Pressed for time this morning, so let’s dive right in for a quick tour through this week’s remaining news:
- Apparently San Francisco Mayor London Breed is genuinely serious about tearing down the failed downtown Westfield Mall and replacing it with a soccer stadium: The city released a bunch of “early conceptual renderings” of a stadium that show typical rendering things like the stadium glowing while the rest of the city stands dark and some kind of insane helter skelter in one corner of the stadium and a giant glass (?) wall in another, plus of course people throwing their hands in the air excitedly in response to no game action at all. No word at all on how much this would cost or who would pay for it — Breed issued a statement this week that she hoped the renderings would “get a developer and others excited about making investments into the stadium,” which good luck with that — and the mayor hasn’t even indicated which soccer team it would be for; the San Francisco Standard speculates that it could be for a semipro team like International SF SC, San Francisco Glens SC, or San Francisco City FC, or for the city’s new NWSL club, Bay F.C., none of which are likely to need a 25,000-seat stadium. City FC’s board of directors has already issued a “no thanks” statement, saying it would rather see renovations at its previous homes of Kezar Stadium or Boxer Stadium. It’s hard to see who the constituency is for this — even business owners around the mall are divided at best — unless it’s developers who Breed thinks she needs to look more pro-redevelopment in front of to counter all the bogus “doom loop” headlines.
- A group of more than 2,100 Philadelphia architects and building design experts came out against the 76ers‘ arena plans this week, saying it would “make matters worse” for the East Market Street area by clogging it with traffic on game days and leaving it devoid of people on non-game days. Checks out!
- The chair of Wisconsin’s stadium district has written in an op-ed that tax revenue from new city and county sales taxes should go to pay for Milwaukee Brewers stadium upgrades, continuing the game of “the Brewers need public money, it’s just about who’ll pay for it how” that has transfixed the state’s elected officials in recent months.
- The Dallas Cowboys‘ stadium is about to get $180 million in upgrades — wait, make that $295 million in upgrades — do I hear nearly $350 million in upgrades? All this is to prepare for hosting 2026 World Cup matches, and the reporting implies that owner Jerry Jones will be footing the bill, though I’d feel more confident in that if the reporting could agree on how much the upgrades will cost in the first place.
$350m could build a brand new soccer- specific stadium for the World Cup. Or two.
Not when Nashville’s cost $345M.
It probably does not need to cost that much.
The big advantage of the Westfield Mall site is the BART station there, so large crowds could be accommodated, but also a nice feature for easy transportation near a housing site.
Westfield Mall is in zip code 94103. A search on Zillow shows 1 bedroom apartments on the market for over $800,000. If the mayor wants to be seen as pro-development and trying to prevent a doom loop, it seems like building hundreds (thousands?) of apartments that will bring in millions of dollars in property tax revenues would be a good idea.
The big advantage of the Westfield Mall site is the BART station there, so large crowds could be accommodated, but also a nice feature for easy transportation near a housing site.
I’m thinking the stadium being lit while the city is dark is new kind of power move. While we’re playing, everything must shut down!
On another topic, there’s an article in Forbes The Oakland A’s Owner Tries $40 Million Accounting Trick On Public
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2023/08/23/the-oakland-as-owner-tries-40-million-accounting-trick-on-public/amp/
Good link, thanks.
There’s no way the A’s are losing money even if the paid attendance drops to zero. MLB has become like the NFL in that one specific area.
There are dozens of tried and true accounting tricks Fisher could use to make it LOOK like the A’s are losing money. And he doesn’t need to ‘leave out’ demonstrable revenue to do it (as Brown suggests in his excellent article).
The easiest way of all is to form a management consulting company and charge yourself a whopping management fee. It shows up as a direct charge and generally no-one questions it. If the fee is tens of millions a year in a business with $300m in annual revenue, people still won’t see it as significant.
Should you ever actually be in danger of losing money or dropping down close to breaking even on actual operations (say in the unlikely event that you accidentally hire genuine major league baseball players), you can always prevail upon your partners at the management consulting company (which you fully own) to defer their due compensation for this year… allowing you to shelter even more direct profit in a future better year. Obviously interest and perhaps some administrative penalties for deferring this compensation would be required… your management consulting company is not a charity after all…
Bill Wirtz famously walled off nearly all the businesses associated with the Blackhawks (arena catering, arena game day parking, ticket processing you name it) and declared them separate and independent and that the Blackhawks were losing money.
