Friday roundup: Calgary to pay bulk of Flames arena overruns, and why stadium subsidies are a “high school lunch table thing”

Just a week with the largest stadium subsidy ever getting final approval, immediately followed by the largest arena subsidy ever getting initial approval. And the week, being an insensate unit of measure with no sense of mercy, wasn’t done with us yet:

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40 comments on “Friday roundup: Calgary to pay bulk of Flames arena overruns, and why stadium subsidies are a “high school lunch table thing”

  1. John O’Donnell Stadium in Davenport was completely flooded in 1994. Nice to see they’re protecting it a little better now as it’s a classic ballpark that’s been expanded and was a great place to watch minor league games.

  2. 1. The Flames shouldn’t get a public subsidy because Calgary is hockey crazy and there is no market with half as many hockey fans with half the money as Calgary.

    2. The Coyotes should just forget about Glendale, Tempe, Gilbert, Tolleson and Gila Bend and move to Canada where there are more than 6 hockey fans per 100,000.

    1. Gila Bend would be epic, though. Visiting teams could bivouac at that Best Western Space Age Lodge.

    2. Maybe Gilbert, Tolleson and Gila Bend will be the next cities to give the Coyotes a free arena, in the in the unending search for the mythical Fan Base.

  3. To be fair with the Arizona clip the guy didn’t say the WILL move or that he has inside info, just that its his feeling. Granted everyone has been wrong about all things Arizona Coyotes since 2009.

    1. 1. The Coyotes haven’t qualified for the playoffs in over 10 years.

      2. The Coyotes have lost money every year they have been in Arizona and the total now tops $1,000,000,000.

      3. Almost half of the Coyotes payroll is dead LTIR contracts.

      4. The Coyotes were thrown out of Glendale after falling over a year behind on taxes and rent.

      5. The current situation at ASU only allows the Coyotes to sell 3,800 tickets with no team store, no parking revenue, no naming rights and very limited in arena advertising and concessions.

      And who has the Coyotes situation in Arizona since 2009 wrong? Move them this year, end of story.

      1. A decent amount of that is paid for by contract insurance. As you probably know they’re heavy on contracts for injured players that will almost certainly never play again because they need to meet the salary floor. The contract insurance ensures that they don’t actually have to pay real money but still meet the salary floor requirements.

        1. I suspect the NHLPA will push to prevent teams from loading up on LTIR quite this much in the future.

          They’re still less of an embarassment than the A’s.

      2. The Coyotes literally made the playoffs in 2020. (Granted, it was a 24-team field that year because of COVID.)

  4. did manfred just admit the only reason they weren’t considering expansion was they needed the threat of moving to get current teams’ new stadia? if only if baseball was subject to antitrust laws.
    nashville is a small market, like Las Vegas, I don’t think they should expand just because 32 sounds like a good number of teams to have.

    1. He’s consistently said that expansion was on hold until the A’s and Rays situations were resolved. In other words, yes.

      And antitrust laws wouldn’t necessarily help — Dunkin Donuts is subject to antitrust laws, but that wouldn’t help me force them to give me a franchise to open an outlet somewhere that there isn’t one. (Assuming there is even a single place on earth that doesn’t have multiple Dunkin Donuts already.)

    2. Bringing the major leagues to Nashville could be a stroke of good timing. Given the ongoing collapse of the RSN industry, a big-league club in Nashville could get a local broadcast TV/streaming contract in place with little trouble.
      (Separately, the Phoenix Suns and Phoenix Mercury are leaving their Bally-owned RSN for broadcast TV plus streaming in a new deal announced this morning.)

  5. “Assuming there is even a single place on earth that doesn’t have multiple Dunkin Donuts already.”

    I don’t know about other parts of the country (except Rhode Island, which has a Dunkin every 100 feet or so), but in my part of Texas, Dunkin’s are thin on the ground.

    They do exist, but the closet one to me is 10 miles and 30 minutes away according to Apple Maps.

    Fortunately, we have Shipley’s, and a lot of independent doughnut shops in strip malls. Some of those even serve both doughnuts and tacos…

    1. Now I want to see a world map showing Dunkin-per-square-mile. Spain would rank pretty high, while I guess Canada would be low, given all the Tim Horton’s…

      1. According to Wikipedia, the source of all vaguely accurate information and plenty of misinformation, Dunkin’ completely pulled out of the Canadian market in 2018.

        Though they still have Baskin Robbins, which is a holely owned subsidiary of Dunkin’.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkin%27_Donuts#Canada

    2. The Dunkin Density appears to increase exponentially the closer one gets to Rhode Island.

    3. About a decade ago they started opening in Vegas, lines around the building for months. As a former New Englander I was in line for sure

  6. I’m setting aside $$$ now for season tickets to next year’s NHL Houston Aeros nee Arizona Coyotes.

    1. Not to be that guy, but would née go back to the franchise’s first name, the Winnipeg Jets (not that I want to ignore the Phoenix Coyotes)?

  7. Ooh, I am really excited about the turn of events now with the Tempe vote.

    #CoyotesToHouston

  8. They can’t just “move to Houston.”

    The league wouldn’t want to let a team move somewhere if it didn’t have a deal in place to stay there long term, because otherwise why bother? They already have them in a tenuous situation, how does moving to another help?

