Category Archives: NFL

Friday roundup: Potential Raiders homes for 2019, ranked (okay, actually not ranked)

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Man, who opened the stadium news floodgates this week? Here it is almost noon on Friday and I still haven’t gotten to the news roundup — okay, know what, less whining, let’s just get right to it:

  • The city of Oakland filed its antitrust suit against the Raiders as promised this week, which means it’s time for a list of places the Raiders could play next year if they are forced to leave Oakland in a huff. “Do a multi-week residency in London and play the rest of the season on the road” is one I hadn’t heard before, anyway.
  • New York’s Empire State Development Corporation approved its draft environmental report on a new New York Islanders arena at Belmont Park, and it basically comes down to “yeah, traffic is already bad and it’s going to get worse, we’ll try to figure something out but don’t hold your breath.” The state will also provide a whole two Long Island Rail Road trains to take fans to and from games, which will require new switches to deal with the massive mess that is that train interchange, for which “it is also expected that [the arena developers] will contribute to LIRR and MTA funding,” which isn’t exactly the same as saying the developers will pay for it.
  • Tottenham Hotspur‘s long-delayed stadium is still delayed, but at least now fans can enjoy drone footage of the place they’re not being allowed to set foot in.
  • The National Parks Conservation Association was “shocked” to learn that Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan wants to take 300 acres of federal parkland to use for a new Washington NFL team stadium. “I have talked to lower-level Park Service employees who are just as shocked as I am about this,” said the organization’s Chesapeake and Virginia programs director, Pam Goddard. “We are vehemently opposed.” Hogan has said that no public money would be used for the stadium plan, but public land and building out sewer and power lines into federal parkland, now that’s another story.
  • Residents of South Boston want the New England Revolution to stay offa their lawns with any stadium plans.
  • NBA commissioner Adam Silver wants more NBA-ready arenas in Latin America so the NBA can play occasional regular season games there, but didn’t offer to help pay for any, that’d be crazy, and does he look crazy?

 

Tom Boswell hates stadium subsidies, but only for team owners he hates

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I will freely admit, I got kind of excited when I saw that the Washington Post had run an article titled “The Real Winner of Redskins Stadium Derby Will Be Whoever Doesn’t Get It.” (The headline has since been changed, but the original is preserved in the URL.) The idea that the best-case scenario for residents of a municipality or state — especially in a region where many of them butt up against each other, like in the D.C. area — is for a team to build a stadium just across the state or city line, allowing you to still attend games but not have the pay the construction bills, is one that’s been discussed here at length, so I was eager to read what the essay said.

Then I saw that the author was Thomas Boswell, the longtime Post sports columnist who memorably wrote of the Nationals stadium deal not to worry about more than $700 million in public costs because “Santa says we win,” and I downgraded my expectations. Which was a good thing, because man is this article all over the place:

  • Boswell really doesn’t like team owner Daniel Snyder: I mean, nobody does, but Boswell is especially ticked that Snyder is negotiating with both Maryland and D.C. officials at the same time for stadium deals, which means the Post columnist must really hate his boss.
  • The team is bad: Let’s check out the NFL standings … okay, 6-7 isn’t that terrible, but it is bad, and they haven’t been that good in recent memory, so fair enough for fans to be gripey. But the corollary would be that if the team were winning Super Bowls it would deserve public money, which isn’t a road one really wants to go down.
  • Snyder is asking for more than other D.C. sports team owners: “D.C. has been fortunate. Abe Pollin built his own arena. D.C. found a way to get suburbanites to pay for a big chunk of its new park by slapping stiff taxes on all Nationals tickets and food to help pay off ballpark bonds.” Um, no: Less than a third of the public cost of the Nats stadium was paid for by stadium taxes, and less than half of that was via new taxes “slapped on” on top of existing ones, and where I come from one-sixth is not “a big chunk.” Also, don’t forget that D.C. just supplied the biggest MLS stadium subsidy in history, so “fortunate” is pretty much the wrong word as well.

