Category Archives: NFL

A’s stadium plan wins friend, Vegas mulls Raiders transit, and other news of the (short) week

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I’m going to be on a plane tomorrow to a faraway land, so let’s do the week’s news roundup a day early:

  • Peralta Community College District chancellor Jowel Laguerre now says he’s into the Oakland A’s tearing down his administrative offices in order to build a stadium, so long as they hire his students to work there: “The A’s are in the business of hiring people, and we’re in the business of developing people, so it makes sense to have these conversations.” I can see it now: Laney College, Your Gateway to a Career in Hot Dog Marketing and Sales! (Also the A’s still need to figure out how to squeeze a stadium onto a tiny site, but one battle at a time, I suppose.)
  • Clark County is smarter than Cobb County, it turns out: The Nevada county’s planning director, Nancy Amundsen, said this week regarding the new Las Vegas Raiders stadium: “If it’s determined that they need a pedestrian bridge at this location, or they need wider sidewalks on these streets, or they need streetlights here or there — any upgrade of the infrastructure based on the development on the site — we can request that in the development agreement.” The county commission still needs to do it, mind you, but at least thinking of it ahead of time puts them ahead of the folks who negotiated with the Atlanta Braves around their new stadium and its pedestrian bridges.
  • That El Paso court case over whether the city’s new arena can host sporting events or just concerts and such turns out to be due to the city’s project consultant, according to one neighborhood group opposed to the arena: “David Romo says sports consultant Rick Horrow is to blame for the city stripping the arena ordinance of the word ‘sports’ in favor of ‘multi-purpose performing arts facility.'” If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Horrow has been selling small cities on his “raise the sales tax and build an arena plus a whole of other stuff” model for decades now — he’s the man who talked Oklahoma City into building a new arena with public money (which worked out okay in that the Thunder eventually moved there) and tried to push the same model for such things as an NFL stadium in Birmingham, Alabama (which would not have worked out okay at all). Romo cites Horrow’s own book, which advises, “De-emphasize, even in triumphant cities, the sports model,” and “Each individual project, on its own, will have little chance of passage. together, bundled, is the most enticing way to present the idea to voters.” Except when you write yourself into a corner with bond paperwork that says your new building isn’t for sports; but then, Horrow will probably have collected his fee by then and moved on to the next town.
  • St. Louis’s MLS expansion bid, which pretty much disappeared after voters rejected spending $60 million on a soccer stadium this spring, may not be dead after all! According to alderman Joe Vaccaro, “I have been hearing rumblings and I have certainly no facts.” Or, you know, it might still be dead.
  • Pictures of D.C. United‘s new stadium set to open next year! Spoiler: They don’t look like much. Also spoiler: They don’t really look like the stadium will be ready by midseason 2018 as the plan is (United will start the year on a lengthy road trip to accommodate the construction schedule), but soccer stadiums are a bit simpler to build than those for other sports, so maybe?
  • “Colorful, glossy flyers urging residents to ‘Stop the Stadium!’ and ‘Take Action Now’ were left on doorsteps around the [proposed Miami MLS stadium] area late last week, paid for by a new group called the Overtown Spring Garden Community Collective.” David Beckham really can’t catch a break.

I’ll be back here … Monday? Later than that? It all depends on how well I can navigate whatever weird metric internet they have where I’m going. In the meantime, use the comments on this post as your open thread on any breaking news, and buy David Beckham a muffin or something, he’s probably needs some cheering up.

Here’s a video of quick glimpses of new Rams, Chargers stadium renderings, excited yet?

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Awright, new stadium rendering porn from the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers! And like all the cool media kids today, they’re pivoting to video:

That’s not all that different from the last renderings we saw, but has the advantage of zipping by really quickly and being set to music that sounds like a 1980s video game developer trying to emulate Grandmaster Flash. From this we can tell that the new Inglewood stadium will definitely contain people. and a latticework roof, and some kind of weirdly shaped scoreboard ring suspended over the field. You can get a better (sort of?) look at that last element in this tweeted still image:

And finally, here’s what the site looks like now, courtesy of the Associated Press:

Stay tuned for more exciting images! We have three years of this left to go, people, before anyone can see this with their own eyes, hopefully set to their own hip-hop-lite soundtrack.

