Something I like to harp on here is that news articles that rage against governments still paying off stadiums after they’ve been torn down are missing the point: How to pay for a stadium, whether with cash now or bonds that can be refinanced into the far future, is just a financing choice, like deciding whether to pay for a car up front or over time. And while continuing to pay for a car that’s long since been totaled (or for Bobby Bonilla) can stick in one’s craw, it doesn’t necessarily cost more than making all the payments while you were still enjoying your stadium/car/alleged third baseman.
Here’s what we do know: the county issued bonds to build a stadium that it owns but from which the Marlins derive all income. An issue that yielded $80 million was to cost $1.2 billion to repay, one that yielded $319 million was to take $1.3 billion to repay, and one that yielded $50 million was to take $200 million to repay. Most of that debt remains, and payments are soon to balloon.
That’s not good! Also not good: Miami-Dade County commissioners apparently don’t even know exactly how much they’ll be on the hook for, even as they try to figure out where to come up with the money to make the balloon payments that Miami-Dade agreed to when the stadium was first planned in 2009. On the bright side, the county got out of paying its Marlins stadium bills in 2009, when it didn’t have the money; on the less bright side, it now has to pay even higher bills over the next two decades, when it still doesn’t have the money.
Way back in 2013, I guesstimated the county’s ultimate cost as being about $800-900 million in present value to pay off about $400 million in bonds, which was not a great deal no matter how you slice it. (One Miami financier told the Miami Herald at the time, “This is the sort of financing you do when you cannot afford it.”) But it was an emergency after all, with the Marlins threatening to move someplace — today’s Miami Today op-ed says Las Vegas, I remember it as mostly San Antonio, it was probably both of those and more over the decade that Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria spent going back over and over to local governments in search of subsidies — and who can put a price on what Miami got out of its investment:
Today, in a covered ballpark built solely for baseball and with a winning team, sales average 12,735 per game – two-thirds as many as in an open-air football stadium. The problem clearly wasn’t the stadium.
A second promise was that a new stadium on the site of the defunct Orange Bowl – whose bonds were still being paid off – would rejuvenate Little Havana, which surrounds it. It hasn’t happened yet, 15 years later.
The third promise was that in a ballpark for which it pays no rent the team would spend more to get better players. The New York Mets this year top league payrolls at $328 million, followed by Los Angeles Dodgers at $302 million and the New York Yankees at $297 million. The Marlins, in contrast, pay $80 million, more only than Cleveland’s $79 million.
Oh, well, live and learn! Or at least Loria gets to live his life, still running his beloved art dealership after selling the Marlins for more than seven times what he paid for the franchise, while Miami-Dade taxpayers learn the dangers of balloon payment financing. Whether they or their elected officials will remember the lesson the next time it comes up is another story: The Marlins’ lease expires in 2047, so we can expect whoever owns them in a decade or so to start talking up the need for a new stadium then, unless all of Miami has relocated to Texas or Nevada by then.
Before we get to this week’s news roundup, some old business from last week: I shamefully forgot to give a shoutout to John Mozena for his outstanding liveblog of the stadium-related papers at University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s annual sports economics conference after I was unable to attend. Please check out John’s work at the Center for Economic Accountability and throw some coin his way if you like, or at the very least get some of his free “Pay For Your Own Damn Stadium” stickers.
Back in the present, you’re stuck with me, and I’m stuck with this week’s avalanche of news items:
The North Carolina legislature is debating whether to set aside unspecified hundreds of millions of dollars in its final budget for a stadium for a potential future MLB expansion team “in or near Wake County,” which would mean the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill “Triangle” area, as distinct from the Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point “Triad” area that voted down paying for a stadium to lure the Minnesota Twins back in 1998. The state has a $700 million Economic Development Project Reserve that it can designate for “high-yield” development projects, and while sports stadiums are nobody’s idea of high-yield in terms of actual measurable impact, there’s got to be somebody somewhere willing to write a consulting report claiming otherwise.
