Green Bay Packers – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: Chargers L.A. move still a disaster, Raiders still lack 2019 home, Rays still short of stadium cash

October 5, 2018 Neil deMause

I’ve been busy getting my post-Village Voice life rolling this week — here’s my first article for Gothamist, on how to fight Amazon’s monopoly power, and I’ve also started a Twitter account for following ex-Voice news writers as we keep up our work for other outlets — but Friday mornings are sacred, for they are stadium and arena news roundup time:

The Los Angeles Chargers are still doing a great job of selling tickets to opposing fans, with the San Francisco 49ers becoming the latest team this week to play a road game that felt more like a home game. “They can’t fill an MLS stadium with their own fans in Year 2 — how are they supposed to fill a 70,000-plus-seat stadium in a couple years?” remarks USA Today’s Andrew Joseph. “The move from San Diego looks worse and worse by the week.” But the team’s relocation decision was made for such well-considered reasons!
Universities are spending a whole lot of money on college football stadiums, and here’s a list of the spendiest ones.
Erie County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz was asked about building a stadium for the Buffalo Bills, and said it would cost about $1 billion, which is too expensive for either the team’s owners or the county to front. This should be obvious to anyone who reads the news, but I guess in a world where many elected officials pretend that stadium money can be spontaneously generated from rotting meat, it’s worth a reminder.
The nonprofit that owns the Green Bay Packers is looking to get into real-estate development near Lambeau Field, something that a local real estate attorney says is part of a trend for needing to make “a destination out of the facilities” to keep people from sitting at home and watching on TV. (Bloomberg also reports that the Packers are envisioning for-sale apartments as being marketed as “second homes for Packers fans across the country,” which is either fabulously optimistic or a sign that capitalism has gone very, very wrong.) I’d say it’s more that real-estate development can be extremely lucrative, especially when your ownership of a sports team gives you a leg up on getting access to cheap land, but the “more people are sitting at home watching on TV” thing is definitely a thing — though increasingly more people are sitting at home looking at YouTube on their phones, which could present an even bigger challenge to sports marketers.
The new arena of the Detroit Pistons and Red Wings will no longer issue or accept printed tickets, meaning you’d better have a smartphone and keep it charged when heading to a game. I guess this saves some trees, but it probably also makes it easier for the teams to track ticketholders’ data, which is what it’s all about these days.
I missed it a couple of weeks ago, but the Texas Rangers have released a seating cross-section for their new stadium, and it’s somewhat misleading — as you can see, they make the new design look a bit better by moving the front row of seats closer to home plate, which doesn’t necessarily help depending on what the rest of the stadium geometry is like — but also somewhat instructive, in that the team is definitely moving the upper deck closer to the field by having it overhang the middle and lower sections more, which is a promising development. Not that this necessarily means Globe Life Field will have great cheap seats — Globe Life Park, its predecessor, has an insanely distant upper deck, at least from what I’ve been able to determine from watching games on TV — but at least it’s a move in the right direction. Of course, this is only a cross-section at one point in the stands — we still don’t know what’ll be up with the seating sections suspended in midair.
John Romano of the Tampa Bay Times got out his calculator and realized that even if Tampa’s tax-district-surcharge stadium-funding plan for the Rays somehow works, the stadium will probably have about a $300 million funding hole, which is a lot. “So is the stadium in trouble?” writes Romano. “It sure seems that way. And I don’t see a simple way out.” Which isn’t news, but given that Romano has tended to be fairly sympathetic to Rays ownership’s stadium demands over the years, it’s notable that even he’s pointing out the Rays stadium’s new clothes.
The Oakland Raiders definitely won’t be playing in Las Vegas’s Sam Boyd Stadium temporarily next year, and they probably won’t be playing in the Bay Area either, so that leaves maybe San Diego or San Antonio or who the hell knows. Road team! Road team!