Montreal stadium used for refugees from U.S., isn’t this a scene in “Handmaid’s Tale”?

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Lightning round!

  • Boise is all in a tizzy over plans to build a minor-league soccer stadium, because it would get a property-tax exemption. This is the kind of subsidy that people don’t usually notice unless they’re the mayor of Minneapolis, so good on Boise.
  • We finally have a due date for proposals for developing land near Belmont Park that the New York Islanders owners have targeted for a possible new arena: September 30. Tune back in then, and maybe we’ll see what they have in mind, and how they hope to pay for it.
  • Louisville is moving ahead with plans to refinance its debt on its disastrous arena deal. This won’t help a ton — the arena deal will still be a disaster — but even stanching the flow of red ink slightly is something, I suppose.
  • El Paso is involved in a court case over whether they’re allowed to hold sporting events at their new arena, because the bonds it used can’t be used for “sports facilities” and — know what, just read about it yourself, it’s too insane to describe in detail here.
  • The mayor of St. Petersburg is “intrigued” by the idea of building a new soccer stadium on the site of Tropicana Field if the Rays move out, something he apparently neglected to discuss with the local would-be MLS team owner first.
  • Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula is still refusing to demand a new stadium, despite the NFL really wanting him to.
  • Montreal’s Olympic Stadium is now being used as a temporary shelter for asylum seekers fleeing Trump’s America. There are undoubtedly many, many jokes to be made here — that’s what the comment section is for, so have fun!

Friday roundup: Beckham sued over MLS land purchase, Browns’ flammable stadium, and more!

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It’s Friday roundup time! Let’s get started:

  • A local Miami landowner is suing Miami-Dade County over its plan to sell land to David Beckham’s would-be MLS ownership group for a new stadium, arguing that the no-bid deal violates state law requiring public land to be sold to the “highest and best bidder.” Bruce Matheson, who owns land nearby the planned stadium site in the Overtown neighborhood but “spends most of his time aboard his 72-foot Argosy yacht,” according to Miami New Times, has previously blocked the use of a public park for expansion of the Miami Open tennis tournament, so he might just know what he’s doing here. Also, David Beckham is clearly cursed, so that can only help Matheson’s case.
  • In case it wasn’t clear that Louisville’s KFC Yum! Center subsidy deal was a complete disaster from last October’s report that the city was losing almost $10 million a year and the arena was in danger of going bankrupt, Louisville’s KFC Yum! Center is a complete disaster. One big reason why: sales-tax projections were based on past sales-tax growth, which included a sales-tax rate hike in 1990, which wasn’t going to happen again. Whoops! The latest plan is to have the city bail out the arena by taking on an extra $100 million in debt, which tenants the University of Louisville could pay off with less than four years’ worth of the profits they’re making on running the place, but won’t because finders keepers, losers weepers.
  • Wichita is about to spend $60 million on a new stadium for the indy-minor-league Wichita Wingnuts — slogan: If You’re Gonna Go, Then Go Nuts! — and the manager of nearby Picasso’s Pizza is excited about it: “People from all over the Wichita area love some Picasso’s,” says Efrain Ramirez. “Because we’re Picasso’s, you gotta make it look cool, it’s gotta be artistic. You gotta put your flair on it.” Well, excited about something, anyway. Spare a thought for the poor small-city reporter who has to wring a quote about economic development out of a pizzeria manager, okay?
  • Speaking of sports venues and local businesses, some bar owners near the Detroit Red Wings‘ new downtown arena are excited about it, while others are worried they’ll get “trampled” by the “big guys.” No interviews were conducted by the Detroit News with bar owners near the Red Wings’ old downtown arena, which will now close. This has been your moment in 21st-century journalism.
  • The Cleveland Browns‘ stadium is covered in the same flammable cladding that caused the deadly Grenfell Tower fire, but Cleveland’s top building official promises this poses “zero risk to the fans.” Presumably because if you’re watching a Browns game, death will come as sweet release.
  • The turf at the San Francisco 49ers stadium in Santa Clara continues to suck.
  • The Roma soccer club is owned by Americans, so they are naturally inclined to levy stadium threats. It also plays in Italy’s Serie A, which like all soccer leagues outside the U.S. works by promotion and relegation, so if the team threatened to move, Rome could just start a new team to replace it. So instead team president James Pallotta is threatening that if the ownership group doesn’t get approval to build a new stadium, they’ll sell the team to … someone who won’t demand a new stadium? You may not have thought this entirely through, James.
  • A Russian farmer has built a stadium out of straw to poke fun at the $700 million St. Petersburg is spending on a new World Cup soccer stadium. Cost of the straw stadium: $675. Be sure to click the link above for a truly bizarre Russian video for 2016 with a giant straw bear and a straw sphinx and … watermelons? Guys, I am slightly worried about whoever’s in charge of media links for ESPN.

