Arizona Coyotes – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: Tokyo Olympics back on, NFL doesn’t understand vaccines, and other hygiene theater stories

January 22, 2021January 22, 2021 Neil deMause

It was yet another one of those weeks, where you finally look up from the news that’s obsessing everybody only to find that while you weren’t looking, monarch butterflies had moved to the verge of extinction. There doesn’t seem to be an end to this anytime soon — which is pretty much the motto of this website, so let’s get on with it:

Japan was reported to have decided to cancel the 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo because the pandemic won’t be over by July, then doubled down and declared that the games are definitely still on. All this is still subject to change, especially since the coronavirus itself is still subject to change, so expect the rumors and counterrumors to continue right up until the torch is lit, if a torch relay is something that can even be pulled off with social distancing.
The NFL is planning to sell 14,500 tickets to next month’s Super Bowl in Tampa, plus allow in 7,500 vaccinated health care workers for free, because as we all know, once you’re vaccinated you no longer pose a contagion risk and so are the equivalent of an empty seat in terms of viral spread. Wait, what’s that? We don’t know that at all? Oh well, I’m sure it’s safe, surely the NFL would never do anything to put anyone at risk.
Speaking of hygiene theater, the Arizona Coyotes are allowing up to 3,450 fans to attend their games, but say it’s fine because fans must be masked and socially distanced and are required to “download an app to answer a series of health survey questions” first, which pretty much comes down to “promise you don’t have the ‘rona first, okay?” The Coyotes have still only drawn an average of 2,329 fans for their first two home games, which is either a sign that Phoenix-area hockey fans still aren’t comfortable going to games at an indoor venue in the middle of a communicable disease spike, or that there are no Phoenix-area hockey fans, make your own joke.
And speaking of Arizona and deadly diseases, officials of the spring-training Cactus League would like to see exhibition games put off past March so they have a better chance of actually being able to sell tickets, with Glendale city manager Kevin Phelps adding, “Without those fans staying in your hotel rooms and eating in your restaurants and shopping in your stores, spring training quickly becomes one of the worst business decisions you can make.” Actually, even with them, Kevin! Not that it matters, since spring training is going on full speed ahead on schedule after owners failed to get players to agree to be paid less for a shortened season.
The Double-A Jackson Generals, who were booted out of the affiliated minor leagues last month despite somehow not showing up on USA Today’s master list, have now been evicted by the city of Jackson, Tennessee, though mayor Scott Conger says the team will be allowed to bid on using the stadium site along with anybody else who wants it. Team owner David Freeman has retorted that since the team is still technically a member of the Southern League, even without any players to play in it, it’s meeting the terms of its lease. This lawsuit is going to be by far the most interesting thing ever to involve the Jackson Generals, very much including the time when the team was for inexplicable reasons renamed the Diamond Jaxx.
Here’s a Jacksonville Business Journal article asking “What do the Jaguars need to be financially viable in Jacksonville?” while noting that the city is now only the 43rd largest TV market in the U.S. Not mentioned in the article: that local TV revenue doesn’t matter at all in the NFL since all TV contracts are national and revenue is shared among all the teams, and Jaguars owner Shad Khan is still raking in almost $100 million a year in profits regardless. Surely it is mere coincidence that this article, which mostly quotes only Jags officials and longtime NFL consultant Marc Ganis, is appearing just as Khan is preparing to again ask Jacksonville for $200 million in development subsidies; to think otherwise would imply that news outlets are willing to serve as mouthpieces for billionaires’ subsidy demands, and what kind of world would that be to live in?
NBA commissioner Adam Silver has clarified that the league isn’t necessarily going to expand right away despite a Covid-spawned cash crunch, because “in essence at the end of the day we’re selling equity in our league by virtue of expansion” and “ultimately, the main driver for expansion should be the ability to grow the pie, not necessarily to bring in, you know, to sell equity, to bring in cash now, you know, as opposed to generating the money later.” That’s all very reasonable, and simultaneously a way to say, Hey, Seattle, we’re not going to let you in our little club just to raise quick cash, you gotta make this worth our while, capisce?
Hey, did you know that the current Busch Stadium, and also the Busch Stadium before that but not the one before that, was built on or at least near the site of a pen where African American slaves were imprisoned? (Also that the original Busch Stadium was named that because league rules prohibited naming a stadium after a beer like Budweiser, so instead St. Louis Cardinals owner Gussie Busch named it after himself then created Busch beer to get around the rule? But I digress, damn you, Wikipedia rabbit holes.) Two state representatives would like to see the Cardinals erect a plaque at the stadium noting this fact, which seems reasonable enough, especially since the pen apparently wasn’t torn down until 1963 — though according to St. Louis Public Radio, it was “well hidden even before it was demolished. It was located in a subbasement, so that the screaming, wailing, and corporal punishment would happen out of sight and hearing range of the people who lived nearby.”
And finally, let’s all bask in Las Vegas tourism authority chair Steve Hill saying that the new Las Vegas Raiders stadium has been a hit for the city despite not being able to host fans because: “It’s been a great representation of Las Vegas. We’ve all seen games on television where you get that just great backdrop of Las Vegas, both during the day and at night. It’s a spectacular shot from the stadium and of the stadium.” Spending $750 million in public money on a football stadium was totally worth it because now TV viewers will finally know what Las Vegas looks like, stop looking at me like that and definitely don’t ask me why I said it was a good idea for the Raiders not to pay rent, okay?

