too expensive.

We concede that Sandy appears to have reduced that cost to $71 million in its second offer. Sandy apparently also has agreed to issue the bond, thus assuming the debt, though we wonder how that can work when the countywide hotel tax would provide the bulk of the revenues to service the bond, at least in its later years.

But Sandy also is asking for the county to commit $4.8 million in other tax revenues to the redevelopment agency portion of the project.

So this deal is only marginally better for county residents outside of Sandy than the original proposal. The county's debt committee should give the latest plan the same rigorous scrutiny it gave the first one.

In the meantime, Sandy Mayor Dolan's effort to sell the soccer stadium as the centerpiece of a $650 million, 136-acre economic development scheme seems to be an attempt to change the subject. It diverts people's attention from the fact that the primary beneficiary of the bond issue would be Real Salt Lake's soccer stadium.

He may be selling the project this way because Tribune opinion polls show that a majority of people do not support such a tax subsidy.

We believe that the tremendous population growth in the south Salt Lake Valley inevitably should cause commercial expansion in Sandy without such subsidies. A Major League Soccer stadium won't do much to change that either way.

Besides, diverting valleywide hotel taxes to build either the soccer stadium or, by extension, the larger commercial tax base of Sandy, as the Legislature and Dolan have proposed, doesn't strike us as justifiable. Salt Lake City used tax-increment redevelopment funds, not the hotel tax, to subsidize Larry H. Miller's Delta Center.

Unlike the county-owned Salt Palace Convention Center, the traditional recipient of hotel tax funds, the privately owned Real stadium and its adjoining retail development won't bring substantial new business or tax revenues to Utah and Salt Lake County from out-of-state visitors. It will simply attract south valley retail customers and sports fans from other places in the valley.

If private businesses, including Real, want to do that on their own dime, fine. But we don't see why countywide hotel tax funds should subsidize them.