Category Archives: St. Louis MLS team

St. Louis officials overwhelmingly approve MLS deal marginally less onerous than one voters hated last year

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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.

St. Louis development agency gives self “five stars” for soccer plan because it won’t lose as much money as last one

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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.

The analysis, which Conway called conservative, predicts a new stadium would send the city $1.4 million in tax revenue every year.

It also shares a litany of new information with aldermen hungry for details: The present values of tax incentives for this proposal add up to $39.7 million, in comparison to $123 million offered to the effort that failed to land a team last year. The proposed stadium improvement fund, fed by a 2.5 percent ticket tax, would add up to $28.7 million over 30 years.

Wait, so the tax incentives and siphoning off half of the city’s ticket tax money would add up to $68.4 million over 30 years, and the new tax revenue would add up to $42 million over 30 years? I don’t know what kind of curve the St. Louis Development Corporation grades on, but that sounds like three stars at best, maybe two if the waiters didn’t promptly refill water glasses.

Normally at this point I would dive into the text of the report itself, but as the St. Louis Dispatch didn’t bother to include a link and the SLDC apparently hasn’t gotten around to posting it on its website, that’ll have to wait. (I’ve requested a copy from the SLDC, but it’s a little early in the morning yet for them to reply.) For now, it looks like the most we can say about the public cost of the soccer plan is it’s not as bad as the last one, and we already said that a couple of months ago, and besides that’s not saying much considering how awful the previous plan was. Further updates as they become available, I guess.

St. Louis legislator says MLS stadium includes hidden future costs, is told to shut up because she has a rental-car dispute with team owners

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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?

St. Louis MLS owners to pay all $250m in stadium costs (except for tens of millions in tax breaks and free land, shh, don’t mention that)

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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:

The Kavanaugh-Taylor group is asking for tax-dollar help. The city of St. Louis has proposed giving the owners a 50 percent break on ticket taxes, a full tax exemption on stadium construction materials, a $30 million tax break from the state, a 3 percent sales tax on stadium goods, and the free use of land — just west of Union Station on Market Street — for the stadium.

That is not “paid for with cash by would-be team owners”! Unless all it means is they wouldn’t sell bonds or take out a bank loan, but would front the $250 million, getting repaid in part by all those tax breaks. Which would make the headline correct on a technicality, while still implying the exact opposite of the truth.

Anyway, the city-run Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority approved the $30 million state tax break and the sales tax break on construction materials yesterday, sending it to the Missouri Development Finance Board for final approval. (And yes, you are correct that neither of those bodies is made up of elected officials.) The city council could vote today on the ticket tax, the free land, and the stadium sales tax surcharge. Neither Post-Dispatch report attempted to determine a total value for all the tax breaks, because come on, man, journalism is hard enough in these troubled financial times without having to “provide numbers” and “write clear headlines” and all that.

Enterprise rental car family proposes new St. Louis MLS stadium plan that sucks less than the last one, probably

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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.

Missouri governor looks to reheat coagulating old plans for St. Louis soccer stadium

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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.

Friday roundup: More MLS expansion drum beating, more wasteful non-sports subsidies, more bonkers Tottenham stadium delay stories

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Getting a late start this morning after being out last night seeing Neko Case, so let’s get to this:

How cities haven’t actually fallen out of love with funding sports stadiums

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The May issue of Governing magazine has an article with the provocative headline, “How Cities Fell Out of Love With Sports Stadiums,” though it’s really mostly about why St. Louis balked at throwing money at an MLS stadium and fought back against paying for arena upgrades for the Blues after getting burned when the Rams got the most sweetheart lease deal in history and then used a lease loophole to move back to Los Angeles just 21 years later.