I know, I know, I shouldn’t be cranky about any article that points up the stupidity of throwing cash at a pro sports team owner, regardless of how badly the argument is made. But arguments matter, too, especially when they put forward the notion that the problem with allowing rich guys to dump their stadium costs on taxpayers while raking in all the revenues is that we’re allowing the wrong rich guys to take advantage of this. Where are those vaunted Washington Post opinion fact-checkers when you need them?

D.C., Snyder working on secret deal to secure RFK site for an NFL stadium

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D.C. officials are reportedly working on a secret plan with Republican Congressional leaders to insert a measure into the federal spending bill that would … do something for Washington’s NFL team owner Daniel Snyder in its efforts to build a new football stadium on the site of RFK Stadium, though it’s not entirely clear what, because “secret,” remember?

Developing the RFK site, which is on federally owned land along the Anacostia River, is politically fraught. The city controls the land only through 2038 under a National Park Service lease that states the land must be used for “stadium purposes” or “recreational facilities, open space, or public outdoor recreation opportunities” only, precluding commercial development.

According to one congressional official and a D.C. official, the language under consideration would extend the existing lease for 99 years and remove the recreation-only language, thus opening the site to other, commercial development.

On the face of it, that doesn’t sound like a huge concession from the feds — just giving D.C. more time and leeway over what to do with the land. But it also doesn’t seem to have much to do with a federal spending bill, and the whole behind-closed-doors aspect is suspicious as well, which is probably why the local advocacy group Greater Greater Washington is sounding the alarm about it.

As a reminder, the stadium Snyder wants to build would look like this:

Yup.

In totally related news, it was revealed that Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has negotiated a memorandum of understanding with the Department of the Interior to obtain federal land near National Harbor south of D.C. with the intent of possibly using it for an NFL stadium. This is certainly starting to look like it has the makings of a bidding war, and one where both sides’ bids are being helped along by the federal government to boot. But I guess who can put a price tag on snowball fights?

Friday roundup: Cincy stadiums still gobbling tax money, XFL to use old Rangers stadium, Crew stadium to require $50m+ in public cash

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So very very much more stadium and arena news from this week:

Friday roundup: Buffalo saber-rattling, Edmonton parking fee shortfall, Chicago music venues go to war against soccer plans

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And in other news of the week:

  • This was actually last week, but I missed it then: Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait has led the city council in voting to conduct a new appraisal of the Angel Stadium property as Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno prepares to opt out of his team’s lease next year. Councilmember Kris Murray, one of the two no votes, argued that this was tantamount to telling the Angels to leave; Tait replied that knowing how much the land was worth would be crucial to any stadium negotiations the incoming mayor will have with Moreno. The Gang of Four is going to miss Tom Tait.
  • The owners of the Buffalo Bills and Sabres have hired consultants CAA ICON and architecture firm Populous to “give us options” for renovating or replacing the teams’ existing venues. This is not necessarily the first step toward demanding new buildings, but it’s more of a step than the Pegulas have taken thus far, so certainly bears watching.
  • The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have been giving away unused tickets for free to their season ticket holders, to try to fill up the seats at their underattended games. Finally something that Los Angeles Chargers fans can point and laugh at! Both of them!
  • The $8.7 million a year that Edmonton was projecting to bring in from parking fees outside the Oilers‘ new arena turns out to be somewhat less: just $2.5 million a year, leaving the city with a roughly $57 million hole in its arena budget. City councillor Jon Dziadyk immediately leaped into action, blaming the reduced parking fees on people not wanting to drive downtown because there are too many bike lanes.
  • Hey, remember that minor-league soccer stadium a major Chicago developer wanted to build as part of a major Chicago development, originally pegged to luring Amazon to town but now with a life of its own? Turns out the whole thing would be funded by tax increment financing kickbacks, and would include three to five new concert venues to be run by the entertainment giant Live Nation that local concert venue operators say would drive their non-subsidized clubs out of business. The Chicago Tribune reports that the fledgling Chicago Independent Venue League “already had its new logo, a peregrine falcon wrapped with a snake, printed on black tee-shirts,” which honestly is going to be tough for any soccer team to top.

