Hey, did you hear the one about the time that then-New York governor and now-New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo gave two of Elon Musk’s cousins $750 million in public money to open a solar-panel factory that ended up not making any solar panels but just re-sold another company’s solar panels for twice as much per watt as the national average? Me neither until recently — consider it bonus topical content.
Meanwhile, back in the now:
- Anaheim city officials have no idea how much maintenance work is needed at city-owned Angel Stadium because the Los Angeles Angels‘ lease doesn’t require them to tell the city about repair needs, but it could be “hundreds of millions of dollars” worth, according to state auditors. They suggested either asking Angels owner Arte Moreno if the city can do occasional inspections or maybe seeking a court order. It’s important because Moreno is on the hook for certain maintenance costs, while others would fall on the city; the Angels owner recently said, “I’m not going to put $200 or $300 million into a stadium that a city owns without any of their participation. Maybe we’ll get a new mayor and council that wants us to stay,” which is not exactly a commitment to live up to his lease obligations.
- Pinellas County is considering sending Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg a bill for county time and money spent on the St. Petersburg stadium deal Sternberg ultimately backed out of, and St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch said the idea “has merit” and he may do the same. “Yeah, why not?” remarked county commission chair Brian Scott, who was previously for the stadium deal. “When we find out what that is, we’ll send them an invoice.”
- Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine still wants to raise sports gambling taxes to raise $600 million toward a Cleveland Browns stadium (and more toward other future stadiums), but the state legislature still prefers its omni-TIF idea to do the same, and DeWine hasn’t said he’ll veto the legislature’s plan. As for the idea of just not giving Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam $600 million to move from one part of the state to another, no one (besides state house Democrats, but who cares about them) seems to be interested in that, way to go, Ohio.
- Bexar County, the city of San Antonio, and the Spurs owners have signed a nonbinding agreement not to use county property taxes to fund a new $1.5 billion basketball arena, instead relying on hotel and car rental taxes, which, uh, was the plan all along? Could this nonbinding agreement just be a way to get headlines like “Bexar County agrees not to use property taxes to fund new Spurs arena”? Surely elected officials would not be that cynical!
- Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman says he has “multiple [stadium] opportunities on both sides of the state line,” because of course he does, he wants to be a savvy negotiator, after all.
- The USL is expanding to compete directly with MLS and adopting promotion and relegation even, and you know what that means: lots of new stadiums! Modesto, California gets one, and Rogers, Arkansas gets one, and Albany, New York gets one, and by “gets one” I mean of course “gets to help pay for one,” that’s just the price of doing business in a world where there are now two leagues that could be forced to compete for the right to play in markets, hmm.
I’m convinced the majority of MLB owners actually don’t mind having guys like Sternberg and John Fisher around because they get all of the attention — and therefore all of the heat — for being uncaring, unapologetic slimeballs who don’t see their teams as anything other than revenue-maximizing operations, and their teams’ home cities as humongous ATM’s. Two of Fisher’s divisional “rivals” (Arte Moreno and John Stanton) are actually among the most readily identifiable members of that cohort of owners.
Agreed. Arte is a great example of a terrible owner who loves flying under the radar while fans and the media (justifiably) laugh over and over again at Failson Fisher.
That’s one heck of a basketball. What’s it made of, Gazoolium mined on the moons of Jupiter? And will it still bounce?
If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
The Pro/Rel aspect of the USL will give owners a new stadium argument. “We need a $100 million stadium improvement or we’ll get relegated.” Or, “with a couple hundred million in improvements we’re on our way to promotion, up there with Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook.”
By gum, minor league soccer, and 2nd tier minor league soccer at that, put them on the map!
Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook agree!
Go BROCK Nation FC!
I can’t wait to see some glorified semipro team in Montgomery demand a free 30,000 seat palace that’s totally impractical for American football, just so 1,000 Alabamians can show up to watch 22 plumbers play to a scoreless battle for 12th place in the soccer equivalent of Low-A class baseball.