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Friday roundup: Jacksonville doubles down on $200m+ Jaguars subsidy, MSG replacement vaportectured, Norfolk arena sabers rattled

January 8, 2021January 8, 2021 Neil deMause

So, yeah, some stuff happened this week, and is continuing to happen now. But let’s not let rampaging Viking cosplayers distract us from the fact that the new year has also brought a resurgence in sports subsidy activity, with a whole lot of news that normally I might write individual posts about if I hadn’t been up too late refreshing Google News, so instead you’ll have to bear with me through some long bullet points:

The Jacksonville city council held its committee-of-the-whole hearing yesterday on Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s $200-million-plus subsidy request for redevelopment of his stadium’s Lot J parking area, and confirmed: Yup, we’re planning to give him $200-million-plus. The council rejected amendments to claw back part of the subsidy if the team moved out of town or to rescind a $65.5 million interest-free loan that’s part of the package — and did so by supermajorities, indicating this will pass the full council on Tuesday — on the grounds that, according to First Coast News, “Representatives for Khan told the council that they wouldn’t agree to a deal that contained either provision.” Apparently “Send money or we’ll shoot this dog” works just great for getting your way in the Jacksonville city council, at least if you’re the local billionaire NFL owner; we’ll find out for sure when the council votes on Tuesday, after which everyone can start negotiating more subsidies for stadium renovations in exchange for Khan extending his lease. It’s good to be king.
It’s been a while since anyone has brought up the fact that Madison Square Garden’s operating permit expires in 2023, at which point the city could technically padlock the building and force the New York Rangers and Knicks to play hockey and whatever the Knicks have been playing the last 20 years elsewhere. But according to the real estate stan site New York Yimby, “the City Council voted this week in a Community Board Five meeting” — the council and community boards are separate governing bodies, so I have no idea which they actually mean here [UPDATED SPECULATION: There’s nothing on the city council calendar about this, so it looks to have been a CB5 hearing on Wednesday] — to move ahead with considering a plan to turn the current MSG into a giant round entryway for Penn Station and build a new MSG a block away between two skyscrapers taller than the nearby Empire State Building. According to the renderings, which are apparently from 2016 (seriously, reading New York Yimby is like trying to sift through plane crash wreckage for clues to what actually happened), the new arena would be built on a superblock created by tearing down two entire blocks of existing buildings, closing 33rd Street between 6th and 7th avenues to traffic, building a platform to lift the entire complex into the sky, and running a “service road” under it. No estimates were given of how much all this would cost or who would pay for it, but it’s worth recalling that Gov. Andrew Cuomo has previously hinted at expanding the Hudson Yards PILOT district that siphons off tax money to repay developers to include not just the current MSG site but this potential new one, which could provide a shit-ton of hidden subsidies for a new Garden. More news on this developing story once an actual journalism site reports on it, or if I get some time free to look into it more myself.
Norfolk could again be getting proposals to build a new arena as it seeks to redevelop its Military Circle district. No word yet on how much any of this would cost or who would pay for it, but the Virginian-Pilot still feels authorized to note that it could make Military Circle “a major pillar of the city’s economy in the decades to come,” especially since it would be one of the few parts of town left above sea level thanks to climate change. I can see nothing possibly wrong with this plan!
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan says she’s “pretty optimistic” about her city getting an NBA expansion franchise, someday. This should be no surprise given that NBA commissioner Adam Silver just called expansion the league’s “manifest destiny” as owners salivate for expansion-fee money to offset Covid-related losses, and that Seattle is the clear frontrunner; if a new Sonics team does arrive, that would be a nice victory for a city that managed to say no to repeated arena subsidy demands and force a mostly-privately-funded one instead, though admittedly going close to 20 years without a basketball team before getting a new one is a somewhat pyrrhic victory.
The Arizona Coyotes renewed their lease in Glendale for one year yet again, now making it six straight years that the team has re-upped after threatening to leave town without a new arena or a more team-friendly lease. This really would seem to be an example of a city successfully calling a team’s bluff, but new team owner Alex Meruelo still says he’s fielding arena offers and hopes to have something to announce by the end of 2020 — oh whoops, 2020 is over, would you look at that. But seriously, without a new lease deal, the Coyotes are gone! Someday. Maybe. He’ll get back to you.
Melbourne, Australia, banned thousands of people who attended a cricket match in the same seating section as one guy who turned up coronavirus-positive from attending the next match, under threat of $1,000 fines. This is an interesting approach, as was allowing nearly 24,000 people to attend a cricket match in the first place, but certainly is a contrast to the NFL’s “pack in as many fans as you’re allowed until you have a proven superspreader event” approach.
This has nothing specifically to do with stadiums, but Defector’s reminiscence about that time Washington Football Club owner Dan Snyder took over control of Six Flags and tried to launch a theme of rollercoaster-themed hair salons for kids where haircuts would be named after rollercoasters and kids would watch rollercoaster videos while getting their hair cut is still a worthwhile reminder that rich people can be just as dumb as the rest of us, only with a lot more money to make their dumb ideas become reality.