People in L.A. still buying Chargers tickets, refusing to actually go see Chargers play

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The Los Angeles Chargers played a home game yesterday, which means it’s time to play fun with empty seats at Chargers games:

The announced sellout, while embarrassing for a game where most of the actual seats were empty, at least gives us some more info about what’s going on here, especially coupled with the news that seats were available on StubHub for as little as $9. Clearly people are buying tickets to Chargers games; they just have no interest in using them. Which means somebody — either Chargers fans in L.A., if they exist, or ticket brokers in L.A. — gobbled up season tickets in hopes of landing season tickets at the Chargers’ new home when it opens in 2020. So maybe everyone is just waiting for the new stadium before they’ll go see Chargers games — though no matter how nice it is, you have to figure it’s still less enticing than seeing a game right now for $9, especially with the Chargers actually playing well this season.

The more likely theory is that nobody in L.A. cares much about the Chargers, and the people getting on line for season tickets are going to end up either taking a bath on them or trying to sell them all to out-of-town fans. Or hoping that Elon Musk builds a tunnel to San Diego.

 

Friday roundup: Tampa won’t divert road money to Rays stadium (probably), Columbus may spend $100m on Crew stadium, Anaheim signs Ducks lease extension as new mayor vows to placate Angels

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You know who the real turkeys are this week? Nah, my heart isn’t in making Thanksgiving puns, just read the news, folks:

  • Three of seven Hillsborough County commissioners have promised that a new sales tax for transportation projects won’t mean diverting money from the existing transportation project to, say, a Tampa Bay Rays stadium, which the mathematically inclined will notice isn’t actually a majority of the county board. It’s still not super likely that the county will try to raid transportation funds to pay for a stadium, unless maybe it’s for transportation costs related to one, and there’s still several hundred million dollars in construction costs unaccounted for, but anyway it’s worth keeping at least half an eye on as we head toward the team’s December 31 lease opt-out deadline.
  • A paid consultant working on a new downtown arena for Saskatoon says it could have a “catalytic effect,” because of course he does, really, Global News, you ran an entire article that’s just interviewing one guy employed on the project? For this you want me to disable my ad blocker?
  • Forbes’ Mike Ozanian reports that “a person with knowledge of the deal to keep Major League Soccer’s Columbus Crew in that city” says the new owners will pay $150 million for the franchise and spend $150 million toward a new downtown stadium, while “the public would foot the other $100 million.” Nobody else seems to be reporting on this, so maybe we should wait to be sure that Ozanian didn’t get his plus and minus signs mixed up again.
  • The Atlantic’s Rick Paulas suggests that we end stadium extortion by forcing pro sports leagues to massively expand and then institute promotion and relegation, which would sort of work, if there were an easy way to accomplish this through antitrust legislation, which you’d think if Congress could manage that they could manage the much more straightforward measure of taxing sports subsidies out of existence, but who knows, maybe a “market-based” solution would go over better in these times, sure, what the hell. “Of course, cities could also elect leadership that will defend them against bad deals,” notes Paulas, which isn’t a bad idea either.
  • Anaheim has signed a lease extension to keep the Ducks in town through 2048, involving the city selling the team 16 acres of land for $10 million — which if the stymied Angels deal is any guide would probably be a small discount, though Anaheim officials claim it’s market value — but the city will get a cut of arena profits after the first $6 million a year instead of the first $12 million, a threshold that’s never been hit. There are a lot of (small) moving pieces here, but I’m willing to say this is probably not too bad a deal, especially compared to some of the much, much worse lease extensions that cities have agreed to. Next is to to see about getting Angels owner Arte Moreno to accept the same logic, now that newly elected mayor Harry Sidhu is vowing to change “the hostile political environment in Anaheim” and “keep the Angels in Anaheim where they belong,” okay, Anaheim residents are probably going to have to settle for just a good Ducks deal.
  • Atlanta Falcons COO Greg Beadles tells NPR it’s not team owner greed that causes stadium food prices to be so high, it’s just that after teams force concessions companies to bid as high as possible for stadium contracts, the only way they can make money is to charge through the nose for food! Anyway, NPR gets busy talking to fans at a Falcons game about whether they’re happy the team lowered its food prices, and they’re happy about it, so no time to fact-check whether team execs’ statements make any damn sense. Free refills on soda, woohoo!