VA governor still vowing to lure Washington’s NFL team with magic development-rights beans

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Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has been an unashamed booster of luring Washington’s NFL team to his state, mostly by shouting exuberantly a lot about how many players and fans already live there and promising to build a stadium with no public money, only the sale of public development rights, which is a totally different thing, right? And with six months to go in his term, McAuliffe is only ratcheting up his rhetoric:

“We’ve laid everything out and served it up beautifully,” McAuliffe said in an interview with The Washington Post. “If they were smart, and they really wanted to be Super Bowl champions, they would have that facility in Virginia.”

This is … a promise? A challenge? A taunt? I always thought that it was a bad idea to use the subjunctive mood when referring to the brains of your would-be business partners, but maybe they do things differently in Virginia.

As for funding for this stadium, McAuliffe says it’d be paid for by proceeds from developing the land around it, just like the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers are doing in Inglewood: “You need an area with a big enough land mass to it, like they’re doing in L.A. They’re basically building a new city around the football stadium.” Which fundamentally misunderstands what’s going on in L.A., which is that the two team owners (mostly the Rams’ Stan Kroenke) are spending a ton of money on a stadium and surrounding development in order to get a foothold in the L.A. market, which is possibly dumb because big markets don’t mean that much in the NFL, but anyway.

It’s still not clear whether McAuliffe means giving the NFL team development rights to public land — which would undoubtedly be a subsidy — or just telling team owner Dan Snyder, “Hey, you can make lots of money building stuff in Virginia and then sink it into your own stadium,” which is unlikely to be much of a lure since Snyder could equally well make lots of money (if money is there to be made) building stuff in Virginia and not sinking it into a stadium and trying to get somebody else to pay for his stadium like the team’s previous owners did last time. Anyway, McAuliffe will be out of office soon so most of this probably doesn’t matter, but I’ll kind of miss him when he’s gone, you know? Unvarnished crazy doesn’t come around every day, at least not outside of the White House these days.

Falcons’ retractable roof won’t work for opening game, will by December, maybe

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Hey, remember back in April when it was revealed that the Atlanta Falcons‘ crazy new iris-style stadium roof was taking longer to build than expected, and team execs promised it would be ready for opening day in September? Well, about that:

The retractable roof of Mercedes-Benz Stadium will be in the closed position when the new Falcons stadium debuts next month and for an undetermined period of time beyond that, the CEO of Falcons parent company AMB Group said today.

Steve Cannon said construction delays have the project behind schedule on fully mechanizing the roof…

Cannon said he could not provide specifics on when the first event might be played with the roof open, although he said it would be at some point during the Falcons’ and Atlanta United’s 2017 seasons.

Well then! The Falcons season runs through December, so sounds like the roof will definitely be operational by then. Of course, Cannon said in April he expected the roof to be operational by the start of the season, not the end, so he has a bit of a record in the wishful-thinking department. I’m not going to mention that Montreal’s Olympic Stadium roof was supposed to retract at first, too, but never really managed it — oh whoops, looks like I just did.