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Friday roundup: Coyotes late with arena rent, Winnipeg move non-threats, and good old gondolas, nothing beats gondolas!

September 25, 2020October 5, 2020 Neil deMause

If you missed me — and a whole lot of other people you’ve likely read about here, including economist Victor Matheson and former Anaheim mayor Tom Tait — breaking down the Los Angeles Angels stadium deal in an enormous Zoom panel last night, you can still check it out on the Voice of OC’s Facebook page. I didn’t bother to carefully curate the books on the shelves behind me, as one does, so have fun checking out which novels I read 20 years ago!

And on to the news, which remains unrelentingly newsy:

The Arizona Coyotes are late on their rent payments to the city of Glendale, or maybe not late according to their lease which gives them until the end of October, but still later than usual. The rent payment is $500,000; the Arizona Republic notes that the city is currently spending $13 million a year paying down arena debt plus $6.1 million a year in arena management fees and maintenance costs. Man, this whole thing was a bad idea.
Former Winnipeg mayor and current Winnipeg Goldeyes owner Sam Katz has signed a ten-year lease on Ottawa’s minor-league baseball stadium, and swears this is totally unrelated to his displeasure with his successors in Winnipeg city government trying to renew his stadium lease there to raise his rent from $1 a year and eliminate $700,000 a year in tax breaks and parking subsidies. “I don’t threaten, never threaten,” said Katz. “What I am saying to you is we have a lease for a ballpark in Ottawa.” That is surely not a thing that anyone would ever say as a threat!
The great Alissa Walker of Curbed weighed in on former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt’s proposal to build a gondola to take people to and from Dodger Stadium, and reached three important conclusions: “A stadium built at the height of car culture on a mountaintop with 16,000 parking spaces is working exactly as designed”; there’s no way you’re going to fit 12,000 fans onto a means of transport that even if packed to the gills would require people to start loading on two hours before game time and then continue doing so in even numbers until the first pitch; and there’s already a fast, efficient public transit technology to get people to Dodger games that doesn’t require massive spending on infrastructure, and it’s called shuttle buses. (Walker also calls gondolas “a kind of combination transit-slash-sightseeing ride,” which is both pretty damning and entirely accurate.) Add in that Los Angeles, unlike Oakland, already has plenty of existing bus routes leading to the stadium, and it’s really a no-brainer, unless you’re a rich dude looking to get city approval for a private gondola concession, in which case gondolas are the future, man, get with it already.
There’s a petition afoot in St. Louis to oppose the city’s plan to tear down a block of vacant buildings to make way for parking lots for St. Louis City S.C.‘s new stadium, presumably on the grounds that St. Louis already has too many vacant lots. A City S.C. spokesperson says the team is “exploring the opportunity” for a parking garage with stores on the first floor; hands up if you think it’s likely that they’re actually going to build this on their own dime.
The owners of the Tennessee Titans have come out against building a major league baseball stadium next door, which would seem to put a fork in the plan, even more than that the entire idea of an MLB team in Nashville is kind of dumb. So let’s take one last (?) opportunity to enjoy one of the more bonkers stadium renderings of our time.
If I had had to put my money on the next sports franchise to be displaced by the effects of climate change, I wouldn’t have wagered on a <strike>minor-league</strike> junior hockey team in Iowa having to shut down for a season because their arena was damaged by a derecho, but here we are.
The Super Bowl may or may not have live fans in attendance and, uh, yeah, that’s really the whole story.
This story has nothing to do with stadium shakedowns, except that it ends with the line “If it’s too expensive for the literal state of Florida to make some improperly obtained evidence go away, the defendant in the case will foot the bill himself,” so yeah, it really kinda does.