Friday roundup: Possible Suns arena renovation funding plan, A’s and Rays still promising stadium news by year’s end (but don’t hold your breath)

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When it rains, it pours, and this week provided a deluge of stadium news:

Pittsburgh and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad sports team impact study

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Check it out, the owners of the Pittsburgh Penguins, Steelers, and Pirates, seeking $800,000 a year in county money for a slush fund for improvements to their venues, have teamed up to pay for a study showing how much the teams contribute to the city’s economy, and their hired hands have determined: a hell of a lot! $6 billion over five years’ worth of a lot! Do we dare try to analyze their methodology without actually seeing the report itself, because the teams haven’t released that? I’m game if you are! Let’s begin with this from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s article on the report:

They commissioned accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to produce an economic impact study that measures their value on several fronts, including direct and indirect spending, tax revenue and jobs.

That’s not a good sign: PwC is an accounting firm, not an economic analysis firm, so it’s unlikely they tried to account for the substitution effect whereby if Pittsburgh residents didn’t have pro sports to spend their money on, they wouldn’t just stuff it under their mattresses instead. A serious economic impact study would look at, say, spending during years when there’s a labor stoppage vs. spending during years when all the teams are playing, but we can probably safely assume that didn’t happen here.

[Penguins CEO David] Morehouse said the teams brought nearly 4 million people, counting concerts, to the city in 2017 to eat at restaurants, to stay at hotels, and to partake in other activities.

“Counting concerts”? How are the teams credited with people in Pittsburgh going to concerts? (People even go to concerts in cities with no major-league sports teams! It’s a true fact!) And the total attendance of the three teams in 2017 was only about 3.2 million, so clearly a lot of these people “brought to the city” were already in the city, which makes bringing them there not such an impressive accomplishment.

“You can’t just talk about Pittsburgh’s revitalization and then say these greedy sports bastards over here. I mean, if you’re going to tell the positive story about what’s happening in Pittsburgh, we’re part of it and we shouldn’t be the ones having to say it,” [Morehouse] said.

“But if we’re going to have to say it, we’re going to say it with the largest numbers we can possibly justify! Wait, did I say that last part out loud?”

Frank Coonelly, the Pirates president, doubts Pittsburgh would be one of 20 finalists for Amazon’s second headquarters if it did not have pro sports teams. Only one finalist for the online retailer’s new location — Austin — is without at least one pro sports team in its region.

This is not actually true: Montgomery County, Maryland, isn’t home to any pro sports teams either, nor is northern Virginia, though I suppose one could squint and give them credit for the teams nearby in D.C. But mostly, this is selection bias: Amazon is looking for a major urban area to put its new headquarters in, and there simply aren’t that many major urban areas without major sports teams: There’s Greenville and Grand Rapids, I suppose, but somehow I don’t think they would have made the cut even if they had acquired teams. (Oklahoma City and Buffalo, which are similar sized, didn’t.)

The GumGum analysis found the three teams generate 513.3 million in “combined impressions” a year, whether through TV broadcasts, social media, or print publications.

To get that kind of “postcard” exposure — whether it’s shots of the city skyline, the bridges, or other local landmarks — through paid advertising would cost nearly $41.5 million.

So basically the teams want to be credited for every time they got the name “Pittsburgh” mentioned in the national media, regardless of whether it was in a positive or negative light. I could note that there are other things that got Pittsburgh mentioned nationally lately that you really don’t want to start crediting for ad impressions, but I probably shouldn’t go there.

When the Penguins were fighting for a new arena a dozen years ago, a move to Kansas City made more sense — the deal was better and the city had a larger population, Mr. Morehouse said.

But, but, your own owner said it was a bluff! Get on the same page here, guys!