Former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Charlie Batch says team ownership is ready to get back on line for a new or renovated stadium now that their current home is 25 whole years old: “Thirty years is the expiration date. Guess what Acrisure Stadium is? Twenty-five years. So I promise you, conversations are happening behind the scenes to figure out kind of what the next move is as the Rooneys are looking for an upgrade in their stadium.” The next move, apparently, is to send your former-players-turned-YouTube-creators out to talk up how stadiums just straight-up become obsolete after 30 years and somebody has to build you a new one and see if that flies.
Illinois’ efforts to retain the Chicago Bears in the wake of team execs’ announcement that they’re absolutely, definitely (maybe) moving to Indiana remain very much undead, with Gov. JB Pritzker saying his state is ready to act but first needs “the Bears to focus on what they want,” adding, “they have not been clear about what is the bill that they need, and how do they need to look, and then, can they get the votes necessary to get it done in the House and the Senate.” State house stadium bill sponsor Kam Buckner noted that both that body and the state senate have passed competing bills — there’s also now a third one, filed by State Rep. Martin McLaughlin despite the legislature not even being in session, that would raise the size thresholds on a “megaprojects” bill to where it would only apply to an Arlington Heights stadium — and “the Bears have to decide what makes most sense for them, which one of those bills is the bill they can get behind and wrap their arms around that can help them remain here in the state of Illinois,” adding, “We cannot have a special session until we have a deal. You don’t call a special session to draw up a flight plan. You call a special session to land the plane.” The hope here seems to be that if Bears officials pick a favorite tax break bill and declare that it’ll be enough to get them to stay in Illinois, that’ll get legislators in both houses to vote for it, which is absolutely the kind of bootstrapping your own momentum thing that you try to do when you’re pushing legislation that just got nowhere.
Building a stadium district in Denver’s Burnham Yard railyards may be easier said than done for Broncos ownership, given little details like the land is mostly zoned only for industrial use. This is Broncos owner Greg Penner’s problem, of course, except that, as the lengthy Denver Post article on this only reveals down in its 28th paragraph, Penner could end up asking for TIF property tax breaks to pay for his larger development. “The track record for delivering on these promises by teams in development,” noted University of Colorado Denver economist Geoffrey Propheter, “is shaky. And that’s being super generous.” (Credit where credit is due to the Post: “The naked man, in retrospect, was the least of Sean Herman’s worries” is an excellent teaser lede, though still not quite up there with “The freighter captain, the cop, the guy from the private security firm, the Swiss Army major, and the reporter never saw the pirates coming.”)
Athletics owner John Fisher now says his mistake in announcing a stadium plan in Las Vegas was not talking to the media himself enough about it: “Not hearing from me, I think, led to frustration from, frankly, the media. Like, who is this guy? Is he hiding? Who’s the real John Fisher?” He then went on to tell The Athletic absolutely nothing about how he plans to make a $2 billion stadium (with $600 million in public subsidies) in what would be MLB’s smallest market work out, especially when his development partner Bally’s may bail on its part and leave Fisher to fund such additional amenities as a $100 million parking structure. Hearing from John Fisher, it turns out, also leads to frustration, who’da thunk it?
San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones would like Spurs minority owner Michael Dell (net worth: $246 billion) to pay for some or all of her city’s $489 million share of a downtown arena. Dell hasn’t responded to her request, and Stanford University Roger Noll says that’s likely because the multibillionaire knows spending your own money on new sports venues is a dumb idea — “the incremental benefits of having a new arena are not as big as the cost” — which is why it’s only worth it if you can stick taxpayers with the bill.
The first of the Buffalo Bills‘ family of stainless steel buffalo statues has arrived, and fans are excitedly pointing out that bisons don’t really look like that! They’re not even usually made of steel!
I unfortunately had to cancel my trip to this year’s sports economics conference at University of Maryland-Baltimore County starting today, but friend of Field of Schemes John Mozena of the Center for Economic Accountability generously offered to liveblog from there instead. Take it away, John, I will be following eagerly along with other readers! —Neil deMause
8:30 a.m.
