The wannabe St. Louis MLS team owners have released some renderings of their wannabe stadium:

So, that square roof is cool and all, but I’m not sure it works in terms of geometry, given that soccer pitches are longer than they are wide. It looks from that image like the seats at the ends are more stacked vertically than the ones on the sidelines, which could be one way of getting around that; let’s see another angle:

We’re looking from one end in the above image, so maybe. Still, it’s also possible this is some form of forced perspective, or the designers just decided to fudge the shape of an actual soccer field to get a cooler image, and the actual roof — if there ever is an actual roof — will be more rectangular. Which is actually what appears to be going on in this GIF:

Team co-owner Carolyn Kindle Betz did call the renderings “conceptual,” so I’m going to take that to mean “it won’t actually look like this, we just wanted something to distract you with.”

Which is fine, but can’t we get any renderings with the more usual fantastical stadium elements, like weird lighting effects and people cheering at nothing in particular? Please?

Ahhhh, much better. Judging from the keeper sprawled on the ground, it looks like somebody (the red team?) has just scored, which isn’t too surprising given that the black team has utterly failed to track back to play any defense.

The stadium — which you will recall is set to get something on the order of $60 million in public subsidies — is supposed to seat 22,000, with room to expand (maybe they can put temporary seating in those gaps in the corners, though the landscaping is going to get in the way), which will make MLS commissioner Don “really our stadiums should hold 27,000 people even though the league average attendance is only 20,000 and that’s with teams papering the house” Garber happy. And since making Garber happy enough to give St. Louis owners a franchise — sorry, sell St. Louis owners a franchise, for an expansion fee of at least $200 million and maybe more — really that’s how we should be looking at all of these pretty pictures: They’re profile pics, nothing more, nothing less.

The St. Louis Board of Aldermen voted 26-2 on Friday to give preliminary approval to tax breaks and free land for a new MLS soccer stadium, with final approval to come when and if the city actually lands a team. Which means it’s a perfect time for me to help throw some cold water on the board’s enthusiasm, via column by St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger (which he spoke to me for before the vote, but which ran this morning).

My only actual quote should be pretty uncontroversial:

“The latest plan is arguably less onerous for the public than lots of other stadium projects out there — and certainly better than the previous soccer proposal for St. Louis,” deMause says. “But that’s damning with faint praise, because the median in stadium deals is ‘pretty awful.’”

Most stadium deals are terrible, and this one is better than most! But it’s not the best, either, which Messenger notes by pointing to my recent Deadspin article on stadium deals that don’t suck, citing in particular the Orlando S.C. deal where the team owner paid for construction, land, and property taxes like a normal land developer. St. Louis mayoral chief of staff Stephen Conway retorts that Orlando’s situation is an “outlier,” which is true, but when you’re giving your own plan five stars out of five, by definition you’re saying it’s as good as any outliers. (What would an Orlando-style plan get, six out of five stars?)

Anyway, to recap and update what the prospective St. Louis MLS owners will get as part of the tax and land break package, with some numbers via city documents helpfully provided by Messenger:

• A 3% sales tax surcharge on goods sold at the stadium. The present value of future taxes is estimated by the city at $21.3 million, but since the higher sales taxes which arguably would just force the team to charge lower face-value prices, it’s not fair to consider this entirely a city cost.
• An exemption from half of city ticket taxes, with the other half funneled into a stadium upgrade fund. Project supporters say that all the other St. Louis sports teams get an exemption on this, so the soccer team should too; still, that makes it less “not a subsidy” than “a subsidy, but one that the city hands out like candy.” The city analysis estimates the value of this exemption at $11.6 million in present value.
• An exemption of sales taxes on construction materials, which is estimated to cost the city $1 million in present value while saving the developers $4-5 million; no explanation is given in city documents how this bookkeeping magic occurs (the city sales tax rate is about equal to the state’s), so just roll with it.
• Free state highway department land and an exemption on property taxes for it. This is the big unknown, since the city apparently threw up its hands and said, “Well, we’re not getting any money from the land now, so may as well give it away for free,” which is not how assets work. (Not that it’s stopped far bigger developers from trying the same argument.) Here’s a vacant lot in the same general vicinity selling for a little under $23 a square foot; if you figure at minimum about 500,000 square feet for a soccer stadium, then you’re looking at $10 million in forgone land value, plus whatever the city would be giving up in forgone future property taxes.
• The state has already approved $30 million in tax credits, though since it doesn’t appear to be a rebate of any specific taxes, this is probably better thought of as “cash.” (Really, all tax rebates are better thought of as cash, since there’s no functional distinction between the two.)