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Friday roundup: Grizzlies lease has secret out clause, judge orders do-over in Nashville stadium vote, reviewers agree Rangers stadium is super-butt-ugly

June 26, 2020 Neil deMause

Normally the end of June is when news around here starts slowing down for the summer, but as no one needs reminding, nothing is normal anymore. There isn’t even time to get into sports leagues trying to reopen in the midst of what could be an “apocalyptic” surge in virus cases across the South and West, because busy times call for paralipsis:

The Daily Memphian has uncovered what it calls a “trap door” in the Memphis Grizzlies‘ lease that could let the team get out of the agreement early if it has even a single season where it doesn’t sell 1) 14,900 tickets per game, 2) all of its 64 largest suites, or 3) fewer than 2,500 season club seats. (There is at least a “force majeure” clause that should exclude any seasons played during a pandemic.) That could force the city to buy up tickets in order to keep the lease in force, the paper notes, and though talks between the team and city are underway to renegotiate the deal, you just know that Grizzlies owner Robert Pera will want something in exchange for giving up his opt-out clause. Pera has so far said all the right things about not wanting to move the team, but then, he doesn’t have to when he has sports journalists to spread relocation rumors for him; if savvy negotiators create leverage, city officials really need to learn to stop handing leverage to team owners when they write up leases, because that really never works out well.
In a major victory for local governments at least following their own damn rules, opponents of Nashville’s $50 million-plus-free-land deal for a new MLS stadium won a court victory this week when a judge ruled that the city violated Tennessee’s Open Meetings Act by approving the stadium’s construction contract at a meeting held with only 48 hours notice, when the law requires five days. The city’s Metro Sports Authority can now just hold another meeting with normal notice and reapprove the contract, but still it’s good to see someone’s hand slapped for a change for hiding from public scrutiny.
The reviews of the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium that received $450 million in subsidies so the team could have air-conditioning are in, and critics agree, it looks like a giant metal warehouse, or maybe a barbecue grill, or maybe the Chernobyl sarcophagus. Okay, they just agree that is is one ugly-ass stadium from the outside; firsthand reports on whether the upper-deck seats are as bad as they look in the renderings will have to await fans actually being allowed inside, which could come as soon as later this summer, unless by then Texans are too busy cowering in their homes to avoid having to go to the state’s overwhelmed hospital system
Amazon has bought naming rights to Seattle’s former Key Arena (Key Bank’s naming rights expired eons ago), and because Amazon needs more name recognition like it needs more stories about its terrible working conditions, it has decided to rename the building Climate Pledge Arena, after an Amazon-launched campaign to get companies to promise to produce zero net carbon emissions by 2040, something the company itself is off to a terrible start on. The reporting doesn’t say, but presumably if greenwashing goes out of style, Amazon will retain the right in a couple of years to rename the building Prime Video (Starts At $8.99/Month) Arena.
The NFL is still planning to have fans in attendance at games this fall, but it’s also going to be tarping off the first six to eight rows of seats and selling ads on the tarps as a hedge against ticket-sales losses. Even when and if things return to normal, I’m thinking this could be a great way for the league to create that artificial ticket scarcity that it’s been wanting for years, n’est-ce pas?
Amid concern that the New York Islanders will be left temporarily homeless or forced to move back to Brooklyn in the wake of the Nassau Coliseum being shuttered, Nassau County’s top elected official has promised that “the next time that the Islanders play in New York it will be in Nassau County.” If my reading-between-the-lines radar is working properly, that probably means we can expect to see the Islanders’ upcoming season played someplace like Bridgeport, Connecticut.
New Arizona Coyotes president Xavier Gutierrez is definitely hitting the ground with all his rhetoric cylinders running, telling ESPN: “When I took the job, [owner] Alex Meruelo told me finding a solution for where we should be located was priority one through five. I thought it was one through five, and he quickly corrected me and said, ‘No, it’s priority one through 10 for you.'” Shouldn’t that really be one to 11?
Here’s an actual San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist saying voters did the city a favor by turning down a $1.15 billion-dollar Chargers stadium plan, because the city would be having a tough time paying it off now what with the economy in shambles. Of course, $1.15 billion still would have been $1.15 billion even if San Diego had the money, but budget crunches do seem to have a way of focusing people’s attention on opportunity costs.
Speaking of which, here’s an article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about how it’s hard for Cobb County to pay off the construction debt on its Atlanta Braves stadium what with tourism tax revenue having fallen through the floor, though at least the AJC did call up economist J.C. Bradbury to let him say that it doesn’t really matter which tax money was used because “there’s no found money in government.”
Both of those are still way better articles, though, than devoting resources to a story about how holding baseball games without fans is going to lead to a glut of bags of peanuts, for which Good Morning America has us covered. Won’t anyone think of the peanuts?!?