Good morning, everyone. I’m deeply honored to be trusted with the virtual keys to Field of Schemes, which is a daily read for me and an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to make sports team owners pay for their own stadiums. I feel a bit like a Wish.com or Temu “No honey, we have Neil deMause at home” but I’ll do my best.
(Also, I’m fully aware that I’m the dumbest and least qualified person in this lecture hall and it ain’t even close. Last night, I was embarrassed to suddenly realize that I was debating the economics of promotion and relegation in American soccer at the bar with someone who literally wrote the book on the economics of soccer.)
8:45 a.m.
The first two papers are on non-stadium-related topics, but I’ll try to summarize them regardless.
The first paper is “Whistle Politics: Nationality Bias and Own-Nationality Favoritism in a Multinational Basketball Officiating Setting,” by Georgy Shukaylo* and Veronika Dolar of the David and Nicole Tepper Department of Sport and Entertainment Management at the University of South Carolina. Their question was whether American players are refereed differently in the AdmiralBet ABA League, the top-tier professional league for teams from the six former Yugoslav republics.
(Editorializing for a moment: The irony of a “Department of Sport and Entertainment Management” being named after someone who has been responsible for the 2019 and 2024 recipients of my organization’s “Worst Economic Development Deal of the Year Award” is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Shukaylo and Dolar hypothesized a few different ways that refereeing bias toward American players might present itself in Balkan basketball: Did Americans get whistled more by local referees because of lingering animus over America’s role in the first and second Yugoslav wars? Or because of resentment over America’s basketball dominance? Or did they get fewer calls because the league wanted to keep higher-profile American players in the game to keep fans happy?
It turns out that the data suggests that final option: U.S. players got a slightly lower whistle rate, roughly half a foul less per 40 minutes than comparable players. The authors determined that this was the result of ‘passive leniency’ by referees calling fewer incidental “touch” fouls on Americans, not more fouls on local or other international players.
* Georgy recently completed his Ph.D at the University of Michigan, where he had the good fortune to celebrate national championships in football and men’s basketball during his time in Ann Arbor. Go Blue.
9:25 a.m.
Petr Parshakov presents a paper by himself, Dennis Coates, Dmitry Dagaev and Sofia Paklina on “Compatriot Bias in Evaluation of Football Players,” looking at the role that national and racial bias play in people’s assessment of soccer players, using the crowdsourced rankings from the EA Sports FIFA/EA FC video game as a starting point. The results are more complex than I’m competent to summarize, but broadly come down to “Yeah, people do have some bias towards people who are different but there’s a lot of other issues at play including rooting interests and player popularity.”
9:55 a.m.
On to stadiums and economic impact, which will be the focus of the rest of the day!
From UMBC colleagues Mike Andrews and Dennis Coates, we have early-stage work on “Estimating Local Effects of Stadiums Using a Runner-Up Design.”
Andrews describes the question as “How does a new stadium affect the local economy,” which he admits is a question that’s been asked a lot by economists in the room (and elsewhere), but that they are trying to use some different tools to answer the question “What would have happened if the stadium had not been built?” and then compare that to real-world post-stadium outcomes.
The interesting thing they’ve done is to look at winning and runner-up NFL stadium sites according to local decision-makers, figuring that sites that would be appropriate for stadiums should have had relatively similar trajectories if not for the stadium being built on one of them, so comparing the differences in outcomes should let you identify the stadium’s impact.
The first result is that they found no significant economic differences between the immediate areas around stadiums versus the immediate areas around runner-up sites, which is consistent with *gestures around at everything everyone in this room has been publishing for years*.
More interestingly, they then went on to look at what happened to growth in areas further away from the stadium and runner-up sites – two, four, six, eight and ten-mile rings. While the data is very preliminary and has issues with small sample size, there seem to be signs that growth in the immediate neighborhood of a stadium comes at the expense of areas a few miles away from the stadium in a way that doesn’t take place at non-stadium sites.
10:10 a.m.