Add it all up, and we’re looking at maybe $60 million in public subsidies, whereas the previous soccer stadium plan that was rejected by voters in 2017 would have provided … $60 million in city subsidies, plus $40 million from the state. So, yeah, this would be somewhat better, but not all that dramatically so. Probably the most honest way to present this to the public would be “We want a soccer team, and at least this way we’d get one at a mild discount over what some other cities are spending,” but maybe that’s just what “FIVE STARS!!!!!” translates into in the politician-to-English dictionary.

The St. Louis Development Corporation released a financial impact report on the city’s proposed new stadium for a proposed MLS expansion team yesterday, and because the city development agency apparently bases its economic methodology on Yelp, it gave the plan “five stars”:

“You’re not going to see a proposal this good anywhere, any place in the country,” said Steve Conway, chief of staff to Mayor Lyda Krewson.

Several members of the St. Louis city board of aldermen are raising objections to board chair Lewis Reed’s proposal for the city to help build a soccer stadium for a potential new MLS franchise (viewable in its entirety here), specifically on the grounds that it would put the city on the hook for future upgrades. From Reed’s plan:

An exemption from fifty percent of the City amusement tax and the deposit of the proceeds of the remaining amusement tax revenue that is collected from the activities at the stadium into an escrow fund (the “Soccer Stadium Improvement / Demolition Fund”) annually by the City to support major future improvements to the stadium, and, if warranted, the demolition of the stadium.

So that “50% amusement tax break” is actually a 100% amusement tax break — or at least, half off the ticket tax and letting the team use the other half for its own future improvements, which is functionally the same thing. I previously guesstimated that eliminating the 5% ticket tax for a soccer team would cost the city about $450,000 a year, which would be worth maybe $7 million in present value; it’s not a huge amount, and could end up being worth less than the full exemption on property taxes that Reed wants to extend to the team, but it’s still not nothing. And the proposed solution by Alderman Christine Ingrassia — making the soccer team the owners of the stadium — would presumably eliminate the property-tax break, too.

According to Ingrassia, six to eight members of the 29-member board of aldermen have expressed concerns about the future upgrade slush fund, but she withdrew her resolution to put the stadium and its future costs in the team owners’ hands because (deep breath) she says Reed accused her of trying to sabotage the stadium plan, while Reed accused Ingrassia of being biased against one of the team’s prospective owners, the Taylor family of Enterprise Rent-a-Car fame, because she’s fighting with Enterprise over $3,000 in damages to a car she rented for a conference that she says she didn’t cause.

Anyway, the whole mess now goes to an aldermanic committee, where no doubt we will hear lots more about Ingrassia’s car rental bills. And maybe even something about exactly how much the ticket tax break and property tax break would be worth to the team owners — we can dream, can’t we?

If you want a strong candidate for the most misleading newspaper headline since, well, pretty much ever, I would nominate yesterday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch masterpiece “Downtown St. Louis soccer stadium would be paid for with cash by would-be team owners.” Here is how it begins:

The hopeful owners of a new Major League Soccer team in St. Louis are prepared to pay for a $250 million downtown stadium in cash, the leader of the ownership group said on Wednesday.

