Friday roundup: Tampa official stonewalls, Falcons get sued, Amazon is the new Olympics

Posted on October 20, 2017 by Neil deMause

Okay, let’s do this thing:

WTSP reporter Noah Pransky keeps trying to ask Hillsborough County commissioner Ken Hagan about how he plans to pay for a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium, and Hagan keeps walking away, and the video of this is fricking hilarious.
An Atlanta attorney has filed suit against Fulton County, claiming that the Atlanta Falcons are ducking $13 million in property tax payments a year by having the state own their new stadium in name only while the team collects all revenues from it. Which, absolutely that’s what’s going on, but since that’s how pretty much every other pro sports team does it as well, good luck getting a court to rule that it’s illegal.
Baseball America’s Tracy Ringolsby, who in recent years has made a specialty of griping that MLB teams should just move if fans won’t come out to see them in sufficient numbers, is reporting that baseball could soon expand to Montreal and Portland, according to … “a building consensus.” A consensus of whom? That’s for Ringolsby to know and you to find out.
The Golden State Warriors are trying to skip out on $40 million in debt still owed on their Oakland arena, on the grounds that their lease only requires the team’s owners to repay it if they break their lease, not if they let it expire in 2019. “This predicament is entirely of the OACCA’s own making, as it bargained for a 20-year term in the license agreement while issuing 30-year bonds,” wrote the team’s attorney. I really need to quit this whole blogging thing and hire myself out as a stadium lease beta tester, don’t I?
California has approved covering up to $270 million in cost overruns from the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, if the city runs through its own $270 million first. Not that there will necessarily be this much in cost overruns, mind you, but that’s now $540 million that California taxpayers could be on the hook for; the idea that maybe L.A. should have said to the IOC, “Hey, you have no other options, we’ll happily host the games but no dice on that cost-overrun guarantee” is sounding better and better.
Speaking of taxpayers, Splinter has an article on how we should all stop saying “taxpayer money” and say “public money” instead, since otherwise it implies that only rich people should have a say in how public money is spent, since they pay the most in taxes. I get their point, but given that we’re largely talking about state and local taxes here, and poor and middle-income people actually pay a way higher percentage of their income in those taxes than the rich, I’m going to keep using both terms, thanks.
And since we’re on the topic of taxpayer money in general, I wrote an article for the Village Voice yesterday on how Amazon is trying to shake down cities and states for massive subsidies in order to be selected to host the company’s new second headquarters, and looks to be succeeding. Much like with the Olympics, everyone in the 100 or so cities vying for the prize should probably be hoping real hard right now that they lose, because the price of winning could just bankrupt you.

Friday roundup: A’s pollution woes, Falcons roof woes, Hansen email woes, and more!

Posted on October 13, 2017 by Neil deMause

Whole lot of news leftovers this week, so let’s get right to it:

