Welcome to 2025! (Looks around.) Hey!
- The Cleveland Browns owners took a major step forward toward moving to a new stadium in Brook Park by issuing a statement that they have “officially execut[ed] a clause” that will allow them to “tak[e] steps forward” to buy the land for the site. As if that’s not an indication of a promise of an intention enough, Jimmy and Dee Haslam are also planning to work with “our public partners on the project” to cover the remaining funding gap of $1.2 billion, a mere detail!
- The Baltimore Banner has ideas for how the Orioles should spend the $600 million (plus!) in renovation money the team was gifted by the state of Maryland, and one of them is “Make Eutaw Street a year-round destination,” but it turns out Eutaw Street — the public street that is now effectively owned by the Orioles — is already open year-round, just nobody goes there. Also, maybe the Banner could have suggested its list of proposals when the state actually could have made it a condition of the taxpayer funding? Ah well, next time.
- Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi points out that spending $91 million in public money on upgrading a public soccer field for BOS Nation F.C., while claiming it’s really to benefit city schoolkids who will get to play there when the team is on the road, is maybe a little disingenuous when nearby Lowell recently renovated its high school soccer field for just $8 million.
- Been wishing you could read an article portraying city staffers who worked nights and weekends to get the Jacksonville Jaguars $775 million renovation subsidy done as “the real heroes” while calling it “a local government version of a two-minute drill in football” and “a hurry-up offense” and important because if hadn’t gotten done in the summer, the team’s terrible record this fall might have reduced support for the plan? The Jacksonville Daily Record has got you covered!
- If you would like to serve on Las Vegas’ new Baseball Stadium Community Oversight Committee to oversee the Athletics stadium’s community benefits agreement, assuming the Athletics stadium is ever built and there ends up being a community benefits agreement, applications are open!
Incredible though it may seem to call the Browns’ $1.2 billion public ask the “bait” in a bait and switch scheme, the complicated infrastructure questions at the site (ingress and egress from freeways, internal road network, site drainage, utilities) coupled with the team’s refusal to answer questions re infrastructure costs or the team’s public ask for same may preview a two part strategy by the team: 1) get public approval of the $1.2 billion dome ask now; and 2) halfway through design and construction, follow up with a hefty additional public ask for infrastructure dollars. Unless/until the team definitively states that it will fund all site infrastructure costs, I suggest that the team’s ask be cited as “$1.2 billion plus.”
Do you think the Haslams are actually serious about the Brook Park plan, Ken? Or are they mostly (or partly) angling for a fallback plan where they just end up with a ton of public money to renovate on the lakefront, a la what Ted Leonsis did in DC with the Virginia threat?
At this time last year — when the dome scheme first surfaced— I thought 50/50 it was a leverage ploy. But I now believe they are genuinely excited about their dome and will accept nothing less. And I also think they’ve ingested their own propaganda about its economic impact and they can’t fathom why their critics aren’t buying their story.
I’m starting to feel like I haven’t given enough credence to the phenomenon of owners drinking their own Kool-Aid. When you look at John Fisher, and the Pegulas in Buffalo, and Stan Kroenke in L.A., there’s a growing track record of billionaires deciding an idea must be a good one just because they came up with it.
Absolutely agree!
well, of course it’s a great idea!
I came up with it!
I think they’re seeing Indy getting all these WWE events, the faux economists creating this buzz around Taylor swift/Beyoncé level touring acts and the potential of Cleveland Super Bowl as reason enough to go for it.
It also helps the current stadium kinda sucks.
I think they probably have some sort of agreement worked out with the state that will fill the bulk of the desired government funding. It will allow the state to also fund the Bengals renovations.
I just find it funny that Ken Silliman is making a name for himself on this issue when he was part of creating the problem by being part of the White Administration that lost the original Browns team and the Jackson Administration that failed to do ANY Lakefront development in in 16 years.
There’s no agreement according to the state officials who are speaking publicly:
https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/we-follow-through/from-cleveland-to-the-statehouse-browns-future-dome-stadium-funding-in-question-by-state-lawmakers
Maybe nobody goes to Eutaw street anymore because it’s too crowded. Did you guys ever think of that?
We have documented histories and opinions of that exact very situation being situated in other areas of the baseball multibourse.
Re: Boston Soccer
NE Revolution have been slowly working on (well, working might be too strong a word) getting their own stadium for about 25 years since playing in Foxboro sucks. It’s too hard to get to. The old “let’s put MLS teams out where the minivan people live” does not work. It didn’t work in Chicago. It doesn’t work in Philadelphia. (although that is not really why the Revs play in Foxboro. They do so because the Krafts own the club).
Last I checked it looked like they finally sorta have a plan to build one in Everett. So why hasn’t there been some kind of collaboration to build just one instead of, presumably, spending public money on two of them? None of the articles on either project mention that. Has it really not occurred to anyone?
I suspect the Revs will draw better – or at least aspire to draw better – than Bos Nation, especially if they continue to call themselves Bos Nation, but a 20-30k stadium should work for both, I would think.
However, I also heard that the reason the Washington NWSL team (can’t recall their name) is not playing all its games in DC United’s park is because it’s just too expensive for what they draw. Maybe BNFC believes it cannot make money sharing with the Revs.
NWSL is not going to grow or be appealing to prospective fans if it does not play in decent facilities (i.e. not astroturf with football lines on it and/or high school stadiums), but it’s not remotely sensible to have two state-of-the-art soccer facilities, one just slightly bigger than the other, in every market.
So maybe they’re just stuck in between and somehow hoping the public will make up the gap.
Having lived in both Chicago/Chicagoland and the Philly burbs, I don’t think of Bridgeview or Chester as “where the minivan people live”. Don’t recall how the Chester site happened, but Bridgeview was definitely path of least resistance and most money rather than servicing any segment of the fan base.
The MLS suburban stadium boom came about cuz the league recognized playing in empty NFL stadiums wasn’t a sustainable product. But the league’s popularity in most markets was middling at best. So they got aggressive with suspect financing partners. Philly initially looked for deals in southern New Jersey. The Fire accepted bids from various municipalities around Chicago. The LA Galaxy ended up partnering with the Cal State system, not understanding that moving to Dominguez Hills was the de facto abandonment of the monied parts of Los Angeles.
The Bridgeview stadium has been a disaster. The Union stadium in Chester slightly less so, but the promise of massive riverfront development seems like a failure.
https://heartland.org/opinion/small-town-gets-big-league-debt-with-stadium-deal/
I think the more blunt way of putting this is: MLS wasn’t a weighty enough gorilla to be able to demand big-city money at first, but the league discovered that there were lots of suburbs desperate for attention and willing to spend public dollars.
Chester is not where the minivan people live, but it is closer to southern New Jersey where some of them do.
Or at least, that was the best they could hope for.
I agree that the sites of these suburban MLS stadiums were not carefully chosen to appease a certain group of fans. But it seems that trying to get those fans who could drive to those locations was the post hoc justification for playing out of the city.
Yeah- a weird reading of American soccer culture was that it was an inherently suburban activity for the children of wealthy people.
Really the bedrock of soccer fandom is Latinos and other immigrants. But MLS justified their dumb stadiums by saying they were going after the suburban consumer
It’s a mixture of all those people, but it seemed like the people most willing to embrace the new league in the beginning were fans from Central America, especially if their countrymen were on the team.
The problem with putting a stadium in the suburbs is that it’s close to the fans in that area, but it’s much harder to get to for everyone else, especially if it’s not transit-accessible.