Friday roundup: Terrible concerts, new Yankees garage costs, and why Phoenix’s ex-mayor is glad he didn’t build a Cardinals stadium

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Welcome to the first-ever weekly stadium news roundup to kick off with a review of a terrible Ed Sheeran concert:

  • The Minnesota Vikings‘ $1 billion stadium still sounds like crap for concerts, reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune in its review of an Ed Sheeran show last Saturday: “Anytime Sheeran slapped out a beatnik-funky drum beat on his guitar and put it on repeat, such as ‘New Man’ or the pre-encore finale ‘Sing,’ it sounded hopelessly mucky and un-funky, sort of like a kitchen-sink garbage disposal trying to clear out gallons of half-dried concrete.” Time for Zygi Wilf to demand a new one yet? Only 28 years to go on their lease!
  • Speaking of concerts, CBC News has a chart of top touring acts that have skipped Saskatoon while playing in other cities in recent years — ostensibly because Saskatoon’s arena is too old (30 years! even older than Ed Sheeran!) and too far out of the center of town and has too antiquated a rigging system — but mostly it’s a reminder of how many arena acts are on their last legs: Paul McCartney and Barbra Streisand and Black Sabbath all played other Canadian cities but not Saskatoon? How will the city ever prepare for the future! (Also, Saskatoon’s bigger problem might just be that it’s Canada’s 19th-largest city — I bet Paul and Barbra didn’t play Lubbock, Texas, either, which is about the same population.)
  • The Miami Dolphins stadium’s revenues were up 39.7% last year, and expenses were only up 31%, so guess owner Stephen Ross’s $350 million renovation is paying off (though a large chunk of that was actually paid for by Miami-Dade County and by the NFL). It makes it all the more puzzling why the county handed over additional subsidies last summer that could be worth as much as $57.5 million, but actually, since the stadium renovations were already done and paid for by then, it would be puzzling even if Ross were losing money on the thing. Florida, man.
  • Here’s a fun Guardian article on what makes a good soccer stadium. Not sure there’s one takeaway other than “Design them to be good places to watch the match with seats close to the action, and try to make them fit into their immediate surroundings,” but that’s more than most U.S. stadium designers do, anyway.
  • Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert and Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores still want an MLS expansion team in Detroit, and while they’ve determined that removing the Lions stadium’s fixed roof and building a retractable one like MLS asked would be prohibitively expensive, they have offered to spend $95 million on a training field and other soccer fields throughout the city, though Crain’s Detroit notes that it’s “unclear” if that spending “would use any public funding.” If it would, this will be an interesting test in how badly MLS wants its teams to play in soccer-friendly outdoor stadiums, and how much it just wants new owners who’ve shown they can extract cash from their local municipalities.
  • Hey, check it out, it’s an NPR report on how Worcester, Massachusetts has been undergoing a boom in development and influx of new residents thanks to its cheap rents compared to nearby Boston, to the point where some locals are worried that they’ll be priced out. Is it too late for Worcester to take back that $100 million it’s spending on a Red Sox Triple-A stadium that was supposed to be needed to put the city on the map?
  • Who says that new stadiums don’t transform the areas around them? Why, the SkinnyFats restaurant near the new Las Vegas Raiders stadium just added a new craft beer tap room! That’s gotta be worth $750 million.
  • The deal for the new New York Yankees stadium included new parking lots that were mostly to be paid for by a nonprofit shell corporation that was to own them and collect parking revenues, but now that it turns out nobody wants to pay $45 to park for Yankees games when there are plenty of cheaper parking options plus multiple subway and commuter rail lines nearby, the company is $100 million in default on rent and taxes to the city, with no real hopes of ever paying it back. I should probably add this to the “city costs” section of my Yankee Stadium subsidy spreadsheet, but I don’t have time this morning, so just mentally note that city taxpayers have now put up almost $800 million toward a stadium that was sold as involving “no public subsidies,” with state and federal subsidies putting the total taxpayer bill at nearly $1.3 billion.
  • Former Phoenix mayor Skip Rimsza says one of his proudest accomplishments is not building a downtown stadium for the Arizona Cardinals, since instead the city got to use the land to build a biomedical campus that provides way more jobs and economic activity than a football stadium. Opportunity cost in action! I’d love to write an article on all the things that cities didn’t get to build because they focused on erecting new sports facilities, but sadly my Einstein-Rosen Bridge portal is on the fritz.