    Moving them now only to have to move them again would be way worse than another season or two at ASU before moving them to a permanent home somewhere else.

    If the Tempe thing fails, the owners will have to decide if it’s worth staying at ASU while it sorts out another idea or if it’s time to just sell.

    If there were an owner ready to go in Houston, they’d probably have identified themselves by now. Or maybe they will emerge out of hiding.

    This is uncharted waters. Anyone who says they know what will happen is lying.

  9. A reason for baseball expansion has to do with the uneven number of teams in each league. Schedule wise it means that there’s always an interleague game being played, in the middle of the season, it doesn’t matter. But at the end of the season, teams stuck playing teams not in their division/league, can’t make up games in the standings the same way.

    Yes you could say they already played those opponents, and it had been decided, but that’s just a lot less entertaining then divisional rivals duking it out the last week of the regular season.

    1. Given that they just changed the schedule to add a lot more interleague games, I don’t think they’re too worried about who plays who in September. And certainly not making multi-billion-dollar decisions about who to let into the owners’ club based on it.

      1. Obviously it’s about getting huge money from the new owners but also with 4 team divisions, you can schedule the last two weeks of the season with nothing but divisional matchups. That makes for a lot of “meaningful” games for the broadcast partners.

        1. With three wild cards in each league, most of the meaningful games at the end of the season won’t be intradivision anyway.

    2. Pretty sure it is now about what it has always been about: $$$$$

      “If we can fleece some small cities out of a billion for a stadium, we can also fleece some rich idiots out of 2-3 Billion in expansion fees”.

      I think MLB would like to have even number of teams in each league. And they have pretty much always added teams in pairs for obvious reasons. They have also had unbalanced divisions for most of the modern/divisional era, so going back to two divisions with more teams than the other four isn’t necessarily a deal breaker.

      But it’s still about the money.

      To me, adding interleague games is a mistake. Sure, everybody wants to see the big teams play each other more, and there’s considerable merit in having cross city or cross state rivals play each other with some regularity. But there are far more teams who have no legitimate regional or traditional rival and can’t be successfully ‘matched’ with teams from the other league in a way that interests the fans.

      I am not sold that basic idea behind expanding interleague will make up for the loss of divisional and intra league games for most clubs. Having the Yankees or Red Sox visit Miami or Arizona might increase the attendance in those two markets as intended, but you also have to factor in the lost attendance in markets where the big clubs won’t be going as often thanks to Manfred going full Selig on all this.

      1. I think they should give up in the traditional leagues and go with regional divisions. Now that the NL has the DH, there’s nothing distinctive about the leagues.

        More opportunities for regional rivalries and more games that away fans can travel to.

  10. Not sure if this has been mentioned yet… but it looks like the actually cash commitment from CSEC is about $40m up front (we assume C$).

    The rest will be in annual payments… so, really, they aren’t putting $500-600m of the money into this development (as the “city/province paying $600m toward $1.2bn development leader would suggest). They are putting a down payment of $40m up and making annual payments of $17m-24m over the course of the agreement (their annual obligation increases at 1% per year… assuming they can’t find an escape clause that allows them to decrease their annual payment instead… and I wouldn’t bet against that frankly…).

    We know they are ‘paying’ this amount. Do we know where the money goes and what it will (or can) be used for? Are they paying themselves as operators? Paying into a maintenance fund? Or is the payment going directly to cover bond or other debt obligations one level of government or the other is carrying on their behalf?
    To whom are these payments being made?

    So we have – again – a weird dynamic where the Flames billionaire owners can just claim they are paying “$750m total” toward a $1.2bn development that they don’t even own”. Yet the reality is far different.

    $40m down and $20m in average annual payments would float a significant construction mortgage all on it’s own. Even with the limited information we have available, the numbers don’t quite add up here. Big surprise.

  11. Yotes could wind up in Utah at some point. 29th and rising on market size list. Bettman has been in contact with Jazz owner Ryan Smith over a team(not necessarily the Yotes). Interest is mutual. 2030 winter olympics could bring new building. Source: Freidman and Marek.

    1. The toxic dust blowing off the shrinking Salt Lake seems more of an existential threat then Las Vegas and water issues.

  12. Coyotes to San Diego!! New arena planned for the Midway District and only other big league team are the Padres (maybe MLS in near future). Coyotes would have to take over the Gulls name of course.

  13. This is all well and good, but professional sports as entertainment will end this fall when this opens:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7VG52035Z4&ab_channel=U2

    So, really, with the venue event horizon so rapidly coming/arriving/us arriving at it, what is the point?

    I just can’t believe JD & the Straight Shot aren’t booked to open this transformative alternate reality venue/universe…

    1. I don’t think it will end any time soon. It’s a deeply engrained cultural habit.

        1. Perhaps I missed it because that thing does look really cool.

          I’m unclear on what U2 are doing. Are they actually going to play in that thing, or just produce some kind of very loud, all-encompassing multimedia “U2 experience” for it?

          1. I’ve been unclear on what U2 are doing at least since “War.”

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