Brief note while we prep for the next paper: As a non-academic, one of the most fascinating things about this kind of environment is the way that the post-presentation Q&A sessions are a combination of politely brutal critiques and collaborative suggestions for how to improve or follow up on research. I’ve heard some people argue that the research consensus on stadiums’ economic impact is an effect of “Oh, they all just agree with each other,” but once you hear economists holding each other’s feet to the fire on things like whether they should have accounted for a city’s grid design in their use of a circular radius for stadium impact it becomes pretty obvious that in this room, getting the answer right is more important than being polite.
Sample question: “I totally want you to be right, let me be clear on that, but…” followed by a sharp observation that the researcher had to admit was a potential issue with their conclusion.
10:20 a.m.
From UMBC master’s candidate in economic policy Bradlee Kilgore, we have “Impact of Stadium Projects on Nearby Home Prices.”
Using Zillow home price data in the areas around 67 stadiums and arenas across the country, Kilgore did a bunch of complex statistical work that flies several thousand feet over my head to find that on average, home prices around stadiums are 8% lower than similarly situated homes further away from the stadium, with arenas (as opposed to open-air or domed stadiums) having an outsized effect on that negative outcome. Kilgore finds the worst effects from NBA arenas, second-worse from shared NBA/NHL arenas, followed by NFL stadiums, with very slightly positive effects from NHL and MLB stadiums.
Basically, what this tells us is that the hassles of living near a stadium – crime, traffic, noise, parking pressure, etc. – outweigh the benefits for enough people that it drives down housing prices in the area.
11:25 a.m.
Next up are Jeffrey Carr, Jessica Morschakov and Mark S. Rosentraub from the University of Michigan (Go Blue!), with “Legacy Central Cities and Fragmented Governments: Which Principles Shape Policies To Change the Spatial Distribution of Regional Economic Activity?”
(In the past, Neil has described Rosentraub as a “sports subsidy apologist.” I am not informed enough about his body of work to agree or disagree.)
Rosentraub and his colleagues are promoting a concept they call “Municipal Capitalism,” which (as I understand their definition) encourage elected officials to make investments in stadiums that generate more in tax revenues and other tangible benefits than they cost to finance. ‘Each community has to look at their own assets and needs, we know what the sports owner cartel wants to achieve, how can cities design stadium deals using market-based criteria to get a tangible return on taxpayers’ investment?’
They use the Las Vegas Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium project as their test case.
They claim $58.5 million in new tax revenues as a result of Allegiant Stadium, with most of that going to Nevada state government, generating $15-20 million more in tax revenues than are necessary to fund bond obligations.
Their conclusion was that it was a Municipal Capitalism success, arguing that its fiscal benefits exceeded the fiscal costs, that elected officials “faithfully executed their obligations to voters” by making a capital investment in the stadium that created a new revenue stream, and that the project provided intangible “big-league city” benefits to local residents.
They reference a Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority claim that 61.8% of visitors at Allegiant Stadium were out-of-town visitors who identified the event as the primary reason for their trip to Las Vegas, which does not pass my personal sniff test.
They admit that Las Vegas is an unusual market, and there are some hard questions on whether anything learned from Allegiant Stadium has any real value to stadium projects in all the other cities that are not entirely driven by the tourism industry.
“Are you asking me to think of this as simply a description of how municipalities work…or are you claiming that this is a normative framework and that the world is better off if municipalities behave in this regard. Because if so, I’m not going with you,” asks their University of Michigan colleague Stefan Szymanski, pointing to negative externalities that the Municipal Capitalism model doesn’t seem to capture in its ROI calculations.
Rosentraub responds that it’s a hybrid, to which Szymanski says it can’t be, that it’s either normative or positive. Rosentraub’s ultimate response is that it’s largely normative, but “We’re not saying that there aren’t bad deals made, but let’s learn what we can from the good deals to improve future deals.”
10:35 a.m.
Quick note: The running joke this morning is “That was sarcasm” after something sarcastic is said, referencing a Q&A during an early presentation on whether an automated assessment of how soccer players are discussed on the Internet had correctly captured the potential that Internet users might, occasionally, be sarcastic about something.
11:55 a.m.