It’s not certain yet how serious the environmental cleanup issues at the Oakland A’s proposed Peralta Community College stadium site are, but anytime you have the phrases “the amount of hazardous materials in the ground is unclear” and “two possible groundwater plumes impacted by carcinogens” in one article, that’s not a good sign. Meanwhile, local residents are concerned about gentrification and traffic and all the other things that local residents would be concerned about.
There’s another new poll in Calgary, and this time it’s Naheed Nenshi who’s leading Bill Smith by double digits, instead of the other way around. This poll’s methodology is even dodgier than the last one — it was of people who signed up for an online survey — so pretty much all we can say definitely at this point is no one knows. Though it does seem pretty clear from yet another poll that whoever Calgarians are voting for on Monday, it won’t be because of their position on a Flames arena.
The Atlanta Falcons‘ retractable roof won’t be retracting this season, and may even not be ready for the start of next season. These things are hard, man.
Nevada is preparing to sell $200 million in bonds (to be repaid by a state gas tax) to fund highway improvements for the new Las Vegas Raiders stadium, though Gov. Brian Sandoval says the state would have to make the improvements anyway. Eventually. But then he said, “I just don’t want us to do work that has to be undone,” so your guess is as good as mine here.
Pawtucket is preparing to scrape off future increases in property tax receipts for a 60- to 70-acre swath of downtown and hand them over to the Pawtucket Red Sox for a new stadium, an amount they expect to total at least $890,000 a year. Because downtown Pawtucket would never grow without a new baseball stadium, and there’s no chance of a shortfall that would cause Pawtucket to dip into its general fund, and nobody should think too hard about whether if minor-league baseball stadiums are really so great for development, this wouldn’t mean that property tax revenues should be expected to fall in the part of the city that the PawSox would be abandoning. Really, it’ll all be cool, man, you’ll see.
Somebody asked Tim Leiweke what he thinks of building a new stadium for the Tampa Bay Rays for some reason, and given that he’s a guy that is in the business of building new stadiums, it’s unsurprising that he thinks it’s a great idea. Though I am somewhat surprised that he employed the phrase “Every snowbird in Canada will want to watch the Toronto Blue Jays when they come and play,” given that having to depend on fans of road teams to fill the seats is already kind of a problem.
The study showing that spending $30 million in city money on a $30-million-or-so Louisville City F.C. stadium would pay off for the city turns out to have been funded by the soccer team, and city councilmembers are not happy. “There’s something there that someone doesn’t want us to find,” said councilmember Kevin Kramer. “I just don’t know what it is.” And College of the Holy Cross economics professor Victor Matheson chimed in, “I expect for-profit sports team owners to generate absurdly high economic estimate numbers in order to con gullible city council members into granting subsidies.” I don’t know where you could possibly be getting that idea, Victor!
Congress is considering a bill to eliminate the use of federally tax-exempt bonds for sports facilities, and … oh, wait, it’s the same bill that Cory Booker and James Lankford introduced back in June, and which hasn’t gotten a committee hearing yet in either the House or the Senate. It has four sponsors in the House, though, and two in the Senate, so only 263 more votes to go!
A Miami-Dade judge has dismissed a lawsuit charging that the sale of public land to David Beckham’s MLS franchise illegally evaded competitive bidding laws, then immediately suggested that the case will really be decided on appeal: “I found this to be an extremely challenging decision. Brighter minds than me will tell me whether I was right or wrong.” MLS maybe should be having backup plans for a different expansion franchise starting next season, just a thought.
The New York Times real estate section is doing what it does best, declaring the new Milwaukee Bucks arena to be “a pivotal point for a city that has struggled with a decline in industrial activity,” because cranes, dammit, okay? Maybe somebody should have called over to the Times sports section to fact-check this?
And last but not least, Chris Hansen is now saying that his SoDo arena plan missed a chance at reconsideration by the Seattle city council because the council’s emails requesting additional information got caught in his spam filter or something. If that’s not a sign that it’s time to knock off for the weekend, I don’t know what is.

Friday roundup: Raiders talk lease extension, Rams attendance woes may set record, and more!

Posted on September 29, 2017 by Neil deMause

Here’s what you missed this week, or rather what I missed, or rather what I saw at the time but left till Friday because there are only so many hours in the week, man:

The Oakland Raiders are negotiating with the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum Authority for a lease extension that would let them play in Oakland through 2020, despite a Las Vegas stadium being in the works to open that year. Which makes sense for the Raiders — they need to be sure of a place to play even if there are stadium construction delays — but for Oakland’s sake I hope the authority drives a hard bargain with Raiders owner Mark Davis, because if you’re going to charge through the nose on stadium rent, negotiating with a team that has literally nowhere else to go when you have no real incentive to want them to stay on a lame-duck deal is exactly the time to do it.
The Los Angeles Rams are on pace to set a new record for the biggest ever season-to-season attendance drop for a team that didn’t move to a new stadium, and Fivethirtyeight thinks maybe it’s because people are going to see Chargers games instead. I’d go with “honeymoon wore off fast after the team went 4-12,” but either way it ain’t pretty.
The city of Boise is considering spending between $33 million and $45 million on a minor-league baseball stadium for the Class A Boise Hawks that could also host soccer and it’d have other private development around it and generate “$1 billion worth of investment,” according to a study by Convention, Sports, & Leisure, which somehow keeps getting hired to study these things. No word yet on Boise seeking an MLS team to play there, but you just know that’s coming.
Nashville Mayor Megan Barry is set to announce Monday a plan for an MLS stadium that she says relies on “private-public” financing, because “public-private” puts too much emphasis on the public part, and she doesn’t want you thinking about that, even though she hasn’t released any actual details yet of how much the public would be on the hook for. This isn’t going to make the Deadspin writers any happier, Mayor Barry.
As promised, the New York Islanders and NYC F.C. both submitted bids yesterday for land near Belmont Park that they’d like to build an arena on, though neither the teams nor the state Empire State Development Corporation that solicited the bids would provide any details. (I asked.) NYC F.C. is also still looking at sites in Queens and the Bronx, and Nassau County also wants the Belmont site for that Amazon headquarters that every local government in the nation thinks it’s going to land, though given Chris Christie has started the bidding at $5 billion in tax breaks, suddenly a hockey arena or soccer stadium sounds fiscally responsible by comparison.
Here’s an article on how Moline, Illinois changing the name of its arena from the iWireless Center to the TaxSlayer Center will help the city get big-name concerts because the new name “makes it sound a little more big time.” You’re welcome.

