Pressed for time here on a bunch of projects (I’ll be able to reveal more about one next Thursday or Friday), so let’s take a brief spin through the rest of this week’s news:
- Wyandotte County will hold a public hearing sometime in the next three weeks to help decide whether to put some amount of city and county sales taxes into a Kansas City Chiefs stadium that would be built somewhere in the county. Meanwhile. legislators from both parties are criticizing the deal as “tax giveaways for billionaires.” The Chiefs deal isn’t falling apart or anything, but it does still have a lot of t’s to cross and i’s to dot before Clark Hunt can cash his $4 billion check.
- Clay County officials said three weeks ago that they were no longer talking with Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman about building him a new stadium, and now the county commission has announced that the deadline has passed for putting a stadium measure on the April ballot. Royals stadium sites are truly falling like dominoes (I don’t think that’s actually how that metaphor works, but sure, close enough).
- It’s been almost four years since the Los Angeles Angels‘ sweetheart stadium land deal was torpedoed by an FBI fraud and bribery investigation into then-Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu, which means it’s about time for city officials to start bringing up the prospect of a new stadium land deal. Councilmember Natalie Meeks, who proposed the agenda item, seems open to ideas — selling the parking lots around the stadium for quick cash, leasing it out for development for slow cash, turning it into open space — and any proposal will also have to deal with the state’s Surplus Land Act, which requires that any sale of public land prioritize affordable housing. City officials say they haven’t talked with Angels owner Arte Moreno about any of this, which will probably be necessary, only hopefully this time with fewer federal investigations.
- ICE is going to be present at the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, and Batman will not stand for it.
- The owner of a dead mall in Phoenix wants to get one of those “theme park districts” to divert tax money to a new domed women’s soccer stadium. Tasmania says hold my beer.
With MLS moving to a Fall-Spring schedule in 2027, domed soccer specific stadiums, DSSS will be the next big scam. All those soccer specific stadiums built in the last few years will have to be replaced with domes. And surely you can’t expect a women’s team and a men’s team to share the same stadium, because reasons. So we will probably need two soccer domes per city. What a great time to be in the stadium subsidy business.
Because of all the snow that Phoenix gets in the winter?
What is winter? What is snow? There are 4 seasons, Summer, November to February, hot season, March to mid May, hell season, October and surface of the sun season, June through September. By the way, I thought there might be a domed stadium somewhere along the loop 101. Maybe I’m just imagining there are Super Bowls and College Football Championships every few years in Glendale.
The actual time frame MLS games will be played is going to change very little from the current schedule, because in the new format there will be a roughly 2 month mid-season break where the current offseason is.
I am hoping that saner heads prevail and they adjust the schedule so that northern teams play more home games in spring and fall, while southern/hot weather teams play more home games during the dead of winter.
There is no need to shut the league down for two months… if you actually set the schedule up properly, you could have that mid winter break down to a couple of weeks.
Surely it is not too much to ask that they take weather into account when setting the schedule?
Still, doesn’t matter much to me given that the AppleTV deal means I cannot watch any of it anymore. Nice work boneheads.
Please show your work on this. And by “your work,” I mean “a schedule that doesn’t keep a team on the road for weeks at a time, which is a competitive disadvantage, no matter if it’s made up later.
Please show me a schedule “set up properly” that ensures you can play all through December and January, with only warm-weather sites having games for 60 days.
A lot of leagues around the world operate in winter and have a big break in the middle. It’s not a problem.
And yet MLS is moving to the winter calendar in part specifically to avoid the 3wk break during the international window that interrupts their playoffs and causes significant fan disengagement.
Can you name me a single “other” league in the world that breaks for two full months? I can’t think of one. Russia and Australia used to break for about a month as I recall, but not two.
KT: For some reason I was not able to post this under “reply” to your comment. Here it is all the same:
First of all, if you actually read the post it does not say there would be no winter break, just that it doesn’t need to be two months long.
The rest is quite easy:
1) the ‘winter break’ would run roughly from Dec 20 to Jan 10th, or if the league wants to carpet bomb the holidays in the hopes people will watch… Jan 5th to Jan 20th or thereabouts… in some ways that is better as it avoids the busy part of the NFL playoffs.