All that is good and fine, as is the article’s discussion of how “the economic impact reports singing the praises of sports development have largely been discredited.” But in the service of trying to make the story into “regular folks used to fall all over themselves to hand money to sports teams, but now they’ve smartened up,” writer Liz Farmer oversimplifies or just plain gets wrong a number of things about the stadium subsidy game and how it’s played, which is going to be a problem if any people in the business of actual governing take it as gospel. Let us count the ways:

“When [Rams owner Stan] Kroenke came along and had the gall to start making demands for a football team that hadn’t had a winning record since 2003, the city was — quite literally — spent. St. Louis was suffering under the same socioeconomic and fiscal pressures as Cleveland, Detroit and most other Rust Belt cities. Its population was declining rapidly, and it was stuck paying off debt for the existing stadium until 2022. Residents were increasingly skeptical when it came to investing in gaudy entertainment amenities the lower-income population couldn’t afford to use.”

St. Louis’s population has been declining since 1950 — if anything, it’s leveled off some in recent years — though its county population has soared as more people moved to the suburbs. And residents were pretty darned skeptical before, too: Way back in 2002, St. Louis citizens approved a referendum requiring that all public subsidies for sports facilities would need to go to a public vote. Unfortunately for voters, courts ruled that the target of that referendum — the Cardinals stadium deal that had just been approved prior to that — was grandfathered in, but it’s not like public resistance in St. Louis is anything new.

“The era of taxpayer-financed stadiums came about almost by accident. Seeking to limit the use of government bonds in stadium financing, the federal Tax Reform Act of 1986 included a provision that capped at 10 percent the direct stadium revenue — mostly from ticket sales and concessions — that could be used to pay for the cost of the facility. That meant that governments would have to raise broad-based taxes, such as on sales or business, to cover the rest of the cost.”

Not quite. What the 1986 tax reform law was attempting to do was to rein in cities’ use of federally tax exempt bonds for private projects — not just stadiums, but all kinds of development — by saying, “Look, only really public amenities, okay? Don’t just offer discounted bonds to anybody who asks and then stick federal taxpayers with the bill.”

Unfortunately, the way that Congress chose to address this was by defining public amenities as things that were paid for by the public — if more than 10% of the cost was paid off by private funds (or special taxes that were just private funds masquerading as public dollars to get eligibility), low-cost federal bonds were off the table. Unfortunately, what that did was to increase the leverage of sports team owners, who could now say, “Yeah, sorry, we would love to put in more money of our own, but then it would increase the financing costs, and we can’t have that, can we?”

This is by no means what started the era of taxpayer-financed stadiums, though: Team owners were already demanding new stadiums and arenas left and right, using the usual playbook of methods to do so (move threats, claims of economic benefits, etc.). The tax reform law further titled the scale toward bigger demands, but it didn’t create the demands in the first place — and while getting rid of tax-exempt bond subsidies would be a nice step, it wouldn’t put an end to stadium subsidies in the slightest.

“But Congress didn’t account for the fan loyalty and pride that — at the time — made raising local taxes more acceptable.”

Fan loyalty and pride are still on full display, but sports fans are taxpayers, too, and have been resisting handing their tax dollars over to sports team owners as much as anyone since the beginning. Just ask Frank Rashid.

“The boom was driven in part by demand from teams and fans for a more sophisticated sports experience than the drab concrete coliseums they were used to.”

If by “more sophisticated sports experience” you mean “more pulled-pork sandwiches and nicer cupholders,” sure. But plenty of sports venues have been torn down in recent years to make way for new facilities that are arguably even drabber than the ones they replaced.

“The Washington, D.C., soccer team, D.C. United, spent years negotiating with the nation’s capital over a new soccer-specific stadium. Those talks effectively shut down once the economic downturn hit in 2008, and the team spent another seven years shopping around in the surrounding counties — even going as far as Baltimore — trying to find a local government that would pay for the facility. None would bite. Ultimately, the team stayed in D.C. and is paying to build a stadium on land the city spent $150 million acquiring. The deal includes a non-relocation agreement.”

In addition to that free land, D.C. United is also getting $43 million in property tax breaks, making it the most expensive MLS soccer stadium subsidy in history. The tide is turning!