Conservatives threaten to yank NFL stadium tax breaks if players keep making the flag cry

Posted on September 28, 2017 by Neil deMause

So the continuing uproar over how many feet athletes have to have on the ground during the national anthem rages on, with many conservatives especially rageful at the NFL, where there have been widespread instances of players taking a knee or linking arms or staying in the locker room (though other sports teams are doing these things too). And in that strange zone where libertarianish economic principles and blinkered patriotism meet, there have been increasing calls for football to be punished by having its public stadium subsidies taken away, or at least some of them:

Louisiana state Rep. Kenny Havard proposed cutting off state lease subsidies to the New Orleans Saints, which amount to somewhere between $200 million and $400 million over 15 years depending on how you count, on the grounds that “It is time for taxpayers to quit subsidizing protest on big boy playgrounds.” How he planned to do that in a contractual agreement signed four years ago, Havard didn’t say.
U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) declared, “In America, if you want to play sports you’re free to do so. If you want to protest, you’re free to do so. But you should do so on your own time and on your own dime.” Gaetz went on to gripe about the NFL’s non-profit status, which the league already gave up two years ago, though he also noted that “the public pays 70 percent of the cost of NFL stadiums,” which while true wouldn’t actually be affected by any actual legislation Gaetz was proposing.
The Daily Signal, which is extremely in favor of “free speech” when it comes to people being guaranteed the right to write conservative student newspaper columns without fear of getting angry emails from readers, noted that upset over anthem protests may “open the eyes of the public to a serious and generally unchecked issue: billionaire NFL owners sponging enormous amounts of money from taxpayers through crony capitalist schemes.” The site then provided a useful list of stats about NFL owner sponging (“$7 billion of taxpayer money” over the last two decades, which it looks like they got from Judith Grant Long’s data via this Huffington Post article), concluding with mention of the bipartisan Lankford-Booker bill to eliminate use of tax-exempt bonds for sports venues, which it said would “strip federal funding from sports teams,” which isn’t exactly right, though it would strip the largest federal subsidy.

If anger at players for calling attention to police violence and institutional racism via silent protests leads to new attention to and limits on sports stadium subsidies, that’d be good, I suppose, albeit weird: For one thing, NFL players don’t really benefit from public subsidies except indirectly (team owners get more profits, and use some of that to spend on higher player salaries). And the Lankford-Booker bill on tax-exempt bonds does seem like the most likely restriction on stadium subsidies to have a shot at passage — nobody that I can tell is talking about reviving David Minge’s bill for an excise tax on local-level subsidies, which would actually do something serious about that $7-billion-and-growing nut.

Mostly, though, this sounds like a bunch of politicians taking advantage of public anger at football players and at sports subsidies to mash the two up into, “Yeah, let’s hit them where it hurts, see!”, even if there isn’t an exact plan for how to do so. The Lankford-Booker bill still has zero other cosponsors and remains sittin’ in committee; maybe we’ll now see a rush of Congressfolk signing on if the kneeling continues on Sunday, but I’m honestly not holding my breath.

Cincy may lack cash for MLS stadium because it has too many other sports venues to subsidize

Posted on September 27, 2017 by Neil deMause

About 100 F.C. Cincinnati fans attended a Hamilton County Commission meeting last night to urge the commission to spend $100 million on a new soccer stadium for the USL team, which is hoping to land an MLS expansion franchise. County Commission President Todd Portune, however, told them that “we have more projects than we have money,” with the county facing $1.5 billion in pending capital projects. Like, the county jail is overcrowded and needs expansion, and a new waterfront development project is still mostly undeveloped, and, um:

The city’s two current major league sports teams — the Reds and the Bengals — will eventually come knocking on the county’s door for a new deal. The Bengals stadium lease with the county expires in 2026 with the Reds’ lease expiring a few years after. Combined, the two stadiums could need more than $200 million in upgrades within the next decade.