2) The league does not shut down, but does drop to an average of 1 game per week per team (not absolutely necessary for all teams as the warm weather cities can play a couple of extra games without trouble… in fact they probably should play additional road games against each other during this period). This means you need only schedule 6 to 8 weekly road games for northern teams during that period – and they can easily fly home between those or do 6 day two game road trips 3x etc.
3) Approx 13 teams (all US based) are located in cities in which it is warm enough to play year round. A few more have domed stadia either as full time homes or that are available in their host cities (this number is likely to increase with future expansion, and includes two of the three most northern franchises).
4) There is no legitimate competitive disadvantage to northern teams playing 2-4 more home games in the fall and spring portions of the season and making those up playing extra games in warm weather locations (where they would probably be living and training during a two month winter break anyway… unless you think they will be couch surfing and watching Real Housewives for two months before resuming play?) from mid Dec to mid Feb.
5) Most locations would be fine to play in March and April, though Montreal, Minnesota, Chicago and Denver/Salt Lake may be outliers, depending on the spring weather. That issue would actually get worse if you shut down the league for two months in winter as more ‘home’ games would have to be accommodated during potentially nasty spring weather.
MLS already has half it’s teams playing in locations in which home games can be played year round. The other “half” already live away from home in the preseason to do warm weather training… is there a reason you didn’t mention the competitive disadvantage that produces for those teams early in the season?
Modifying the schedule to avoid a total league shutdown is not difficult at all. It also allows the league to NOT pack two games per team into every week in both autumn and spring (right before the playoffs).
It also avoids the inevitable problems you get from a lengthy league shutdown midseason. A 2-3wk break is not a significant problem for players, nor does it allow fans to drift away to other sports the way a two month break inevitably does.
ICE is also going to be present at the Winter Olympics, which has alarmed city officials in Milan and forced the hard-right Italian government into an awkward position.
As always you have to go to non-American news sources for these important stories.
I saw that (Guardian? BBC? one of those), but didn’t include it in the roundup because it didn’t have Batman.
Let’s hear it for San Jose! Nueva Ciudad Gotham!
So is that a reward for the death squads for the killings they have already ‘achieved’ or just an opportunity for additional killings?
I mean, I guess they don’t have to choose….
“Clay County officials said three weeks ago that they were no longer talking with Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman about building him a new stadium…”
————
And I’m through with Clay County
There ain’t nothin’ there for me
There ain’t nobody in Clay County
Who ever did a thing for me
— Tom Petty
I was today years old when I learned that Tasmania is a real place. Apparently Tasmanian Devils also exist but they aren’t destructive. Just slutty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmanian_devil
Wait till you read about Tasmanian tiger truthers:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reports-of-tasmanian-tiger-sightings-as-aussies-search-for-extinct-thylacine-60-minutes-transcript/
The AFL has been working on getting a team in Hobart for a long time.
Tasmania has about 575,000 people of which around 230,000 live in Hobart and immediate surrounds.
A 23,000 seat stadium (that costs $850m USD)? Really?
I would think that procurement of goods and labor would be more expensive given the small population of the area. They probably have to ship materials from far away and bring in labor like Qatar for the World Cup Stadiums.
No doubt, Aqib, but the issue is 23,000 seats for a local population of just ten times that.
This stadium is bigger than necessary. With the exception of outliers like Green Bay, it is a rarity for stadia in host cities to be able to accommodate 10% of the local population. It is hard to imagine, even with visiting fans, that they will come close to filling it regularly.
Secondly, while the cost itself is staggering (you wonder what percentage of that is roof alone), the real issue is the per capita cost – $850m US for a city with a population of 230k? Or a nation with a population of 575k?
That is a staggering number. Host cities with double that population routinely spend half to 2/3rds of that total on “national” or major stadia… even NHL or MLB facilities rarely approach $4,000 per resident in construction costs.
While I’m sure AFL fans are thrilled, it is hard to see this as anything but a disaster for the people/taxpayers of the nation.
Bari will do anything to try to knock the Epstein files off the front page, won’t she?