Next up is University of Colorado Denver’s Geoffrey Propheter, who has done useful work on the intersection of the real estate industry, property taxes and sports.
Propheter is presenting some of an upcoming “labor of love” book on the Oakland Coliseum, discussing his efforts to assess the facility’s total lifetime cost to taxpayers from 1963 to 2024.
He points out that many now-standard government finance mechanisms were first launched in California.
“TIFs were invented in California. You’re welcome!”
Propheter looked back at the at-the-time promises in 1963 of stadium boosters promising that (among other things) the subsidy from the city/county would go from $1.5 million/year to $536,000 by 1970, that it would be self-sustaining within 22 years and that it would be profitable by Year 30.
While the stadium subsidy did drop, mostly, to the promised levels five years late, and it most certainly never got self-sustaining or profitable.
12:05 p.m.
I studied philosophy and political science. When I see a slide like this, I get a loud vacuum cleaner noise in my skull.
But seriously, it just drives home how much hard work, expertise and care goes into answering a question as simple as “Do hotels do more business when a world-class sports superstar is playing in town?”
(More on that question in a moment)
12:25 p.m.
So, superstars and hotels.
Chan Hyeon Hur at Florida International University is presenting his work with Badr Badraoui of FIU and Timothy Webb of the University of Delaware: “Do Sports Superstars Generate Local Tourism Gains? Evidence from Hotel Markets after Messi’s MLS Arrival.”
Lionel Messi, they say, created “an uncommon natural experiment” in coming to Inter Miami FC, and that the demand to watch him either at home or away created a “rare, high-intensity league-wide demand shock” for MLS tickets that would not have existed without him. (Shohei Ohtani is the other current example of a superstar with this kind of drawing power.)
The research question they asked was whether the demand to see Messi play in Miami had any measurable impact on local-market hotel revenues.
Using a lot of math like the slide I shared above, they found a “transient novelty premium” generating a short-term spike immediately after Messi’s arrival, but no evidence of any long-term structural growth in hotel stays. They suggest this should be relevant for local government officials using projected growth in hotel revenues to justify dedicating hotel taxes to stadium projects.
(One criticism from the crowd is that the authors did not capture AirBnB and other similar non-hotel lodging services, which they said is something they are hoping to do in a followup paper.)
12:30 p.m.
Lunch!
I have asked presenters to check out this blog and let me know if I missed or misconstrued any of their work. If I get asked for edits, I’ll note them in the interest of transparency.
2:00 p.m.
A break from stadium stuff, with Dave Berri of Southern Utah University and Stacey Brook of the University of Central Florida presenting their paper “Does it Matters Who Swings the Bat? Player Exploitation in College Softball and College Baseball.”
Berri, who has been involved in a number of legal cases by athletes against universities and/or the NCAA: “The NCAA receives more than $1 billion per year from media rights for college basketball. It spends more than $60 million of this on legal fees defending its arbitrary rules.”
He argues that saying “college sports are not profitable” is meaningless, as colleges and universities are nonprofit institutions and departments within those schools – academic or athletic – will spend “as much money as they’re allowed to.” He also pointed out that college sports are tiny, from a budgetary perspective, using the example that the University of Maryland has a $2.98 billion budget, and its athletic department had $124 million in revenue in 2025.
Berri presented some evidence that the NCAA is doing a terrible job at maximizing revenues for ‘non-revenue’ sports – which he points out is a terrible name, since they do bring in revenues – thanks to its focus on maximizing its basketball and football media revenues. He presented a model to measure the value of NCAA baseball players and other similar players to university athletic revenues, and to use that to develop a structure to get an appropriate percentage that money to players, whom he argues are being badly under-compensated compared to the value they generate for their schools.
2:30 p.m.
University of Michigan doctoral candidate Jeff Carr returns with “Changes to Franchise Supply and the Effects on Teams in the Same Market: Niche Markets or Limits on Discretionary Spending?”
He’s attempting to measure the “substitution effect” for sport within a market, looking at what teams arriving or leaving did to incumbent teams’ attendance. If an MLB team shows up, what does that do to the local NFL or NHL team’s attendance? (He used the example of the Orioles’ attendance when the Ravens came to Baltimore.) If an NFL team leaves for someplace else, do jilted fans console themselves with tickets to the local MLB or NBA team?
