The stadium news does not care if I am having a busy week, it just keeps happening! And I am, as always, here to catch it in a bucket and dump it out for you:
- The group trying to force a public referendum on Phoenix Suns arena subsidies threw in the towel this week, after the city promised a court battle on the grounds that spending $168 million in tax money on renovating an arena is not a “legislative act.” The lesson: If your opponent doesn’t have deep pockets, threaten to sue them into oblivion. (Side lesson from the Suns mess: Elected officials always have their price, and it’s usually pretty cheap.)
- Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper said he’d “love to put some sort of roof” on his stadium so it could host the Final Four, and because this is 2019, nobody can tell if he was kidding.
- David Beckham’s Inter Miami has been turned away by both the Miami Marlins and Dolphins to share digs temporarily in 2020, thanks to the problems of scheduling MLS games around the MLB or NFL schedules, leaving the team with a mystery “preferred site” that team co-owner Jorge Mas promised to reveal in “late February, early March.”
- Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis says he is “not frustrated” about not having a place to play in 2019, indicating it’s his “preference” to stay in the Bay Area but that he has “other options” as well. In other words, Mark Davis probably doesn’t have any better idea than the rest of us where the Raiders will open the 2019 season, which is just seven months away.
- Sorry if I failed to keep you up on the Queensboro F.C. saga, but the city of New York late last month signed a letter of intent that proposes two scenarios for the contested Willets Point neighborhood, one with a minor-league soccer stadium, one without. In other words, nothing has been decided at all, so feel free to go back to ignoring this story until somebody actually takes a step toward putting concrete plans in motion, or at least releases some cool vaportecture renderings.
- Tottenham Hotspur stadium opening update: April, maybe.
- In anticipation of the arrival of the Boston Red Sox‘ Triple-A team in Worcester, the Worcester Business Journal has taken an exhaustive look at how funding a new minor-league ballpark worked out for nearby Manchester, New Hampshire and eleven other cities. The answer: really, really not well at all, with the new stadiums sparking little of the promised neighboring development. On the glass-partly-full side, Southern New Hampshire University business professor Doug Blais does say of building sports venues, “It’s much easier to say it’s been successful at a $25-million price point rather than a $100-million price point”; unfortunately, Worcester is on the hook for more than $90 million.
- And here’s an exhaustive look from the Kansas City Star at some Chiefs tax returns that were briefly made public; no earth-shattering stadium subsidy news, but it is an excellent explanation of how easy it is to make a bundle owning an NFL team, regardless of whether you win games or not.
- And here’s an article from Fast Company about how stadiums can be good things for municipalities, because look at what the Roman amphitheater in Arles has done for that French city. Never let it be said that I do not provide you with links to the full breadth of stadium coverage.
A better explanation of how easy it is to make a bundle owning an NFL team: “Dean Spanos, Mark Davis and Bill Bidwill are all billionaires.”
(plays Three Stooges theme)
Sometimes the gags come like shooting fish in a barrel.
The lesson from the amphitheater in Arles seems to be that a stadium may turn a profit over a couple thousand years. The Romans should have invented the “Top Tier” clause.
It’s also good business practices if you can pay off the bonds over the life of the arena. Makes the month to month payments affordable if you can divide up the payments into 24,000 monthly payments over the last 2,000 years.
The Romans said “If we don’t get a new arena in Arles, we’re packing up our empire and going away.” And they weren’t kidding.
The Romans would have sold out in Quebec City. Oh wait, that’s a meme from another site.
Fooey to safety and logistics. Have the Final Four in an roofless NFL stadium.
Happy Friday.
I’m pretty sure nobody wants publicly funded and run venues like they had in the Roman Empire.
Mark Davis is a stooge.
I wonder what it takes to be a professor at SNHU?