Well, it worked for the Tampa Tarpons…
Hey, that’s an honest-to-god major league stadium you’re talking about.
Promotion and relegation doesn’t care about financing for sportsball palaces. Everton — the cross-city rival to Liverpool — are leaving their legacy home of Goodison Park after this season for a new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock. Construction carried on even as Everton have been sold and the club flirted with relegation from the Premier League. In plain English, Everton built their new stadium knowing they could move in as a second-division club.
Everton could fall to League 1 and still have fans show up though. Lower division soccer is a different animal in the US.
Exactly. Everton matters to people in a way that Geographic Area FC does not in America.
Thinking about the “welcome to wrexham” show that details much of what Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mcelhenney have gone through…
I did notice that they have had to make improvements to their stadium to allow more fans to attend games. And the growth coupled with promotion keeps requiring more additions.
Its interesting to watch it play out in real life, but presented in a different way.
Just an observation
The way it *should* work is that by having two leagues competing against each other, it would reduce the leverage of either league, especially with pro/rel — if a team owner threatened to leave, the city could just say “Fine, we’ll go get a team in the other league, or get a new lower-division team and have them play their way up.”
Given that this is the U.S., though, you’re probably right that it will just give city officials more excuses for why they need to give money to the local rich guys.
About 20 years ago, I recall the Marketing Director of the Chicago Wolves telling me about his experiences in Peoria with the IHL/AHL Rivermen. He said it didn’t matter when they were being replaced with a lower level ECHL team. People just want come out, drink beers, and watch guys hit each other. Peoria hockey teams have played in 4 different leagues, but they’re still in the same arena.
Counterargument: After the Newark Bears switched from the Atlantic League to the Can-Am League, their attendance went from around 2,000 a game to under 1,000. I went to a doubleheader their final season and there were more people on the field than in the stands — my son got three foul balls, because there was no one within 100 feet of us.
https://www.statscrew.com/minorbaseball/t-nb13310
Was that because of the level (there were always independent clubs that could do really well) or because the Bears no longer had the money to effectively sell and market?
Tickets don’t sell themselves, and if you stop trying, they stop selling at all.
In their five years as a AA Texas League franchise, the Round Rock Express drew 3,394,337 fans and in their first five years as a AAA Pacific Coast League franchise, they drew 3,336,200.
It’s not always about the level. It’s about the organization.
USL (and it’s predecessor USISL) have announced various pro/rel schemes over the years, not of which come to fruition. “Promoted” teams don’t promote because they don’t want to, or their stadium isn’t up to snuff. “Relegated” teams don’t relegate because the upper division needs a minimum number of teams to maintain sanctioning. Hell, the Richmond Kickers self-relegated to save money after back to back years of making it to the D2 championship game all but bankrupted the organization.
And I’ve long pointed out that the day relegation becomes a realistic possibility for a Division 1 soccer team is also the last day a professional division 1 soccer team gets any public assistance in any stadium project. Forget the big civic and governmental handouts, you can forget about rezoning, street realignments, improved services and so on. Relegation means turning that 15-20k attendance into 3-5k overnight. Hard to pay back the bonds when attendance and sponsorship revenue all but disappear.
Pro/Rel came out of too many teams and not enough cities to hold them. We have the opposite problem in the U.S. Sure, you can relegate Fulham or Chelsea or Arsenal, but London will always have a team in D1. Sponsors, broadcasters, and casual fans will adapt. Pro/Rel makes zero sense here economically.
I didn’t realize it required a formal agreement (binding, non-binding or otherwise) to not do something.
Suddenly I discover that in my personal and business lives I have a shocking lack of contractual documentation around things I don’t plan to do.
Oh cool, Moreno is going to sabre-rattle again with threats to move and antagonize local city government again. Can’t wait for more endless discussions about some crappy site in Tustin nobody can reach.