FC Cincy mulling Kentucky tax kickbacks to pay its entire stadium cost, and other week’s news

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All the news that wasn’t fit to print this week:

  • FC Cincinnati now wants the Port Authority of Greater Cincinnati to own its stadium since Hamilton County doesn’t want to. (Does “own” mean “pay for”? Reply hazy, ask again later.) Or maybe Newport, Kentucky, since, according to team president and former city council members Jeff Berding, that would allow the team to recoup its entire $100 million through tax increment financing kickbacks of property taxes paid on the property. How would it generate a whole $100 million in TIFs? Reply hazy, ask again later.
  • Would-be Seattle arena builder Chris Hansen hired University of Washington public finance professor Justin Marlowe in May to compare the economic impact of his Sodo arena proposal to that of the KeyArena renovation plan, and he has issued his report, which says that the Sodo plan would create three times as much tax revenue for Seattle ($103 million over 35 years vs. $34 million for Key). On the other hand, the Key plan would include some kind of sharing of arena revenues, though that wouldn’t kick in until the Key developers got their share, and, yeah, basically it’s a muddle. On the whole, it seems to give the edge to Hansen’s plan, if only because that arena would pay property taxes, but I’d need to sit and break down the math to say exactly by how much, and I’ve been waiting for time to do that all week, so clearly it’s not happening. Reader exercise!
  • Oakland A’s executive VP Billy Beane promised that once the team gets a new stadium, it will stop trading all its decent players once they start to get expensive: “There’s only one way to open a stadium successfully, and that’s with a good, young team. … Really what’s been missing the last 20 years is keeping these players. We need to change that narrative by creating a good team and ultimately committing to keep them around so that when people buy a ticket, they know that the team is going to be around for a few years.” Which could make sense if a new stadium draws enough fans that having a winning team boosts revenues enough to pay for player salaries, though we’ve heard this song and dance before elsewhere.
  • The Nashville Sounds‘ new stadium was supposed to cost taxpayers $37 million, but it ended up costing $91 million.
  • What does $74 million in public subsidies buy Minnesota Timberwolves fans and staff? New seats, new restrooms, new locker rooms, an ice floor that doesn’t leak, two new loading docks, and a big glass wall, because everybody’s gotta have one of those.
  • The athletes’ village from the 2016 Rio Olympics is now a wasteland of unsold condos, because everything the Olympics touches turns to trash.
  • A homeless camp has arisen on the site of the planned Las Vegas Raiders stadium. Make your own metaphors.

Las Vegas Raiders to have fans park in Idaho, and other Friday stadium news

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I’ve been busy this morning working on further research into Jeffrey Loria’s Miami Marlins windfall for an article set to run at Vice Sports on Monday, so rather than let the day slip away entirely, let’s do another round of news briefs:

Harris County demands repayment for Houston Super Bowl costs, told “sorry, too late”

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Harris County spent $1.3 million on security and other support for Super Bowl LI in Houston, and now county officials are asking that the NFL — or really, the Super Bowl Host Committee, a nonprofit that acts as conduit for Super Bowl spending — reimburse them. Which, unfortunately, they didn’t think to ask for in their contract for the event, and the host committee says no backsies:

Super Bowl Host Committee officials say they would like to reimburse taxpayers but are not obligated to because the county did not, in its offers of support for the weeklong event, negotiate that it be compensated or repaid by organizers. The city of Houston did and has been repaid $5.5 million by the host committee…

“It is very shortsighted,” said Harris County Precinct 4 Commissioner Jack Cagle. “There will be future events, future Super Bowls.”

Yes, there will! And Harris County is welcome to try to negotiate repayment of costs for future events, though given the NFL’s typical demands for being allowed to host the game, good luck with that. (Really, the city of Houston should be applauded for even getting repayment for its security costs, as well as for turning down NFL demands for $50 million in renovations to a nearly-new stadium and still landing the game.)

Meanwhile, does the Houston Chronicle’s report include unverified claims of the massive windfall Houston allegedly received from the game? Of course it does:

Super Bowl organizers tout some $347 million in economic impact from the game, the amount visitors spent while in Houston.

And how much would have been spent by the would-be visitors who steered clear of Houston because of the Super Bowl? You know, like happened the year before in Santa Clara? Nah, it says $347 million in a popup right on the host committee’s website, it’s gotta be true, right?

Stadium architects dream of holographic players, and other Friday news

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Hey, know what we haven’t done in a while? A Friday news roundup. Let’s do one of those now!

Happy weekend, everybody!