There’s an absolute ton of news to get to today, but first the biggest news of all: The Field of Schemes gift vault is down to only one remaining numbered Vaportecture art print out of the 100 created for site supporters! That means the next person to sign up as either a new Patreon subscriber or new one-time donor gets print #100, and then there are no more! I’m working on a fun new reward or two for those of you who allow this website to happen, but it’ll take a minute for those to be ready — meanwhile, site supporters are still eligible to get any refrigerator magnets you haven’t already received, plus of course my eternal thanks for helping me devote the time each day to this site that, tragically, still has reason to exist after 28 years of this nonsense.
And speaking of nonsense, here’s more of this week’s stadium and arena news:
- Tampa Bay Rays CEO Ken Babby sent an email to the Hillsborough County Commission in advance of yesterday’s commission meeting warning that getting $1 billion in cash from the county and city for a new stadium is “foundational to the project’s viability” and “time and action are of the essence” or else “we would have no choice but to evaluate alternatives,” in a tour de force of don’t-make-me-come-in-there-ism. The commission didn’t endorse the plan yesterday but also didn’t kill it — they weren’t expected to do either, it was just a “workshop” meeting — something Tampa Bay Times senior bothsideser (and poor math student) John Romano thinks is a sign that a deal can be had if Rays owner Patrick Zalupski just lowers his demands a little and adds “some acknowledgement that the county is, you know, a partner in this marriage.” Maybe some flowers now and again, is that too much to ask?
- Tampa and Hillsborough County may be setting themselves up to be on the hook for a new Rays stadium and a renovated Buccaneers stadium, but there’s still some potential stadium debt in the future of Pinellas County across the bay: The Clearwater City Council and Pinellas County Commission are working on a term sheet to devote $115 million to an upgraded Philadelphia Phillies spring training complex in exchange for the team re-upping its lease through 2047. (The Phillies previously said that upgrades were needed, among other reasons, so that players could have “batting cages with floor scales that track a player’s weight distribution through an entire swing,” that’s a kind of public infrastructure, right?) But I suppose you can’t put a price on the value of spring training to local economies in Florida, and … what’s that you say, you can, and the price is pretty much zero? Well, then.
- Would revenues from a tax district around a new Kansas City Royals downtown stadium (which the city council gave preliminary signoff to pursuing yesterday, as expected) be enough to pay off $600 million in city bonds to help build the stadium, after projections for the city’s Power & Light District proved so “spectacularly wrong” that the city has had to dump an additional $199 million into the pot? City officials are promising to take a “conservative” approach, pursuing what the Kansas City Business Journal describes as “studying different debt coverage ratios; bond sequencing, whether all at once or over several years; and enlisting a revenue consultant to ensure city estimates are not off-base.” That all seems to fall more under “trying to make sure we’re guessing right” than actually “making sure there’ll be enough money if we don’t,” but at least they’re admitting there are past failures that this project needs to pretend to be different than.
- Royals owner John Sherman, meanwhile, has said that he wants any downtown stadium to look kind of like Kauffman Stadium, given that fans tell him “the No. 1 preference, if you ask people that question, is to stay where we are. Hmm, maybe there’s a less expensive option here? No, the Kansas City Star insists that “the Royals will be leaving Kauffman Stadium in a few years” one way or another, surely a respectable newspaper wouldn’t say something like that if it was just an empty threat by a team with no other viable options.
- When Strategic Actions for a Just Economy published my cost report on the 2028 Olympics in February estimating that Los Angeles could end up on the hook for perhaps $7 billion in cost overruns, I didn’t necessarily expect L.A. city officials to do much in response — after all, it also estimated that the city could be on the hook for similar billions in damages if it tried to back out of the games. Since then, though, things have started to get interesting: City councilmember Monica Rodriguez has introduced a city charter amendment to require that the LA28 organizing committee reimburse city costs before setting aside money for its own “legacy fund,” which the original agreement somehow failed to prohibit; the parking news site Parkonomics did its own study of just the traffic and transit costs of hosting the Olympics, and found that nearly every prior host city has ended up hemorrhaging money on getting Olympic visitors to events; and it turns out California Gov. Gavin Newsom still hasn’t signed off on a state promise to help cover Olympic cost overruns, which could deepen L.A.’s budget hole. L.A. is still in the middle of negotiating an Enhanced City Resources Master Agreement with LA28 — it was due last fall, and a draft was sent to the L.A. city council in February, but still hasn’t been made public — so there’s still a chance for the city, as I suggested in my report, to use the International Olympics Committee’s fear of having to cancel or move the 2028 games to reopen talks on reining in costs. Leverage can work both ways!
- You can’t really blame local governments for trying to recoup their 2026 World Cup costs by soaking visitors for whatever they can control, but all the same $100 train tickets just to get to the matches is going to really suck for fans, let alone potential sales tax and hotel surcharges on event days.
- Better hurry up with approving $2 billion in property tax breaks for a new Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights, Illinois legislators, or Bears officials might have to tell the NFL stadium committee that things aren’t going well! Don’t make us send Dad in there!