In all seriousness, if Moreno was smart (he isn’t), he’d be better off moving the Angels to Riverside or San Bernardino and re-adopt the California moniker. Most of their fanbase is in the Inland Empire anyways. Anaheim would probably make more money developing the stadium site for a Disneyland extension or some other entertainment option. (Or just housing, which is always a default option pretty much anywhere in greater SoCal these days). As it stands, the problem is that Angel Stadium is old – not in a charming Dodger Stadium kind of way, and Moreno has neither the money nor the skills to navigate the snakepit that is California real estate politics to get a new venue built. It’s all of the exact same problems with John Fisher, just on a longer timeline.
If you want a new major stadium in California, you need an owner(s) with a lot of money, connections, and “screw it, just get it done” mentality. The NFL and NBA have understood that. MLB lucked into John Moores being a deeply connected businessman to get PetCo built and maybe envisioned Lew Wolff being that for the A’s until the San Jose fiasco. But otherwise they’ve allowed cheapskates who are way in over their heads to drag out their stadium situations in California for way too long before realizing it’s untenable.
Agreed, Ian. Everyone knows he’s not going to leave the LA basin, so why even float it as a possibility (although the Yankees managed it, it probably wasn’t the threat that they were going to move to Newark or Trenton that really did it…)?
Relocating from the current site is not a bad idea for all of the reasons you have mentioned. And, if you are going to do that, it makes the most sense to move closer to your existing fan base and (if possible) toward the more well heeled fans you hope to win over.
Sadly, MLB has become so addicted to welfare payments from local governments that they can no longer see anything else.
Now, a broader question: Before the never ending expansion of interleague play began, one of the benefits of being the “other” league team in a town dominated by the incumbent (pretty much NY, LA and Chicago) was that fans wanting to see the Yankees or Red Sox in LA, or the Cubs or Dodgers in NY, had a reason to show up at the opposing league park.
I’m not sure how many did, nor whether it was a significant part of the White Sox, Angels or Mets gates (certainly the cross town games – usually a single series that switched from one home to another every other year – were big hits most of the time).
But in this enlightened age where every team is eventually going to play in every park every year (even if it means your divisional games end up cut to 40 or so a year…), there is no longer any reason to go watch “the other guys”.
I still think a savvy business person can extract government benefits to build a new stadium in California. It just won’t be direct subsidies. But paying for infrastructure, tax abatement, favorable development deals, or getting to run roughshod over zoning or environmental ordinances? That’s all available. And if Moreno were really smart (and cynical), he could pull a move like the 49ers did in Santa Clara and hold a referendum in a low-turnout election to approve direct government funding. The key is the owner would still have to kick in significant money upfront and be at peace with their real estate project turning a profit a decade down the road. Joe Lacob, Stan Kroenke, and Steve Ballmer can do that, but Moreno is too cheap and probably not capitalized well enough to do that.
As for “the other guys,” there are a couple reasons. Geography is probably the biggest selling point, which is why Riverside has traditionally been more Angels fans, or people in Oak Park are more likely to follow the White Sox than the Cubs. There is a real value in being close to a fanbase, especially for baseball with 80+ home games a year.
The other is team culture and identity, which is harder to quantify but has a real value. The A’s attracted a much more blue-collar fan than the Giants’ wine-and-cheese crowd, especially after they moved to Pac-Bell. The Mets and ChiSox have also pretty clear divisions from their more popular cross-town rivals. The Angels under Moreno, though, have utterly failed in that regard. They should’ve been the team for the working-class baseball dad who commutes 50 minutes from his home in Upland each way every day compared to the Hollywood Dodgers with celebrities and scenesters from the west side as their fans. Instead, they stupidly aped after being an “LA team” with their name change and marketing campaign. Never formed a distinct identity, so naturally fan support fell off when the baseball went bad.
Neil, to be fair to the USL, the USSF awful pro league standards has contributed to the mess, like the stadium size requirement of having at least a 15,000 seat stadium.
Bournemouth plays in arguably the best league in the world and their stadium has capacity of only 11,379. Some of the promoted teams in the past have even smaller stadiums.