There are a lot more pro sports teams out there than there used to be.
Cities have more pro sports teams than they used to.
His finding is that the arrival or departure of teams doesn’t tend to change the attendance of existing teams by a meaningful amount. The one meaningful outlier is WNBA teams, which Carr posits is a function of that league having a fanbase that is more likely not to be fans of other sports.
2:55 p.m.
Because of a scheduling issue, conference organizer Dennis Coates is filling in to present a previously published study from himself, Sabina Kosimova and Gleb Vasiliev titled “Performance Under Pressure in Elite Curling.”
Their findings generally confirm sports consensus that players make better shots when they’re either way ahead or way behind and there’s no immediate pressure, but perform worse in late, close games. They found a small amount of evidence that women (at least in curling) may do slightly worse than men in general, but better than men on common (as opposed to unusual or highly technical) shots.
I will admit that I did not expect a curling-specific paper today. (The Q&A has become an opportunity for those in the audience who actually understand curling to politely flex on their fellow attendees.)
3:30 p.m.
Pete Groothuis from Appalachian State University *pause for instinctive shudder from Michigan football fan* asks what he describes as “a philosophical question” about the ways that applied microeconomics papers use and define their population data, how they check their work to determine whether the results they’re seeing are truly statistically significant…and what “statistically significant” means in the first place.
Groothuis himself describes the issue as a “highly theoretical” exercise in econometrics, so your humble correspondent was deeply out of his depth around the third slide – and the first two slides were a title card and a photo of a mountain.
Leaving the details of the question to those more competent to explain it, I will say that yet again I’m struck by the way that the researchers in this room and their colleagues across the country are putting brain-meltingly intense intellectual effort into trying to get as close as humanly possible to the capital-T ‘Truth’ of what’s actually happening in the real world with their research.
As someone who’s a consumer of this work and relies upon it to form the foundation of advocacy for good public policy, it’s incredibly heartening to see this rigor in action.
4:15 p.m.
Clay Collins from the University of Georgia presents “Family Violence and Football at 15: A Review and Re-Evaluation of Card & Dahl.” It’s a revisiting of a famous paper from 2011 finding connections between domestic violence (now more commonly known as intimate partner violence) and NFL games, where “seemingly irrelevant events” such as an NFL team’s upset loss drives someone to violently lash out at a partner.
(Conference organizer Dennis Coates: “I would consider this an ‘economic impact’ topic.”)
Collins is using modern, more-comprehensive datasets to update the 2011 paper, which (among other things) used crime data that only covered roughly a fifth of the U.S. population.
“I run this, and I’m not getting any significant results,” Collins says. “So what’s going on here?”
His first take is not that Card & Dahl were wrong — “they don’t give out Nobel Prizes for nothing” — but that something else must be in play. Maybe the prevalence of gambling and fantasy sports is changing the emotional for NFL fans, so the “your team blows a game” trigger is less…triggering? There’s some research out there that suggests this is playing a role. Maybe people are venting on social media rather than via violence? In the Q&A, attendees are suggesting potential answers, data sets, statistical tools, etc.
4:50 p.m.
Doctoral candidate Aiden Powell of West Virginia University presents a very interesting investigation into sports externalities: “Professional Sporting Events and Emergency Medical Service Response Times: Evidence from San Francisco.”
Researchers (including some in this room) have documented increased police response times near stadiums during events, but Powell has focused on EMS response, specifically for people having “cardiovascular events” where delayed treatment can result in death or other adverse outcomes.
Powell’s research uses data from San Francisco Giants games in 2024 and 2025.
He finds that in the hour before a game, EMS response within a quarter-mile of the ballpark is delayed 4.7 minutes on average, a 51.6% delay. He estimates an additional seven seconds of additional EMS delay for each 1,000 attendees at the game.
After the game, it’s delayed 2.6 minutes; a 28.4% delay, with three seconds per 1,000 fans.
