Ever since the state of Nevada approved $600 million in public money two years ago toward a new A’s stadium on the Las Vegas Strip, the project has existed in a state of quantum superposition: It is simultaneously both happening and not happening, depending on your perspective. On Friday, the stadium took another step forward, as workers poured the first concrete — prompting both headlines about construction hitting a “milestone” and also paragraphs like these from Sports Illustrated:
The true believers in this project will point to the groundbreaking, the concrete being poured, and John Fisher’s purchase of a house in Nevada last December as tent pole reasons for why this ballpark is happening.
The skeptics will point out that none of those factors are permanent. The groundbreaking was a show (which they all are), while concrete can easily be removed. Houses are sold all the time. You could argue that Fisher bought the house as a stunt for potential investors, and if he ends up having to sell the house for a slight loss, then oh well. But if it ends up securing funds for his ballpark plan, then it was all worth it.
Oh yes, the funds. Fisher told the Nevada Independent two weeks ago that the stadium price tag is now “up in the $2 billion range,” which is a whole hell of a lot more than the $600 million he has in hand (some of which are future tax breaks, so he doesn’t even have those in hand). Fisher has another $100 million in a prepaid concessions contract with Aramark and a $300 million loan deal with Goldman Sachs, but those are both just borrowing against the future; he’s also been trying to sell minority shares of the team at inflated prices, without much luck reported as of yet. He keeps insisting he can turn to his family for money if needed, and he also has the San Jose Earthquakes that he could sell all or part of, but so far an actual financing plan remains aspirational.
Which is fine for Fisher for now, as he doesn’t need a full financing plan to move dirt around and pour some concrete. Clark County is now considering the team’s permit applications for the next stages of construction; the first steel work and beginning of the building’s foundation isn’t set to be started on until 2026, so Fisher doesn’t have to start spending the bulk of that $2 billion for a while yet.
But would he even be starting on it if he didn’t have the money to finish it? You might think not, but consider the sad story of the Nou Mestalla, the future stadium of Valencia C.F. that started pouring concrete in 2007 and then, well, let’s let Wikipedia explain what happened:
Construction on the stadium was suspended in February 2009, due to the club struggling financially.Valencia CF announced in December 2011 that it had negotiated a deal with Bankia to complete the stadium and transfer the old Mestalla property to the bank, and that it expected to complete the stadium in approximately two years, but this deal later collapsed.
An updated redesign, by Fenwick Iribarren Architects, was put forward in November 2013. The capacity was to be reduced to 61,500, the underground car park reduced in size, and the original roof and elaborate façade to be scaled back, but no date was given for when construction would restart. Valencia CF began negotiations with Ayuntamiento of Valencia in October 2017 to renew and restart the project. Further design modifications were proposed, reducing to a capacity of 54,000 seats.
Eighteen years in, the Nou Mestalla currently looks like this. Construction work began again earlier this year, and Valencia now says it plans to move in for the 2027-28 season, but you know how quantum superpositions can be.
Could Fisher’s Armadillo still be sitting half-finished in the year 2043? We simply don’t know — and Fisher himself may not either. Big construction projects are by their nature leaps of faith, and the best way to build faith is to get other people to show faith, so the A’s owner badly needs some momentum on the fundraising end to convince investors that he’s actually ready to go through with this. The higher the price tag goes, the higher eyebrows will be raised: Spending around a billion dollars to build MLB’s smallest stadium in its smallest market and hoping you’ll earn it back seemed dubious from the start, and it’s only more so now that it’ll be more like a billion and a half and Vegas tourism is down amid tariff woes and international tourists being afraid of getting imprisoned.
With so many bad vibes about, it makes sense that Fisher would be hyping the pouring of some concrete, even if he hasn’t bought the next batch yet. And he might still! Or might not! There’s a very good chance it won’t be until 2026 before anyone opens the box to see if the cat is dead.
Schrödinger’s Cat Box: Simultaneously both happening and not happening,
Schrodinger’s litter box.
It both does and does not need to be emptied.