Which they probably were on paper. That tends to happen when, for example, you might choose to pay one of your own companies $48 to ‘manage’ the sale of each $20 ticket you sell to your own games.
You can’t fool your partners in any league with that sort of shenanigan. But you can certainly fool the fans and local politicans.
I went last year to see Mexico vs Nigeria at Cowboys Stadium. I don’t see why it needs more upgrades. Unless the Cowboys are using it as an excuse to blackmail Arlington and get the other cities in the DFW (Weatherford, Plano, Denton, Ft Worth, Rockwall, Mesquite) salivating at the chance of having the next Cowboys Stadium.
It’s never too soon, I guess…
Jerry World needs more upgrades because he’s the king of selling, in his own words, “glitz and glamour,” or the sizzle instead of the steak. All hat, no playoffs.
The obvious salivating suburb is Frisco, the self-proclaimed “Sports City USA.” They’ve already gifted Jerry a free team HQ/practice field and vacant upscale restaurant/hotel district. There’s not a lot of suitable land left for a parcel that size, but they might be able to do something with land across from the Golf World they just built for PGA at a cost of about $1.5M per job created.
And in a somewhat related topic, with the massive conference realignment that’s leading among other things to the eventual demise of the Pac-12, what’s your take on this? This site covers mostly pro teams but I figure at some point with the winning conferences (aka the SEC) getting plenty of money coming their way, we might see stadiums upgraded or even bee ones built. And particularly I think in the lesser conferences like the Mountain West or C-USA the public colleges in particular are going to find a way to guilt trip the constituents to cough up money for bigger stadiums to compete with the Michigans and Alabamas.
I prefer to treat college football as a war crime.
That’s already happening.
So many schools are trying to make their football team into something it can never be and losing tons of money in the process.
As I’ve said before, some of those schools could probably get better TV ratings and attendance by just dumping that money out of a helicopter or, perhaps, just lighting it on fire in the middle of a stadium.
There are about 30 or 40 teams that can actually make money just based on tickets and TV revenue. And they’re losing patience with having to share that with the teams that draw much smaller audiences. That’s what is driving all of these conference shifts.
They’re really going to lose patience with that if and when they have to collectively bargain with their players and/or give them a defined share of the revenue – which they should, of course.
Could the 49ers build at the mall site? Seems their stadium is now getting pretty old and was horribly built
That stadium sucks so hard. They’re in year 9 of a 20 year lease. Considering the pace of construction in California- it wouldn’t be crazy if they started putting feelers out about renovations
It’s amazing to me that the relatively new stadium in Santa Clara regularly scores so low on the popularity scale… I haven’t been to it but the reviews I have read are overwhelmingly bad.
It’s taken the 49ers that long to buy the politicians in town, can’t leave just yet!
Mayor Breed should focus on homelessness, drug addiction commercial real estate issues, crime and housing crisis problem instead of taking up valuable land for a non existent Football club
If San Francisco had an MLS team, had a realistic chance of getting an MLS team or the Earthquakes were in the market for a new stadium, then I can imagine there maybe being support for a stadium.
It would still be a dumb use of public money compared to much more pressing issues in San Francisco, but at least you could see how it might be popular.
But as it is, this quest is just bizarre. It’s like she heard about soccer stadiums at some conference and is now convinced they need one, even though she has no idea how US pro soccer works.
I know that the monorail reference is used over and over, but in this case, it’s especially apt.
Hey, Neil. I know it’s been a long time since I’ve visited this site, and this story is from June 13, 2023, but I thought you’d be interested anyway.
Threadjack here.
Apparently, Sacramento’s parking revenues have fallen short of projections, as we expected them to. I can’t get to Bizjournals, thought you might be able to. Here’s the Reddit thread.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Sacramento/comments/149joqd/sacramento_forecasts_future_deficit_in_parking/
And to think famed (jnfamous) state politician Lena Guerrerro came this close to imposing a nickel tax on every plastic bottle produced in Texas in the 1980’s
(Jobs for the homess!) only to be brought down by an incomplete college transcript (she was in a hurry to save to world…..