I believe that ESPN is going to leave CT. If a state like Georgia or North Carolina would give them incentives to move, they would in a heartbeat. The owners of ESPN have no ties to CT, so I guess in 5 to 10 years they'll be gone...and sooner if CT sues ESPN for ignoring UConn.
Enticing companies to leave the northeast is an established practice. All of the fruit that is ripe to harvest has been harvested. Which is to say that the low hanging fruit is already gone.
When companies leave ny or nj for ct ( or the other way around ) they are likely doing so for incentives. Earlier in the year an insurance company relocated from Westchester to Stamford. Same labor pool and very little impact to their existing workforce. Free money.
Financial service companies without specialized facilities are very portable for the most part.
When companies leave ct for the south, they are likely doing so because the cost of labor is cheaper...not for the incentives. It is very costly for a company to move jobs elsewhere. 1000 jobs move to North Carolina, less than 400 people will follow. And most of them are given financial incentives ( bonus, promotion, move stipend ) to do so. Filling 600 positions is expensive both directly and indirectly. Government incentives usually do not fully compensate a firm for relocation costs and risks. These companies plan to make their dough back through long-term labor cost savings.
The companies that do these southern relocations generally share similar profile: high labor costs as a proportion of operating expenditures. They tend to have general facility needs and recruit generalized skill sets.
You will not see Morgan Stanley's prop trading desk move to Atlanta, the supply of labor there is too low therfore the cost of labor is too high. You might see them move to ct, bc they would be accessing virtually the same labor pool that they are in today.
The world's greatest cluster of asset management minds are in the tri-state. When bridgewater threatened to move operations out of state it was ny/nj where they threatened to move. Not Atlanta.
The same is true with ESPN's on air operations. TBS and TNT are backwoods operations and an exception. There are exactly two clusters of media in the US. LA and the tri-state. That's where the talent is because that's where the jobs are. And vice versa. This will not change just because the governor of Georgia throws around some incentives. Not to mention the fact that Espn sits on over a million square feet of specialized facilities, built over the last three decades.