“Kiel Center Partners, the firm that owns the NHL Blues, had asked the St. Louis City Board of Aldermen for $64 million to finance upgrades to the Scottrade Center. Had the city’s voters not been distracted by the soccer stadium proposal and by a heated mayoral election, the financing might have met more resistance. Some aldermen did question whether the city’s 1994 lease with the team required it to pay for upgrades, but still the proposal narrowly passed. If it had been submitted to a popular vote, it most likely would have failed.”

Again, “if voters had been asked, they would have voted it down” is likely true of all of St. Louis’s past sports subsidy deals. (Possibly not the original Rams deal, though if they’d known that it would allow the team to move away by claiming their two-decade-old stadium was no longer “state of the art,” they might have balked at that, too.) And voters didn’t get to vote because the city council just up and decreed that they wouldn’t be allowed to, despite that 2002 referendum, so it’s tough to see how this is a sign of increased political resistance.

“So the hockey team got its way. Things like that still happen. But they don’t happen easily, and they don’t happen with broad public support. Several years ago, for instance, when the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings wanted a publicly funded stadium, the state legislature rejected the proposal. Eventually the team got its money, but with a state law capping public contributions to the $1 billion project at $498 million.”

OMG, the Vikings owners actually had to ask for stadium subsidies multiple times! And then they had to settle for a mere half-billion dollars in cash, except counting tax breaks and other hidden goodies it’s actually costing taxpayers more like $1.1 billion, so, uh.

In the end, the Governing article isn’t a terrible one, and it does touch on a lot of details of the stadium scam that Governing likely wouldn’t have been caught dead discussing 20 years ago. (Now there’s some progress.) But if the takeaway is that the general public loved sports stadium plans, but now have realized they were duped, that’s not the story at all: Actually it’s been a battle from the beginning between team owners trying to extract as much public money as possible, and taxpayers and some of their local representatives trying to push back. And while maybe a few more elected officials are pushing back harder, there’s pushback against the pushback, too. So this whole mess isn’t ending anytime soon, much as I wish it were so I could retire this blog and go back to treating sports as the purely apolitical, fun pastime that it never really was.

Friday roundup: Marlins claim British residency, video football with real humans, and the White Sox stadium that never was

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Busy (minor) news week! And away we go…

  • Derek Jeter’s Miami Marlins ownership group, facing a lawsuit by the city of Miami and Miami-Dade County over the team stiffing the public on the share of sale proceeds they were promised, are trying to stave it off by claiming that (deep breath) because one of the owners of an umbrella company of an umbrella company of the umbrella company that owns the Marlins is a business incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, the case should be arbitrated by a federal judge who handles international trade issues. Maybe the Marlins should quit trying to sell tickets to baseball games and sell tickets to the court proceedings instead.
  • Tampa Bay Rays chief development officer Melanie Lenz, in response to concerns that a big-ass baseball stadium wouldn’t fit into the Ybor City historic district that it would be on the border of, said that “we expect to build a next-generation, neighborhood ballpark that fits within the fabric of the Ybor City community,” though she didn’t give any details. That’s vague enough to be reassuring without actually promising anything concrete, but it’s worth making a note of just in case the historic district ends up becoming a stumbling block in stadium talks, which, stranger things have happened.
  • A guy wants to start a football league where fans vote on what plays to run via Twitch, and build an arena in Las Vegas for people to watch … the players? The voting? The Las Vegas Review-Journal article about it was a bit unclear, though it did say that the organizers want to “create the experience of playing a football video game with real people,” which isn’t creepy at all. It also reports that the league plans to use blockchain technology, which is how you know it’s probably a sham.
  • Something called the Badger Herald, which I assume is a University of Wisconsin student paper but which I really hope is a newspaper targeted entirely at badgers, ran an article by a junior economics major arguing that the new Milwaukee Bucks arena will be a boon to the city because during the first few years “many will come from across the state to watch the Bucks play in this impressive new facility” and after that it will “continue giving the people of Milwaukee a reason to be optimistic.” The author also says that the arena was built after “the NBA gave the Bucks an ultimatum — either obtain a new arena, or the NBA would buy the Bucks and sell the franchise to another city,” which, uh, no, that’s not what happened at all.
  • Here’s a really nice article for CBS Sports by my old Baseball Prospectus colleague Dayn Perry on the Chicago White Sox ballpark proposed by architect Philip Bess that never got built. Come for the cool pictures of spiders, stay for the extended explanation of why supporting columns that obstruct some views are a design feature that stadium architects never should have abandoned!
  • The Los Angeles Rams are trying to pull a San Francisco 49ers, according to Deadspin, by making a run at a Super Bowl in the same year they’re selling personal seat licenses for their new stadium. More power to ’em, but prospective Rams PSL buyers, check how that worked out for 49ers fans before you hand over your credit card numbers, okay?
  • The state of Connecticut has cut $100 million for Hartford arena renovations from the state budget, at least for now, so that it can use the money toward a $550 million bailout of the city of Hartford itself. Is that what they call a “no win-win situation“?
  • NHL commissioner Gary Bettman says the New York Islanders need to move back to Long Island because Brooklyn’s Barclays Center “wasn’t built for hockey,” which he actually pointed out at the time they moved there, but did anybody listen?
  • Alameda County is moving to sell its share of the Oakland Coliseum complex to the city of Oakland, which should make negotiations over what to do with the site slightly simpler, anyway.
  • That Missouri governor who killed a proposed St. Louis MLS stadium subsidy, calling it “welfare for millionaires,” is now under pressure to resign after his former hairdresser claimed he groped her, slapped her, and coerced her into sex acts. Maybe we should just stop electing men to public office? Just a thought.