“While no one is talking about demoing these stadiums, we know there will be substantial maintenance (needs),” [Hamilton County Administrator Jeff] Alutto said.

Those leases running out are worth planning ahead for, I suppose, but it’s still a little worrisome that Hamilton County is already budgeting for stadium renovation “needs” that the teams haven’t even asked for yet. Apparently either somebody hasn’t gotten the memo that it’s okay to demand that taxpayers not take a bath on stadium projects, or else Hamilton County leaders think that Cincinnati has less leverage to keep its teams without bribing them to stay, which, okay, maybe.

That said, the rest of the county’s wish list includes a $230 million convention center expansion and a $342 million rebuild of the city’s arena, neither of which exactly seems like a “need” per se. If the only choice for Hamilton County is which dumb project for private profit to sink public money into, I can sort of see why soccer fans would feel justified in saying, “Us first!” Too bad overcrowded prisoners don’t have fan clubs.

No, the Chargers aren’t moving back to San Diego, but the NFL probably wishes they could

Posted on September 25, 2017 by Neil deMause

So it looks like the internet first exploded about the Los Angeles Chargers moving back to San Diego midway through their first season in their new home (not that they’d move midway, but the internet exploded midway — you get what I mean) came on Thursday, when longtime NFL reporter Don Banks went on the radio in San Diego to discuss this article in which he wrote that “sources privy to the league’s thinking” have indicated that “the NFL is shocked at how far south things have gone already for the relocated Chargers.” And then on the air, Banks upped the ante:

“There are people in the league, including the commissioner, they did not want to see San Diego forsaken. They would rather there be a team in San Diego. If there’s anything viable they can find to put the league back into San Diego, I think they will be in that camp strongly…

“I think a lot of people are in retrospect looking back and saying this was not a smart move, and how do we get ourselves out of it. But I don’t know that there’s a good option short of pressure on trying to force a sale.”

Because this is 2017, the news media first went crazy reporting that Banks was saying the NFL was about to move the Chargers back to San Diego, then went crazy debunking that notion that Banks didn’t even actually say. By the time of the Chargers game on Sunday — they lost again, and once again they sold out their 27,000-seat soccer stadium but lots of seats were either empty or occupied by fans of the visiting team, so many that the Chargers dispensed with team introductions for fear their players would get booed — things seemed to have largely calmed down. But now that it’s out there in the zeitgeist, is there anything at all to the idea of the NFL forcing the Chargers to throw in the towel on L.A.?

“Forcing,” almost certainly not: While the league can block a proposed move, it can’t undo one that’s already taken place. The most the other NFL owners could do, as Banks noted, would be to lean on Chargers owner Dean Spanos to sell the team, perhaps to an owner interested in moving back to San Diego. But that would mean 1) giving a team back to a city that spurned demands for a new publicly funded stadium, 2) undoing the lease that Spanos signed with Rams owner Stan Kroenke on a new stadium opening in Inglewood in 2020, which Kroenke is counting on to help pay his stadium construction costs, and 3) potentially angering Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis, who was denied a chance to move to L.A. because the Chargers had been granted dibs (though given that Davis is getting $750 million in tax money toward a new stadium in Las Vegas, maybe he doesn’t care about L.A. anymore, no matter how convenient it would make his haircuts).

The most reasonable conclusion, then, is what Banks actually said: The NFL is concerned by low levels of support for the Chargers, but doesn’t have any good options. The best bet is probably to wait until 2020 and hope that people want to go see the team once it’s in a new stadium; I guess Plan B would be to try to get San Diego to lure them back with a stadium offer of its own, and somehow use the proceeds to pay off Kroenke for his lost revenue? This is a huge mess, as one might have predicted from a process that was determined partly by Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones challenging his fellow owners to move to L.A. to show they had “big balls.” The only question now is if NFL owners finally find an agreement to unravel their L.A. misstep, what kind of ink they’ll dip their balls in to sign it.

Friday roundup: Saskatoon soccer frenzy, Phoenix hotel sale to fund Suns, and more!

Posted on September 22, 2017 by Neil deMause

And more!