And here is its sixth paragraph:

There are new owners hoping to bring an MLS expansion franchise (and MLS stadium) to St. Louis, and the Post-Dispatch is reporting on it with typically dispassionate hometown newspaper skepticism:

For those who thought the city’s ambitions of becoming a Major League Soccer town died at the ballot box last year, there is hope — and its name is Taylor.

Taylor is the family behind Enterprise rental cars, which is based in the St. Louis suburb of Clayton. The Post-Dispatch goes on to pick up such press release soundbites as that this would be the first MLS team majority-owned by women, and that Enterprise has lots of ties with local nonprofits, and okay okay, we get it, what about the damn stadium that was the stumbling block the last time somebody tried to get a soccer expansion team for St. Louis?

A roughly $250 million stadium dedicated to the soccer franchise would be “overwhelmingly” privately financed, the Taylors say. Public help would likely come from dedicated sales taxes on concessions and other merchandise sold to patrons, a property tax break from a city agency owning the stadium site and leasing it to the group, state tax credits and a break on the city’s 5 percent ticket tax.

That “overwhelmingly” sounds good; that longish list of tax breaks sounds less good. Let’s take them one at a time:

• Those “dedicated sales taxes on concessions and merchandise” would apparently mean an extra 3% sales tax surcharge within the stadium. That would mostly come out of the team’s pockets — the economics gets a bit complicated, but suffice to say that as with ticket taxes, sports teams tend to lower concessions prices to eat the surcharge themselves, since they are already trying to charge fans as much as the market will bear for hot dogs — so probably wouldn’t be a significant public subsidy.
• The size of the proposed property tax break is unknown — here’s the site under consideration if somebody wants to dig through St. Louis tax records to estimate how much it would normally be expected to pay.
• Actual MLS ticket sales and prices are famously hard to calculate thanks to teams’ policies of goosing the gate by giving away tickets for free or cheap, but if we guesstimate 300,000 tickets a year at an average of $30 a pop, then eliminating the 5% ticket tax would cost the city about $450,000 a year.

So all told, yeah, that all sounds preferable to the $60 million from sales tax hikes and kicked-back property taxes on adjacent land that would have gone into the previous soccer stadium plan. Though of course right now we’re just taking the word of the prospective team owners for it, so let’s see what the fully fleshed-out proposal looks like. Hopefully the Post-Dispatch will remove its rose-colored glasses long enough to report on that, once it’s available.

When last we visited plans for an MLS team in St. Louis, voters were rejecting spending $60 million in city tax money on a stadium for one, and the whole idea was falling by the wayside. But it’s been almost a year and a half since then, and the MLS commissioner mentioned their name on the telly recently, so sure, once more into the breach!

An official in Gov. Mike Parson’s office told the Post-Dispatch that officials with the state Department of Economic Development met with Major League Soccer representatives as recently as Tuesday, and that the Parson administration was interested in working on a stadium proposal.

Oh yeah, one other thing happened since April of last year: Missouri governor Eric Greitens, who had denounced the soccer stadium plan as “welfare for millionaires,” resigned in a scandal over using a nude photo of his former hairdresser as blackmail to threaten her into not revealing their affair, and was replaced by lieutenant governor Mike Parson. That Parson is open to working on an MLS stadium plan isn’t necessarily an ominous sign — maybe he just wants to smooth the path for a team owner to spend their own money on a stadium, it’s possible, kinda! — but that his office went as far as to leak it to the press probably means that he’s trying to get some attention for St. Louis in the wake of Don Garber’s latest expansion saber-rattling, which probably isn’t good.

Anyway, MLS may still be a Ponzi scheme, but Ponzi schemes can last a good long while if they’re run well and can come up with a continual supply of new marks. And with both prospective owners and prospective cities lining up to prove Apocryphal P.T. Barnum right, it looks like it’ll be a while yet before any chickens come home to roost.