- A week after Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeff Lurie hinted he could move the team out of Philadelphia without quite saying so out loud, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro vowed that “we’re going to make sure” that doesn’t happen, non-threat threat accomplished!
- Louisville could be building a new pro volleyball arena. That seems like a good place to leave things, see you Monday.
As bad as that Phillies deal would be, it would at least extend their lease until 2047, not just 2027…
You know, it’s a sign of the times we live in that I read that as a one year extension and it didn’t seem at all out of character for an MLB owner to demand $115m in welfare/bribes for a one year lease extension at a spring training stadium.
Wait a sec… isn’t it the landlord who is supposed to demand more money as part of an offered lease extension???
Yes, typo, fixed, thanks!
At the curious (and for some, worrying) rate at which news stories about cancelled hotel reservations and general lack of bookings are popping up in many host cities, I wonder if there will be no need to worry too much about ‘getting world cup fans to the venues’ this summer?
It’s always possible that locals will pick up the ticket slack, but it sure doesn’t seem like the anticipated wave of foreign fans is building.
I looked up pricing for a friend who’s national team will be playing near(ish) to where we live. Seats behind the goals… $950. Seats along the touch lines… $1200. For group matches.
Yeah. Don’t think so….
I support the Japan NT in international soccer, and I looked up the prices for the two Japan matches to be held in Arlington during the group stage. Couldn’t find a single ticket under $500 in *any* section for either game.
And that’s just for the actual 90+ minute action on the pitch. It stands to reason that there would be massive markups on food and beverage, parking, hotel bookings, rental cars, and airfare to the host cities.
I know this whole operation is engineered specifically to extract as much revenue as possible, knowing that FIFA will never generate nearly as much revenue as they will from this World Cup, even if the stands end up being only half-full for even the majority of games… but come the f— on.
Agreed, Kei.
Just read an article that explained (for non-New Yorkers) that the $100-120 train fares they will be paying for trips to WC games in the swamp are normally around $10-12.
And the justification for this would be??? We expect fuel to rise 1000% in cost by summer?
I also saw a ticket site (admittedly, these are “early” prices and they will almost certainly drop as the final gets closer) listing tickets to the final for north of $10k.
Seats at the final in Qatar, I’m told, averaged around $1500.
I would be overjoyed if people simply refused to pay these prices… but, of course, the majority of tickets to the finals/semifinals are VIP seats and comps to politicians etc. Somebody might be paying for them, but it isn’t the people who are in the seats.
Normally about 10% of MetLife stadium attendees take the train. Due to FIFA deciding they want to use the parking lots for other things, almost no one will be allowed to drive to the stadium.
So they’re going to have to move a lot more people via train which will mean a lot of extra trains, a lot of extra workers and overtime and shutting down those train lines completely for people who aren’t attending the game.
It’s a lot of extra expense and it makes sense for NJ to not want their taxpayers to foot the bill
It’s always been perplexing to me that stadium deals are described by anyone, whether it’s the media, the fanbase, or the team itself, as being akin to a “marriage.” An actual, equal-measure partnership of kindred spirits usually doesn’t involve literal extortion attempts by one side, let alone successful ones — but hey, who am I to say?
It really only makes sense to me in that 40-50% of marriages in the US do end in divorce, and of the ones that don’t, you have to assume that a decent percentage of them lean more toward the unhappy variety than the lovey-dovey. It’s a lot of long-term partners out there who are staying together out of convenience (whether real or perceived) — and that feels like a better descriptor for most of these types of deals.
Until 1974, married women couldn’t get their own credit cards, and marital rape was legal in every state. An “equal-measure partnership of kindred spirits” is a relatively novel concept.
Supposedly the oft-quoted divorce rate is not nearly that high.
It is 100% in my household, but not typical.
Illinois state leg dithering still. You don’t know who you are playing with here.
And don’t think that $4 Billion or $12 Billion from Indiana is necessarily enough either. You remember what Glanville said NFL stood for, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPrViMm7NNU
Yeah. That’s right.
Rays fan here: it’s bizarre how quickly the new owners make Vince Naimoli look like a good guy and Stu Sternberg look like a sympathetic figure.
Let ‘em go. I said it when they floated the Montreal split-season nonsense, and if they want to go to Orlando, Godspeed.
Meanwhile, JP Peterson continues to shill for the project, saying taxpayers would basically be loaning the Rays the money because it would all come back to them several fold.
Agreed! I did not like the idea of the City of St. Petersburg having any relationship with Stu’s friend in Canada, Seagram family Bronfman of NXIVM infamy. Stephen Bronfman et al , headed a Montreal group of businessmen considering minor partnership in Rays. The deal did not happen. Sternberg sold the team. New owners (just like the former owners) demanding beaucoup bucks from taxpayers. Kat Ford
The link to the volleyball arena led to a NJ based article, not Louisville.
Here you go: https://www.wlky.com/article/louisville-new-sports-arena-hockey-volleyball/71009016
Seems like plan is ultimately for no property taxes. Everybody gets a tax break! How will we pay for schools and local services… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
https://chicago.suntimes.com/bears-stadium/2026/04/20/bears-stadium-proposed-legislation-arlington-heights-property-tax-relief-illinois-homeowners-northwest-indiana-site