A corporate consultant wants free land in Saskatoon so he can build a $20 million, 8,000-seat stadium for a soccer team in a league that only has two teams so far, but promises it’ll work out because it’ll “bring more people to downtown.” Or if that doesn’t work for the city council, maybe he’ll take something else: “My background is finance, and I’m accustomed to developing complex financing structures. We can lend some ideas and some support to the city, in how we ultimately do that together with them.” Unless, you know, maybe this is more of a Shelbyville idea.
The Atlanta Braves got approval for $40 million in subsidies for a new spring-training stadium in Sarasota County, Florida, which will hopefully not be underwater by the time it opens.
The city of Phoenix is set to vote on Tuesday on whether to sell its Sheraton Hotel to raise an estimated $255 million toward a new Suns arena. The Sheraton is reportedly bringing in $7 million a year in revenues, so I don’t actually know why anyone would pay $255 million for it, but if the city has found a sucker to buy it, they should jump at the opportunity. Then taking the windfall and handing it over to the Suns would be beyond stupid, of course.
Smith College economist Andy Zimbalist points out that it doesn’t really matter if nobody’s showing up at Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers and San Francisco 49ers games, because football stadiums are dark so many days a year anyway that they’re “not a very good economic proposition.” Woo, silver lining! Zimbalist also says that having a football team does “provide some coherence to a city’s culture,” which, you know, maybe this wasn’t really the best day to make this argument.

Rams, Chargers continue to play home games in relative privacy

Posted on September 18, 2017 by Neil deMause

NFL fever is still at an ice-cold pitch in Los Angeles, where both the Rams and Chargers saw tons of empty seats yesterday. Take it away, sports Twitter:

Kickoff at the Coliseum between the Rams and Redskins. Not many here to see it. pic.twitter.com/XAwandU2l6

— Lindsey Thiry (@LindseyThiry) September 17, 2017

@tomleykis LA continuing to be pumped about football back here. #Chargers can't even fans to show up to a 27,000 seat high school stadium! pic.twitter.com/gPiqsQ3frp

— Ray Lismon (@Raybeno11) September 17, 2017

As with last week, the empty seats are scattered throughout the stadiums, so this looks like a case of people buying tickets and then not using them, either because they’re trying to get on a season-ticket waitlist for when the teams’ new stadium opens in 2020, or because tickets are cheap enough that they figure they’ll buy a season strip and only go when there’s a good opponent and there’s nothing good on TV that day. (Or maybe just when a team they actually care about comes to town: The hottest Chargers ticket on StubHub is vs. the Oakland Raiders.) Also, by one estimate half the maybe 20,000 fans if you’re being generous at yesterday’s Chargers-Miami Dolphins game were rooting for the Dolphins, which apparently was a problem at times in San Diego, too, but still.

None of this is a crisis just yet: It can take a while to build a fan base for a relocated team, and obviously the big push is for fans to go see the teams at their new stadium in three years. Still, when you’re trying to charge record seat-license prices, you really want to see pent-up excitement about your team, and that’s not exactly what’s going on here. There’s been talk for years that L.A. football fans have been happy just to watch the best games of the week on TV without having a home rooting attachment; if so, the no-shows could be a sign that it’s going to be tough to build actual fan bases for the Rams and Chargers, beyond just having games be a thing people just want to go to when their actual favorite team from somewhere else shows up. More data points are needed, so let’s keep an eye on this throughout the season.

This week in boondoggle vivisection: Plenty of good seats available in SF, Cleveland, Ottawa

Posted on September 15, 2017 by Neil deMause

We’ll get to the weekly news roundup in a minute, but first, I need to mention this editorial from yesterday’s Globe and Mail, which makes several eminently reasonable points about how Calgary shouldn’t capitulate to the Flames owners’ extortion attempts for arena cash (“using past bad decisions to justify terrible future decisions does not qualify as logic,” “arena financing is a hamster wheel, and here is an opportunity to jump off”), and then says this:

Everyone involved should take note of a remark this week by Neil deMause, renowned stadium boondoggle vivisectionist and creator of the fieldofschemes.com website: “The number of mayors who’ve been voted out of office for standing up to sports team subsidy demands remains zero.”

That’s right, I am a major-newspaper-certified renowned boondoggle vivisectionist, y’all. Clearly it’s time to order some new business cards.