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Coyotes owner says he has many bigly arena offers, they’re just huge, really

June 10, 2020 Neil deMause

Banking and media and food and casino billionaire Alex Meruelo bought a majority stake in the Arizona Coyotes almost exactly one year ago, which meant he inherited the franchise ownership’s mission of finding a Phoenix-area government to shake down for money for a new arena. And, guys, that’s no easy feat in the middle of a pandemic, but poor Alex is giving it his best shot:

If it wasn’t for what happened with COVID, we’d be so much further ahead.” Meruelo said. “It’s really set us back at least six to nine months. I still hope and I plan, with [new team CEO] Xavier [Gutierrez]’s help — Xavier is very good at this — we’d like to get something announced by the end of the year.

“We’re working very hard. What I can tell you is this: Xavier has moved down here. His whole family’s here with them. They bought a beautiful house. My son lives here. I’m not going to go anywhere and we’re committed to Arizona. It’s not that simple. And you ask, ‘Why?’ Well, we’re still right now currently playing in Glendale. You know very well we can’t leave tomorrow. It’s impossible to leave tomorrow, so I have to be there probably a couple more years. Now, Glendale has expressed a tremendous amount of interest in us staying there. So I will listen to what they have to say. But we’ve also gotten a couple offers from the East Valley, which are extremely attractive.”

As Kent Somers of the Arizona Republic points out, that last bit is especially dubious, since if he’s gotten “extremely attractive” offers from the East Valley, he could have taken them long before the Covid epidemic hit. Far more likely is that Meruelo is just trying to keep the arena fires lit while the current crisis passes — he even hedged on a timeline for an announcement this year (“we’d like to”), which is great for getting headlines about how a new Coyotes arena is in the works while also retaining plausible deniability if December rolls around and he still has nothing to show for it.

And it’s important to remember: What Meruelo is waiting for isn’t the money to build an arena — with a net worth of at least $2 billion and possibly a whole lot more, he has plenty of that — or even a place to build one, but rather for somebody else to offer him the money to build one. And since he’s fortunate enough to operate in a market that has multiple municipalities (plus Native American tribal entities) that he can play off against each other, his best bet for getting a bidding war going is to keep on talking about what excellent offers he’s gotten, and how [your city name here] had better step up to the table if it wants to have a shot. That’s just what savvy negotiators do.

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Friday roundup: CFL calls its owners “philanthropists” who need bailout, plus actual sport with actual fans takes place in actual stadium!

May 8, 2020 Neil deMause

And how is everyone out there? Going stir-crazy? Waking up early to watch Korean baseball? Starving to death? All good options!