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The week that Newt Gingrich called for non-profit sports team ownership

May 5, 2014 Neil deMause

And then there’s this:

The right answer to the Clippers ownership challenge is to sell it to the people of Los Angeles. Green Bay, not billionaires, is the model

— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) May 1, 2014

Yes, that’s the Newt Gingrich, not Fake Newt Gingrich or The Real Newt Gingrich or any of those. Apparently the Donald Sterling scandal was enough to get the guy who thinks that the solution to corporate tax dodging is to lower corporate taxes to a rate they won’t cheat on to decide that for-profit ownership is wrong for the Los Angeles Clippers, because hoops belongs to the people, man. (Though given Gingrich’s past history with not-for-profits, maybe he just means a shell corporation that would pay a local rich guy to run the team.)

Anyway, it all gave ThinkProgress’s Travis Waldron a good opportunity to go on about the benefits of public and not-for-profit ownership of sports teams, which can only be a good thing:

Even if you don’t care how many games the Clippers or any other privately-owned team wins, even if you hate sports, there are benefits to fan ownership. A fan-owned team has direct ties to its community, and so it’s next to impossible that the team could pick up and move to a new city if its current home decides not to give it massive public subsidies for a new stadium. That both avoids the ugly problems that occur whenever cities fork over hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies and keeps teams from playing hop-scotch to new cities. A private owner would have moved the Packers out of Green Bay decades ago. Instead, they remain in a tiny town in Middle-of-Nowhere, Wisconsin.

Of course, the Packers did manage to get Green Bay (actually Brown County) to fork over $295 million in subsidies in 2000 by threatening to play hopscotch to a new city (or to have the NFL force them to move, or something — the threat was never quite clear), so it’s not a perfect point. But still, public ownership does have its benefits.

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Socializing sports could work, but wouldn’t necessarily end stadium subsidy demands

January 6, 2014January 30, 2014 Neil deMause

So Alex Pareene of Salon wrote an article on Friday in which he argued that the only solution to the problem of greedy, dumb sports team owners is to nationalize sports teams. It’s a legitimate argument — certainly no worse than nationalizing Facebook, especially since there you’d face a conundrum over which nation should do it — and there are plenty of examples of public- or community-owned teams that have operated successfully. But then Pareene pulls out the favorite object lesson of socialized sports everywhere, the Green Bay Packers:

We already have an example of what this would look like in the NFL with the Green Bay Packers, a publicly-owned team operated as a non-profit corporation. It has been a stunning success, with the person in charge of all football decisions having that authority not because he made a lot of money in direct marketing or real estate, or because his father owned the team, but because of his experience and expertise in football. Nationalized teams would be free of unscrupulous, meddling owners. There’s no reason why they wouldn’t continue to be massive money-makers, though now that money would be going toward the communities that follow and love the teams, and not random lucky billionaires who usually don’t even live in the same state.

First off, the Packers aren’t “publicly owned” in the sense of being owned by the public; they’re a not-for-profit owned by more than 100,000 people, which is an odd model, but probably was marginally less odd back in the 1920s when the team was first set up. Fans buy shares in the Packers, and get nothing back except the right to elect a board of directors — not altogether unlike how some European soccer teams operate, albeit through a slightly different mechanism. The team plows profits back into operating costs and a reserve fund, which currently sits at around a quarter-billion dollars.

All of which is well and good, but when Pareene suggests that Packerizing all of pro sports would help eliminate “extortionate threats to move that encourage public funding,” he’s forgetting something:

On Sept. 12, 2000, Brown County voters by a 53-47 percent margin agreed to tax themselves for the $295 million renovation of Lambeau Field, a project that Green Bay Packers leaders said was crucial to the future of the franchise…

D. Richard Parins, president of the [Brown County Taxpayers Association], said the Packers and their supporters won the campaign by threatening that the franchise would leave town otherwise. That so frightened football fans, he said, that they agreed to embrace the tax increase.

Admittedly, this might be harder to pull off if all sports teams were owned by the public, since it would make it harder for team execs to argue that they need subsidies because all the other kids are getting them. But it is a reminder that greed and self-interest aren’t the sole property of rich owners, even if rich owners are really good at them.

To really address that, you’d need to take up Pareene’s other, less flashy suggestion: national “legislation banning public funding of arenas for teams in the big four leagues.” There’s even model legislation ready to go! Though I suspect that Pareene’s suggestion that a presidential candidate could become “an instant presidential front-runner” by pushing for such a law overlooks the connection between presidential front-runnership and corporate fundraising…

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