Okay, the rest of the week’s news:

The Los Angeles Rams aren’t the only California team having trouble getting fans to turn out for games in the September heat: The San Francisco 49ers are seeing so many empty seats on the sunny side of their stadium that they’ve hired architects to see if it’d be possible to add a sun shade. One problem: The stadium can’t get any taller, as it’s in the flight path of San Jose’s airport. Until then, the 49ers are handing out free water bottles and sunscreen to fans on the hot side of the stadium, which is nice and all, but probably isn’t what you want for your big marketing push. This once again points up how smart the 49ers management was to stick fans with PSLs before the team got lousy and people noticed how crappy the new stadium was for actually watching football in.
And speaking of empty seats, the Cleveland Indians won their American League–record 22nd straight game yesterday, but they still can’t sell out their ballpark, which not that long ago saw a record sellout streak of 455 straight games. Indians GM Mike Chernoff blamed Cleveland’s small size, the start of the school year, and “weekdays,” three things that apparently didn’t exist in the ’90s. At least he didn’t blame the 23-year-old stadium or demand upgrades as a solution — yet, anyway.
And also speaking of empty seats, the Ottawa Senators have begun tarping over part of their upper deck for every game, because they can’t sell tickets there. The Senators owner is already blaming his 21-year-old arena for that one (apparently the last owner built it in the wrong place), so team president Tom Anselmi was left to say: “We just need more of us to come to more games more often.” Can’t argue with that!
And also also speaking of empty seats, the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics have only sold about 5% of available tickets so far to actual fans (ticket brokers have bought up another 18%), with less than five months to go before the games start. If you’re looking to snap up a bargain to watch curling, though, be forewarned: Not all the new hotels planned for the Olympics are finished yet.
And speaking of seats that a team hopes won’t be empty, the Oakland A’s will be letting in fans for free to a game next April against the White Sox. Make jokes all you want about how dismal an A’s-White Sox matchup will be, it’s still free baseball, and you never know what you might see that you’ve never seen before.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman declared that that the scaled-down Nassau Coliseum is “not a viable option” for the New York Islanders, two weeks before the team is set to present plans to Nassau County for a new arena near Belmont Park. A total coincidence, I’m sure.
The Rhode Island state senate started hearings on a new Pawtucket Red Sox proposal yesterday, with the team owners and their allies noting that “the team’s 54-percent share of stadium costs is the highest portion of private investment in 14 AA and AAA ballparks built over the last decade,” according to the Providence Journal. What was that someone was just saying about using bad decisions to justify terrible future decisions?
Deadspin’s Drew Magary has come up with a new nickname for the Atlanta Falcons‘ new iris-roofed stadium: Megatron’s Butthole. Drew Magary needs to be put in charge of all stadium nicknames, starting immediately.

L.A. fans still really don’t want to watch the Rams play at Coliseum

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Neil deMause

I decided not to make fun of the Los Angeles Rams for reports of low attendance at their opening game of their second season back in L.A. on Sunday, because they’re playing at the L.A. Coliseum, and also they’re still the Rams. But with photographic evidence, it’s really hard not to point and laugh, at least a little:

Glad to see the Rams fans taking part in the "Dress as a seat" promotion. Looks really cool. pic.twitter.com/CdmmSydnIq

— VikingsGraphics (@VikingsGraphics) September 10, 2017

Okay, so maybe fans are just waiting to get a chance to see the Rams in their shiny new space stadium in 2020, by which point maybe the team will also be able to win more than four games in a season. (Assuming football hasn’t been banned as a health hazard by then, anyway.) Still, attendance was pretty bad last year too, so unless L.A. fans are more into seeing a fancy roof than actual football — assuming what the Rams play qualifies as actual football — this does not bode super well for the team’s plans to charge the highest price for seat licenses in recorded history.

The one interesting thing I would note is that, like last year, the empty seats are mostly distributed pretty evenly around the stadium, which would indicate fans who bought tickets but then didn’t feel like actually showing up to use them. (Tickets going unclaimed for as low as $6 on the secondary market would further support this theory.) So maybe there are lots of people in L.A. buying season tickets now with little intention of using them, but just hoping to be first in line for season tickets at the new place once it opens in another three years? If so, the Rams had better have a hell of a season in 2019 to ramp up the excitement, and/or consider backing off on those PSL prices some, because they’re going to have quite the sales drive required once it’s time to convince all those empty seats to become full ones in 2020.

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sports stadium news and analysis

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