I personally have been watching this 1988 game between the Philadelphia Phillies and Montreal Expos (spoiler: Randy Johnson is, as the announcers keep noting, very tall), while continuing to keep tabs on what passes for sports stadium and subsidy news these days. Let’s get to it — the news, I mean, not the Phils-Expos game, I have that paused:

CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie told the Canadian House of Commons finance committee yesterday that the 2020 season most likely won’t happen, which should come as no surprise, and that this would be “terribly sad” and that CFL owners are “sports philanthropists” who “really have invested in Canada and Canadian culture and Canadian sport” and that teams could repay up to $120 million in bailout money by offering free ads so that “government can deliver important information,” which should probably come as no surprise either, but only because nothing should surprise anyone anymore. The Globe and Mail reports that Ambrosie was “chastised by members of the committee for not including the CFL Players’ Association in his proposal, and for framing the request as a ‘partnership with government’ rather than a bailout.”
Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno is expected to announce by the end of May what he plans to do with the stadium land he got for a $175 million discount last December, unless of course the city council votes on Tuesday to give Moreno until September. Maybe by then Anaheim residents will even be able to attend council hearings to express their opinions of the plans, because that went so swimmingly last time!
Taiwan’s baseball league started allowing fans back into stadium in small numbers today, in small numbers, with seats separated by one meter, and with masks required. (Though not for cheerleaders, for some reason, as you can see from the video here.) This could maybe show a way forward for other sports leagues, except that Taiwan (population 24 million) has only had 15 new Covid cases in the last 16 days, while the U.S. (population 328 million) has had more than 400,000, so maybe not just quite yet.
MLB is planning to propose “best-case scenario” plans for a season restart to its players’ union for discussion even though things remain very far from a best case, and the NFL has moved its 2020 games from London and Mexico City back to the U.S. even though the U.S. has slightly more new cases per capita than the U.K. and way more than Mexico, and tennis is probably shut down until 2021 even though it’s a sport you can play while social distancing because it would require so much international travel (which, yes, is a good point about the NFL games), and college football is still totally ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Over in Europe, meanwhile, restart plans are still moving ahead, except for in the English Premier League where the teams in danger of being relegated are holding things up because they think that canceling the season would be a great way to call a do-over, which is the most wonderfully soccer thing ever.
Four times as many people watched live Korean baseball at 1 am than watched people playing basketball video games, after both were televised on ESPN, which maybe indicates that e-sports aren’t quite the future just yet.
The Brooklyn Nets aren’t paying all their arena workers even after promising they would, and the Arizona Coyotes aren’t paying all their arena workers even after promising they would, and lots of other teams still haven’t even promised to pay their arena workers. As in so many things right now, who gets paid and who doesn’t is increasingly looking like it’s going to come down to who has the best lobbyists, and who got their claims in first.

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Friday roundup: Won’t anyone think of the sports franchise owners?!?

April 10, 2020 Neil deMause

Coming up on the end of week four here, I think, and how is everyone doing? I remembered that today was Friday and I needed to do a news roundup, which was the first day in several that I remembered what day it was, so I feel like things are looking up! Except for the fact that large numbers of people gathering in close confines is looking like the main way this virus spreads, and that describes perfectly spectator sports and music and theater and many other things that make life worth living, so that’s not so great. And, of course, nearly 17,000 people have died and tens of thousands more deaths are expected, and that’s not counting all the people who are dying uncounted at home. Small victories may be victories, but they’re also small.

Eventually this will all be over, though, whatever “over” means, and it’s not too soon to start wondering about what the sports world will look like on the other side. Especially for sports journalists who are twiddling their thumbs right now and hoping that their employers still exist once the worst of this has passed:

Whole lot of talk this week about how teams could be driven out of business by going part or all of a year without income, starting with Jared Diamond’s big Wall Street Journal article about how this could be devastating for minor-league baseball teams that are “an integral part of many communities” and average “21 full-time employees, who on average are compensated about $62,000 a year, including benefits.” That’s fairly misleading — just because health insurance is expensive doesn’t make your job any better compensated — but also Diamond doesn’t look into what government programs might be available to help pay those workers. The new Paycheck Protection Program, for instance, provides forgivable loans to small businesses to cover payroll costs, and even lets businesses with lots of seasonal workers get reimbursement based on variable work dates. (I initially wondered if major-league teams could use this to cover player salaries, but Congress smartly capped the program at $100,000 per employee.) The PPP runs out at the end of June (unless it’s extended), and implementation has so far been a disaster, but it’s certainly one way that minor-league teams could help defray some expenses to survive until things return to some kind of normal. (Diamond also writes that “minor-league clubs are expected to receive rent abatements from local municipalities for further relief,” which is something to keep an eye on in case this is more than just what all small businesses are offered.) As I wrote a week or two ago, the government is going to determine the winners and losers in all this, and small sports franchise owners seem better positioned at least than, say, undocumented workers who are out of work and ineligible for all the newly expanded unemployment benefits.
And speaking of major-league teams, Forbes’ latest MLB franchise value estimates are out, and have gotten lots of attention for showing teams being worth more money despite the coronarecession. Except that Forbes’ numbers appear to be based on baseball still playing a 100-game season, which indeed MLB is pretending is possible, but that’s very much in question. Meanwhile, the Texas Rangers don’t show a big jump in value despite being about to open a new stadium, so maybe air-conditioning isn’t such a vital part of the sports business model after all?
And speaking of things being very much in question, the CEO of Tokyo’s Olympic organizing committee has said that the 2020 Games may not be able to be held in 2021 either, since “I don’t think anyone would be able to say if it is going to be possible to get it under control by next July or not.” True dat.
In marginally more promising news, the Korean Baseball Organization is still readying itself for an early May opening day, though that could easily change if South Korea sees another virus flareup or if even a single player or team official tests positive. But there’s at least a chance you’ll be able to see the likes of Dan Straily and Hank Conger in action in a month or so, if that’s what lets you hold on to hope for the future.
Here’s a dumb article about how several NHL teams could be forced to move thanks to coronavirus losses (where are they going to go, the Moon?), and here’s a dumb article on how the Arizona Coyotes need a new arena even more badly now that nobody is going to arenas at all anymore. Sportswriters gonna sportswrite!
Construction is continuing on the “Field of Dreams” ballpark in an Iowa cornfield that is suppose to host a single game in August, and which is reportedly “reminiscent of the old Comiskey Park in Chicago,” which, uh, right. Shouldn’t all these workers be getting requisitioned to build ventilators or masks or something?
No vaportecture this week, but there is video of someone driving by the new Las Vegas Raiders stadium with some of its LED lighting on. If referring to a stadium as “the Death Star” is still a thing we do when this is all over, we’ll know that normalcy has truly returned.

Be well, stay safe, and see you Monday!

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Coyotes stay put in Glendale another season, five years after insisting they were gone

December 16, 2019 Neil deMause

Hey, it’s been a while since we checked in with the Arizona Coyotes, whose then-owner Anthony LeBlanc in 2015 objected to not getting paid by the city to operate their own arena by saying he was talking to lots of other cities, then signed another lease extension in 2017, then signed another one this January. What’s the latest?

Arizona Coyotes officials have confirmed the team will stay in Glendale for another season as the team draws larger crowds to Gila River Arena than it has in years.

“We will absolutely play the 2020-2021 NHL season in Gila River Arena,” Coyotes CEO Ahron Cohen said in a statement on Friday.

Coyotes attendance was indeed up ever so slightly last year, and they’re currently only fourth-worst in the NHL, ahead of the Florida Panthers, New York Islanders, and Ottawa Senators. The team’s new owner has said that staying n Glendale without a new arena would be “difficult,” and NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said last summer that the current situation is “not viable long-term,” but at a certain point actions speak louder than words, and the fact of the matter is that we’re now going on five years since LeBlanc threatened to leave town if he didn’t get to keep his sweetheart arena lease, and the team is still there, with no serious relocation talks underway that anyone has publicly reported on.

I never want to suggest that pro sports teams’ move threats are entirely a bluff: They do move on occasion, though it’s way more common in the NFL where local cable market size isn’t an issue and there are a lot fewer tickets needing to be sold; and Phoenix has never really been a hockey hotbed, so there are arguably other markets the Coyotes could viably leave for. Still, it’s a good reminder that the number of teams that move is a tiny, tiny fraction of the number whose owners threaten to move, and in almost every case there’s a long, drawn-out negotiating process before the moving trucks are actually packed up. So as memorable an image as the Baltimore Colts packing up their Mayflower vans may be, usually playing hardball over a lease doesn’t result in losing a team “overnight,” so maybe we can all stop using that word?

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Friday roundup: Saints’ $300m subsidy moves ahead, St. Louis MLS announcement on tap, Richmond council votes no on democracy

August 16, 2019August 16, 2019 Neil deMause

Sometimes I feel lucky to cover a topic with so many constant absurdities, and then this happens, and I realize that constant absurdities are just the new normal. Anyway, I did get to edit this this week, which is an excellent look at how this week’s absurdity is having potentially catastrophic impacts on people’s lives, so go read it!

