It’s Friday, which means I had to take valuable time away from reading about the Mafia luring rich people into playing in rigged poker games in order to hang out with NBA players who scored 6.6 points a game so that I could instead sum up the rest of this week’s stadium and arena news, for you, because I care.
- Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is once again saying his condition for allowing a new Chicago Bears stadium is that first the team owners must pay off the remaining $500 million in Soldier Field reconstruction debt (or $356 million, definitely somewhere in there), which as we discussed last month is both a reasonable ask and an arbitrary one. Pritzker also said he’d be okay with helping to build roads and infrastructure but not a stadium, which is kind of a slippery slope when the team is demanding an incredible $855 million in traffic and transit upgrades, and the biggest stadium subsidy in U.S. history was just approved involving mostly not direct stadium spending. Given his past statements, Pritzker probably isn’t trying to leave the door open for massive state subsidies while claiming he’s protecting the public purse, but if he were, this sure is what it would look like.
- Kansas State Senate President Ty Masterson says he expects the Kansas City Royals owners to soon propose a new baseball stadium at the Aspiria site (formerly a Sprint corporate campus) in Overland Park, to take advantage of Kansas’s offer of $700 million worth of sales tax kickbacks and lottery money (maybe, if it can find enough sales taxes to kick back) that state officials say is only on the table until the end of December. Two local residents, one of whom used to serve in the state legislature, told Fox4KC that they think this would be a bad idea because traffic; meanwhile, Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe has been holding regular phone meetings with both Royals and Chiefs execs to discuss stadium possibilities in his state, so if nothing else an Overland Park proposal would help Royals owner John Sherman create some of that sweet, sweet leverage.
- NPR has taken a look at soaring sports ticket prices and concluded that the reasons are that team owners 1) would rather sell fewer seats at higher prices because that’s more profitable, 2) are able to charge more for tickets thanks to dynamic pricing, and 3) are offering more club seats and other “premium experiences,” and while all of those are true enough as pricing strategies, they don’t really explain why teams are only doing this now. Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that there are more and more Americans today who can afford premium ticket prices, and they’re the only ones spending any money because there are also more and more Americans who can’t afford anything, and this has been the trend for the last four decades? I wrote about this in 2002 — along with how stadium subsidies have been letting team owners rebuild with more club sections and fewer cheap seats, helping drive up ticket prices — and again in 2006 and again in 2024, guess this counts as writing about it again in 2025, it’s taking longer than I thought.
- Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty and West Sacramento Mayor Martha Guerrero are teaming up to try to land an MLB expansion team, with a stadium to be funded by reply hazy, try again later. McCarty says he’s fine with a stadium being in West Sacramento, while adding that Sacramento residents need to “support the A’s here, show that we are worthy of a Major League franchise,” good luck with that.
- “Leading sports economist calls current deal to publicly fund Spurs arena ‘insane’” is an entirely unsurprising headline if you know anything about sports economists or the insane Spurs arena funding proposal that could cost taxpayers $750 million or more to replace the NBA’s 11th-newest arena, but it’s still an impressive one to see in the run-up to a voter referendum on helping to fund said deal. (No, of course it wasn’t in the San Antonio Express-News — they just can’t quit claiming the public costs aren’t really public costs, preferably in at least one editorial a week.)
- Speaking of hiding stadium subsidies in the infrastructure budget, something called Smart Cities Dive has taken a look at how stadium projects for the Washington Commanders, Denver Broncos, and Carolina Panthers have all saddled taxpayers with huge costs even while claiming to be privately funded. It’s enough to make you think maybe people are finally catching on that you need to read the fine print before praising “private” deals that aren’t, and … okay, never mind, we still have some work to do in that department.
- Dallas is spending $3.7 billion to tear down its convention center and build a new one, because that always works out well, and the Dallas News reports that the 20 acres of land that will be freed up as a result could provide a space for a new arena for the Mavericks, whose owners are looking for between 30 and 50 acres of land for an arena district. Yeah, I don’t get the math either, but city council ad hoc sports recruitment and retention committee chair Chad West says, “If we need to move mountains to keep them, then so be it,” so maybe he’s looking at putting an actual mountain on the old convention center site, if it’s steep enough it could provide additional acreage?
- “Will the Jaguars franchise move to London?” asks USA Today’s headline, answering its own question eight paragraphs later with “The Jaguars will not be moving to London.” Guys, I’m pretty sure Ian Betteridge meant his law of headlines as a cautionary tale, not as an instruction book.
One of the advantages of the Bears moving to Arlington Heights is that Arlington Race Course used to host crowds of tens of thousands of people. How much road work really NEEDS to be done?
Improve the train line (which would be used 365 days a year), and it would be easier for many Chicago residents to get to Bears’ games by train and they wouldn’t need to drive.
After the rebuild, Arlington Park had a few Mother’s Day opening day crowds in the 30 to 40,000 range. But nothing near the 60,000 the Bears stadium would allegedly hold. I don’t recall the traffic situation. A horse race was pretty much the last thing my mom would want to do for Mother’s Day.
I was at a couple of the bigger events at Arlington Park, the day Secretariat was there and a couple of the Arlington Million races.Traffic backed up onto 53, but they had all the gates open and it wasn’t that bad.
One difference between that and a Bears game though–for a horse race, most people are trying to arrive in the 60 minutes before the first race. For a Bears game, people will start getting there 4+ hours early for tailgating. The arrivals will be staggered over a much longer time. Where they used to collect cash and had to make change for parking (twice for preferred parking), now that they would just scan your barcode and go.
That Metra station though, yeah, that’s going to need some work.
The Arlington Park METRA stop would probably need an expensive upgrade. It was chaos toward the end of a racing day. People crossing over the outbound tracks to get to the inbound platform, which an express heading by. (UPN trains run on the left). I’m guessing a pedestrian bridge is way beyond the Bears budget.
Thank you for linking to the Defector piece on the NBA’s corruption. It was far better accounting of the essentials than everything the NYT published yesterday taken all together.
Thanks for linking to the Defector piece on the NBA’s corruption. It’s a better accounting of the meat of the matter than everything the NYT has published taken all together.
I find it quite telling and not at all coincidental that, as the target customers of the professional sports cartels moved up market over the past 40 years the facilities they play in became both far more luxurious and highly subsidized.
It’s certainly true that some teams played in 100% publicly financed (and generally very modest) stadia in the 1960s or 70s, but they also tended to have to pay rent on those facilities.
In those days the taxpayers who, for the most part, paid for the facilities were able to afford tickets and maybe even a hot dog or a beer while attending a game.
Today, the majority of fans attending games appear to be upper middle class at least. No doubt there are some who save up their entertainment dollars and splurge a few times a year on high priced tickets, but I don’t believe that happens very often.
A check of today’s available NFL tickets showed a couple of teams with seats available from $16 (Saints) to $39 (Ravens), but the majority of teams are well north of $100 and some are well north of $200. Not including parking, fees and concessions of course.
So, when sports were truly the entertainment of the ordinary masses facilities were spartan and the attendees paid something close to market value for their seats. Now that sports have moved up market (and in some cases out of reach of ordinary fans), the taxpayers subsidies for the entertainment palaces the wealthy get to inhabit (at far below market value) have expanded beyond reason.
It is very hard not to draw conclusions from this.