Extremely fun bit for BIG to welcome comparisons to the Sydney Opera House—a building famously 1300 percent over budget and 10 years late—when the Armadillo-dome design was revealed.
What was that rule about headlines that end in a question mark again?
(??)
(Ian Betteridge has left the chat)
Fisher is losing ground on the financing front. He is standing still while the costs balloon (and the build hasn’t really started yet…just wait until the $2bn has another 15-20% tacked on during the build… when you absolutely just can not quit).
His ‘business history’ is working against him also.
It seems highly unlikely he can sell the Earthquakes for $300M+ (even accounting for what other MLS/WNBA teams can go for these days… he isn’t selling a prime property).
And he would have to sell more than 50% of the A’s to raise the kind of money he needs to come close to ‘finishing’ the stadium at the current price.
He might find some angel investors (you know, like the current convicted-felon-in-chief did when he sold the lease to the money losing hotel he built in the Old post office in Washington – believed to be worth maybe $75m – for $375m… sometimes you just don’t know how valuable a money losing asset can be until you try to sell it…) who just want to “make Vegas happen”, but that seems less and less likely as time marches on.
I don’t believe for a second that his fellow heirs (or family as he likes to think of them) will cough up to bail him out. He would likely be required to get their consent before using his share of the family nest egg as collateral for a loan, or be required to sell to his siblings under right of first refusal.
Man, being a failson nepobaby must be hard work.
“It seems highly unlikely he can sell the Earthquakes for $300M+ (even accounting for what other MLS/WNBA teams can go for these days… he isn’t selling a prime property)”
The property is SO un-prime, that MAGA-Lite Mayor Matt Mahan*, “said that the potential sale of the Earthquakes by owner John Fisher “might be a way to entice the soccer club to play its games in downtown San Jose,”
https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Articles/2025/06/20/san-jose-mayor-suggests-earthquakes-sale-could-relocate-soccer-club-downtown/
*San Jose mayor and Trump aligned in homeless response (KTVU)
ICE conducts operation in San Jose, Mayor Matt Mahan confirms (SF Chron)
This is funny cuz Fisher built a very functional but boring stadium in a terrible location, although it’s really maybe a mile from “downtown” San Jose.
It’s also very new, already kinda outdated and a pretty bad location for MLS’s “Bay Area franchise”
Why is the quakes stadium a bad location ( I’m asking this as I don’t know the answer)? It seems to me that the stadium is fairly close to I-880 near the San Jose airport. Is there something I’m missing?
So it’s hemmed in by the airport to the east and train tracks to the west. While it’s just north of a freeway, the fact that it’s basically accessible by a single road means a lot of congestion on game days. No “fun” development around it, limited parking.
With public transportation- can’t get there with VTA (local light rail) and the Caltrains (regional commuter rail) station is about a 20 min walk.
Would be pretty dam funny if someone bought the Quakes and moved them to Oakland.
Tourism isn’t going to account for 162 games per season. This team will need organic support. I hear the minor league team draws support so maybe, but if its highway robbery for a seat, and a bad team with a republican for disrespecting fans, hmmm
They only need support for 81 games, but your point is still valid.
Operating in a small market with a relatively less well-heeled population mean that generating the kind of revenue streams (tickets, streaming, sponsorships, etc.) needed to pay off such an expensive project is unlikely. I agree tourism isn’t likely to make up the difference.
Having sufficiently grieved for my (former) favorite team, I’m very highly to very-very highly enjoying this slow motion collapse. Having watched this drama closely for many years, I don’t see how he gets this across the finish line. The value of the team, especially with this tainted ownership, isn’t worth the ballpark they’re trying to build. We wanted him to sell the team because he sucks, but he’s gonna sell the team because he has to.
Amen. If Manfred could figure out a way to sell streaming rights to watching John Fisher utterly and completely fuck himself, it could make MLB’s RSN related revenue fears fade into oblivion.