Rams to charge record PSL price, Cavs arena subsidy moves ahead, and other news of the week

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It’s Friday again, so let’s go spanning the world:

  • The Los Angeles Rams are considering charging a top personal seat license price of as much as $225,000, just for the right to then buy season tickets for $350-400 per game. This seems like a bit of a reach when the payoff is just that you get to watch Rams games, but I guess Stan Kroenke needs to try to recoup his $2 billion in stadium costs somehow — and at least if it all goes south, he’ll be the one on the hook, not taxpayers.
  • Some Canadian bank bought the naming rights to the Toronto Maple Leafs arena away from some Canadian airline. Is this going to buy it valuable market exposure and name recognition that will justify the $40 million a year expense? Not on this blog!
  • The LED lights at the Atlanta Falcons‘ new stadium make football look all weird.
  • Shreveport Mayor Ollie Tyler says spending $30 million on an arena for a minor-league basketball team is a great idea that only “naysayers” don’t appreciate. “I think sometimes we don’t believe in ourselves and some of our urban areas we don’t believe that we are able to make things happen,” she says. If Mayor Tyler needs a reelection campaign theme song, I have a suggestion.
  • “The Federal Aviation Administration has determined that the Oakland Raiders‘ proposed stadium in Las Vegas would not be a hazard to aircraft.” Huzzah!
  • Would-be St. Louis MLS owner Paul Edgerley says he’s still ready to pay $150 million for a franchise, and $100 million toward a stadium, as soon as someone comes up with the other $60 million in construction costs. Noted.
  • Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert has officially reinstated his plan to do $140 million of renovation work to the team’s arena, with Cuyahoga County paying for half the cost. ”This is corporate welfare at its worst,” said Steve Holecko of the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus, after his erstwhile coalition partners the Greater Cleveland Congregations withdrew petitions against the arena subsidy after getting a promise of two mental health crisis centers from the county. Holecko’s group doesn’t plan to mount another ballot challenge on their own, though, so construction work is set to begin later this month.
  • Mikhail Prokhorov is ready to sell the Brooklyn Nets, but will hold onto the Barclays Center, after renegotiating the team’s lease so that it will pay less rent to the arena. This … does not seem like the smartest way of going about things, but maybe Prokhorov is figuring he’ll give up future rent revenue in exchange for a higher sale price now on the team? Or maybe he’s just not very smart.