5:15 p.m.
Victor Matheson of College of the Holy Cross presents “The Impact of Mega-Events on Gambling Revenues – Evidence from the Las Vegas F1 Race.” The economic impact question he’s asking is deceptively simple: What did the creation of a Las Vegas Formula 1 Grand Prix in 2023 do to gaming revenues in Las Vegas casinos?
(As a supporter of Detroit City FC in the USL, I need to shout out the deeply esoteric Hartford Athletic USL jersey that Matheson is wearing. So he’s the person who bought one.)
The up-front $500 million cost of the race’s permanent infrastructure was largely private, but there are per-race costs for infrastructure, police, etc. to Las Vegas, plus negative externalities headlined by a 10-week closure of The Strip.
Matheson puts up a slide where F1’s CEO predicted $1.7 billion in economic impact in the first year alone, asks “How many years have we been doing this?” as the room chuckles wryly.
Gambling revenues on the Strip are way up, $66.8 million. That’s almost entirely from high-stakes table games. However, revenues from slot machines and other lower-tier gaming are significantly down, as are gaming revenues overall in non-Strip casinos and casinos elsewhere in the state.
Matheson’s take is that the Las Vegas Grand Prix is “remarkably successful” for the large casinos on The Strip, that booked an extra $70 million in gross gaming revenue. However, that boom for the big, fancy casinos has come at the expense of a bust for the non-Strip casinos and casinos elsewhere in the state, which have gaming revenues down almost the same proportional amount.
“It might be up a bit in total,” said Matheson, “But it’s certainly not up enough to reach that billion-dollar economic impact figure.” He also noted that excitement over the race seems to be waning, with that bump in gaming revenues shrinking each successive year.
5:45 p.m.
Doctoral candidate Murad Latifov of Texas Tech University presents a paper on a fascinating question I’ve never seen asked, “The Impact of Professional Sports Franchise Movements on Crime Rates in Urban Areas.”
He’s not looking just at crime on gamedays, but in general at long-term baseline crime rates. Do new stadiums and/or teams make cities more or less law-abiding? Does it change if it’s the fourth or fifth team in a city, versus the first or second?
It’s especially interesting because stadium subsidy supporters often point to “uncaptured benefits” that sports teams bring to a city, including things like civic pride and a more robust civil society, which could, maybe, be seen in crime rates. (The crimes he’s looking at in the FBI data are rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft.)
This theory considers sports teams to be “Civic Anchors” around which a society organizes itself in a virtuous, upright manner that discourages crime. The counter-argument is that stadiums “concentrate motivated offenders and suitable targets” in a way that promotes crime.
It turns out that the latter seems to be true. Latifov’s work unearthed some meaningful, statistically significant results: “A city’s first franchise significantly raises violent and short-run property crime. The loss of a city’s last franchise lowers crime, especially for rape.”
Gaining a second, third, etc. team doesn’t seem to have any impact, and losing a team doesn’t seem to change things until a city loses its last team.
One relevant question that was asked and that Latifov had not investigated was whether this effect exists for cities that had major college sports teams before they had professional teams, such as Columbus, Ohio before the arrival of the NHL Blue Jackets.
5:50 p.m.
The last presentation of the day is an early-stage exploration by Shirin Mollah, Josh Davila and Jonathan A. Jensen of Texas A&M into “Why are stadium lifetimes getting shorter? Findings from a semi-parametric hazards model.”
One unusual finding is that a growing economy keeps older stadiums around, rather than pushing replacement. A 1% growth in GDP in a market reduces the probability that a stadium will be replaced by up to 14%.
The larger the city, the less public funding they offer — every 1 million in population decreases subsidies by $8 million.
The more expensive the stadium, the longer they’ll get kept around. Every $10 million spent on a stadium lessens the chance of it dying by 3.96%.
6:30 p.m.
And that’s it! Thank you again to Dennis Coates and the entire team at UMBC for gathering together such an excellent group of presenters, and for being wonderful hosts.
Thank you to the presenters, and I apologize for any errors or omissions I made in describing your work.