But not before you read these:

The Louisiana State Bond Commission has approved selling $450 million worth of state bonds to fund renovations to the Superdome, in exchange for the New Orleans Saints signing a 15-year lease extension. As covered back in May, Saints owner Gayle Benson would cover one-third of the bond cost, leaving Louisiana to pay off $300 million, bringing the Saints’ five-decide subsidy total to a cool $1.442 billion. In exchange, the Saints will sign a 15-year lease extension — with another 15-year option, but there’s no way they’re going to extend their lease again without more subsidies the way this gravy train is rolling — which comes to state taxpayers ponying up $20 million a year for the presence of an NFL team, which is a hell of a lot of money, though not as much as Indiana pays the Pacers, because Indiana.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported this week that St. Louis will be announced next Tuesday as the next MLS expansion city, bringing the number of teams in the league to a cool 154. (I think it’s actually 28, but honestly the number changes so fast it’s hard to keep track.) Deadspin read the announcement that there would be no public subsidies for the as-yet-unnamed team’s stadium and excitedly reported that the deal “might not completely fleece the city”; sadly, it will actually involve about $60 million in public subsidies, but since about half of that is coming from the state, not the city, that Deadspin headline is still technically correct, right?
The Richmond city council has voted 5-3 against allowing a referendum on the city’s proposed new $350 million city-subsidized arena on the November ballot, because voting is for elected officials, not regular folks. Though regular folks do still get to vote on electing elected officials, something that referendum sponsor Reva Trammell clearly had in mind when she said following the no-voting vote: “I hope the citizens hold their feet to the fire. Every damn one of them that voted against it.”
Two-plus years after the arrival of the Hartford Yard Goats in exchange for $63 million in public stadium cash — plus a couple million dollars every year in operating losses — the Hartford Courant has noticed that stadium jobs are usually part-time and poorly paid. Not included in the article: any analysis of how many full-time jobs could have been created by spending $63 million on just about anything else.
New Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo said he intends to keep the NHL team in Arizona, but that keeping it in Glendale is a “difficult situation,” at which point a Glendale spokesperson said that city officials would meet with Meruelo “to see how we can help him achieve his goals of success.” Which is all fine and due diligence and all, but given that helping Meruelo “achieve his goals” is likely to mean paying him money to play in Glendale like the city used to do, it’s not exactly promising; if nothing else, Glendale officials would do well to remember that Meruelo currently has exactly zero better arena options elsewhere in the state, so he’s not exactly negotiating from a position of strength.
Joe Tsai, who was already set to buy the Brooklyn Nets from Mikhail Prokhorov, has officially exercised his option to purchase the team, plus the Barclays Center arena to boot, for a reported $3.5 billion. Given that the arena is currently losing about $21 million a year, this seems like an awful lot of money even if the team does employ whatever’s left of Kevin Durant. Since Tsai already owns the New York Liberty, though, maybe it at least means that WNBA franchise will finally return to the city from its exile in the suburbs.

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Coyotes sold to billionaire, Gary Bettman celebrates with arena demand and move threat

June 20, 2019 Neil deMause

The NHL approved a new billionaire to buy a majority stake in the Arizona Coyotes from their old not-billionaire owner, and league commissioner Gary Bettman naturally cited this as a reason why somebody should get the new billionaire guy a new arena:

“I think (Meruelo) is committed to trying to get a new arena in the right location and making it work,” Bettman said. “He is a person of substantial means, and he is very good, if you look at his career, in turning around businesses and making them successful. I think this is an extraordinarily positive step for the Coyotes and their fans in Arizona.”

Alex Meruelo has substantial means! It is entirely possible, of course, that Bettman means that Meruelo has lots of money and will “try to get a new arena” by looking deep within his own bank account and then paying for one, but also this is Gary Bettman so of course that’s not what he means.

Bettman added that while he didn’t want to threaten that the Coyotes would leave Arizona without a new arena, that’s exactly what he was saying:

“I’d rather not go there, because I’m not going to issue threats,” Bettman said. ”(Meruelo) has told us, including in his interview with the executive committee, that he very much likes Arizona. He wants to make it work there, and he’s going to try very hard for that to be the case. Obviously, the club is not viable long-term in Glendale, but hopefully we don’t get to that point.”

The Associated Press then filled out its article on Bettman’s crafted public statement by citing the Coyotes’ low attendance and all the places they could move to if they wanted. There’s a reason why I have a category titled “the sports-media complex.”

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