Something I honestly haven’t thought too deeply about until now… how do the transferable tax credits work? It’s pretty easy to understand how they might be considered cash-equivalent, but who wants to be on the other side of the transfer transaction? Why would you want to essentially pay part of your tax liability to John Fisher in exchange for a transferable credit, instead of just paying the state anyway? Unless Fisher is transferring the credit in exchange for goods/services/restoration of his shredded dignity that would normally cost less than the face value of the credit, i.e. overpaying when his budget’s already blowing out.
Tridents Up! Mariners need a good rivalry. Sell the team to the Portland group that has $$$ and land ready to go.
Northern Florida Rays to Nashville. (Florida doesn’t support neither baseball team) Southern Florida Marlins
Then expansion!
It’s worth noting that per VitalVegas, Fisher isn’t paying for the work currently being done. That’s being paid for by Bally’s. We’ll see what happens when Fisher has to spend his own money.
No source for that Bally’s claim, Vital Vegas says “I don’t care enough to do a full story.” So it could be true, or an unverified rumor, or nothing.
Can anyone tell from the images if the concrete work is on the stadium site or elsewhere on Bally’s plot of land?
It’s not obvious to me based on the available images… but maybe if Fisher stiffs the contractors, they can pour a bas-relief concrete structure that says: “$ell” right in the middle of the future playing field.
And if those five armadillo shells are really going to be that big and made of concrete, I think the roof alone could cost $1Bn…
Now, maybe the ‘final version’ (if we ever get there) will be significantly less grandiose, but the March ’24 renderings are unbelievably crazy.
And look at Arco Park in Sacramento from the 80s. The construction stopped after the concrete foundation was built.
At this point, it seems like Fisher’s end game is to sell the franchise to someone who wants to build a ballpark in Vegas.
The snag in such a plan is that no one seems to be able to get a high price for an MLB franchise at the moment and the MLB office doesn’t want to approve a sale at a price they deem “too low”. The Angels, Nationals, and now Twins have all put their teams up for sale and then taken them off the market after failing to get offers that they (or Manfred) thought were good enough. The alleged sale of the Rays may or may not actually happen.
So who is going to pay a premium price for a shabby franchise -and- pay more than a billion on top of that to build a ballpark in a small market that is probably oversaturated for sports already?
If anyone could make building a stadium in Vegas for the A’s pencil out, why would Fisher want to sell the team? He could just take on a partner, or borrow money from a bank, and still get to play the conquering hero.
At this point the question seems to be “Is Fisher going to find a billion dollars to spend way too much on a stadium in a small market out of spite, or will he be forced to throw in the towel?” Either seems possible, and knowing what I do about failson psyches, he’s going to hold out for door #1 as long as he can.
Pardon me while I laugh at John Fisher. He has managed to massively screw up the A’s move, while angering would-be fans in three different cities. He honestly seemed to think he could say, “I want to move the A’s to Las Vegas,” and Las Vegas would spend a fortune to build him the expensive ballpark he wants. Instead of trying to build a financially-smart ballpark, and understanding his financial constraints, he had his architect draw up plans for an expensive park that he didn’t have the financing for. The Tropicana site was, by far, the worst of the four sites discussed for the A’s ballpark. It’s nine acres, barely enough room to fit a ballpark, while the other sites were all 20-plus acres, extra room that could have been used for a number of purposes, including team offices or a parking lot for fans. The Tropicana site was also the most expensive, and located at the corner of an intersection that was already very busy. And there was a perfectly good hotel on the site, which had to be torn down, while the other sites would have been ready for construction with little or no demolition required. The only reason to choose the Tropicana site is that it has the prestige of being on the Strip. If John Fisher was smart – something he doesn’t appear to be – he would have abandoned his dreams of a Sydney Opera House-inspired ballpark on the Strip, and would have instead built a more modest park on the $1 site near the Rio or the site of the now-closed Wild Wild West hotel. Now he’s looking at a $2 billion price tag that he probably can’t afford for a ballpark in a city that has only lukewarm interest in bringing a Major League Baseball team to town. This could end badly for Fisher and the A’s.
Just fucking sell the team to a Lacob-led ownership group already!