Happy Scottish Independence Day! And now for the rest of the news:
- The Nashville S.C. soccer stadium deal is still on hold, and now apparently Mayor John Cooper may be using his power to deny demolition permits at the fairgrounds site to try to force a new deal that renegotiates who’ll pay for rising infrastructure cost overruns and provides a future plan for the adjacent Speedway motor sports racing track. Neither of these seem insurmountable obstacles, but also I would have thought they’d be resolved already, so we’ll see. Big development projects have certainly been tripped up for stranger reasons.
- Inter Miami‘s soccer stadium deal in Miami is still on hold as well; there was a report yesterday that the Miami city commission was preparing to either approve the plan to lease Melreese golf course to the team for a new stadium or kill it, but it looks like they got distracted by trying to decide whether to fire the city manager and didn’t get around to it. Oh, Florida.
- Comcast and DISH Network are reportedly considering dropping some sports channels from their lineups as too expensive, which is notable because 1) until now cable and satellite providers have considered live sports the only sure way to stop viewers from cutting the cord, but apparently some would rather take their chances than keep on paying huge fees for sports, and 2) if the cable cash cow dries up (mixed metaphor, I know, but just imagine a liquid cow), the economics of the sports industry will change massively, with shifts in not only how much revenue comes in but how much is shared vs. retained by individual teams, changing the relative of value of being in a large cable market and generally making all our assumptions about how things work vanish into air. Plus already MLB is giving back local streaming rights to individual teams for resale, and the New York Yankees may be teaming up with Amazon, and … this really calls for a longer article of its own, stay tuned.
- MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said Wednesday that the league’s plan to eliminate 42 minor-league affiliates was “by no means a fait accompli,” but also that by complaining publicly about the threat, minor-league owners had “done damage to the relationship with Major League Baseball.” (Replied one minor-league owner under condition of anonymity: “Rob is attempting to decimate the industry, destroy baseball in communities and eliminate thousands of jobs, and he’s upset that the owners of the teams have gone public with that information in an effort to save their teams. That’s rich.”) The irreplaceable Marc Normandin asked minor-league players what they thought of all this for Talk Poverty, and they pointed out that the Toronto Blue Jays already raised their minor-league salaries without cutting teams or going bankrupt, so why can’t the rest of the league?
- The Edmonton Oilers franchise has soared in estimated value from $170 million to $575 million (in American dollars) since 2008, which Edmonton Journal writer David Staples says is thanks to its new publicly subsidized arena, but his article also shows that six NHL teams that didn’t get new arenas saw their value increase by even higher percentages, so honestly I don’t know what to think here.
- The Las Vegas Review-Journal wants to hear none of your Raiders faulty-bolts schadenfreude.
- If you want some idea of why buying stadium naming rights might not always be the best marketing move for a company seeking name recognition, consider having to wake up to a headline reading “Janitor Killed at [Your Name Here] Arena, Crushed by Mechanical Gate.”
- If you were hoping this week would bring an anti-Los Angeles Angels stadium land sale video featuring Squigglevision and Anaheim councilmembers tumbling out of a clown car, you’re in luck!
- That time when then-New York City Mayor and now-Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg promised an “extraordinary” fiscal benefit from building a Brooklyn Nets arena, which didn’t work out so well.
