This paper examines the question of whether it is justified from an economic perspective that in Germany the general taxpayer has to finance the costs of police operations on match days of the professional football leagues. Although this question has been the subject of an ongoing discussion in politics and the public as well as in the legal literature, this issue has been relatively rarely analyzed in the economic literature. The presented economic analysis, in which the main arguments of the defenders of a socialization of police costs (esp., football clubs and their associations) are scrutinized, comes to the conclusion that under certain conditions the event organizers have to contribute to the police costs; so far, in Germany this is only the case for so-called "high-risk games" in the federal state of Bremen