If you have any questions, comments or criticism, please feel free to email me directly.
Lots of state legislative sessions are wrapping up this week, but it’s been oddly quiet around actual stadium news, leaving room for lots of spin doctoring and other questionable takes:
Turns out today’s conclusion of the Florida legislature’s special budget session won’t be a deadline for a Tampa Bay Rays stadium deal, as everything appears to be getting pushed off to even specialer sessions. Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that though there’s only $50 million in the state budget for relocating Hillsborough College buildings to make way for a stadium district on what’s now its Dale Mabry campus, there could be more state money later sometime: “We can do more on the infrastructure,” said the governor, adding, “I think maybe over time you would do more to spruce up the campus because I think it could be something meaningful. And I’m happy to support it.” (Ed. note: Yes, DeSantis leaves office in January. Yes, presumably he knows this.) Hillsborough County Commission chair Ken Hagan, meanwhile, said his “goal” is to hold county and city votes on a binding deal by a scheduled July 15 board meeting, “or maybe have to call a special meeting right around there,” which gives him around seven weeks to flip one of the four “no” votes on the Tampa city council. Rays owner Patrick Zalupski has remained silent on the current stadium stalemate, but DeSantis stepped in to levy a threat on his behalf, declaring: “Maybe if they don’t want to do it, I know Orlando’s ready, willing and able. I think you have Raleigh-Durham, Nashville, and those are great cities, but I’d hate to see us fumble a team and have it end up in some of those other areas.” Now that’s what friends and/or campaign donation recipients are for!
Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty and West Sacramento Mayor Martha Guerrero say they want an MLB expansion team once the Athletics leave town for Las Vegas, and West Sacramento is set to provide $1 billion in money for a new stadium from property tax kickbacks, hotel taxes, and “additional sources.” The city could spend $1 billion and it “would not impact the City’s general fund or require a taxpayer vote,” explained a joint press release, because it would “be generated solely by activity in the ballpark district,” citing a figure that over 40 years, a ballpark district “is projected to lead to $1.77 billion in new tax revenue.” Citation extremely needed, but also even $1.77 billion over 40 years wouldn’t be enough to pay for $1 billion in stadium costs up front, why can’t our elected leaders math?
Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon will “do everything in his power” to move the team if he doesn’t get the full $600 million in public arena renovation money he wants, according to (checks notes) a sports talk radio host who runs public relations and crisis counseling firms. And other NBA owners would allow it, he claims, because “if he does relocate, there’s a relocation fee attached to that.” No, don’t ask why Dundon would readily agree to forgo the $365 million already approved by the state of Oregon and also pay an expansion fee to move someplace that isn’t offering a newer arena even after saying he has no intention of moving the team, PR isn’t about answering your questions.
The Seattle Seahawks are for sale, which means it’s time to ask if a new owner will want a new stadium, apparently. Answer (courtesy of me as quoted in the Puget Sound Business Journal): A new Seahawks owner would be dumb to pay to build one themselves when they have a perfectly good old one, but “if somebody else is going to buy you a new car, you’re not going to say no.”
Spending $600 million to help move the Cleveland Browns from one part of the state to another was a pretty bold move by Ohio, but saying it was giving the state’s data centers $136 million in tax breaks in 2025 alone and having it turn out to actually be $1.6 billion in tax breaks is even more impressive, way to go, Ohio.
“When I bought the Hurricanes, all I heard — because I was from Texas — we were going to move the team to Houston. Moving a team is difficult. We didn’t move the Hurricanes. We ended up getting a deal done. We went through the same thing in Portland. Before I even bought the team, I had an agreement with the city and the state. We had an agreement in principle. They’ve already approved half of it. Assuming that all gets done, then this is a non-story. For me, it’s never been really a thing. We didn’t buy the team to move it. We bought the Portland Trail Blazers.”
That’s news, you would think? Maybe not big news — Dundon is not outright promising not to move the team if he doesn’t get his entire $600 million demand in public funding for arena upgrades, he’s just saying “assuming all this gets done” then he won’t move — but still, it’s useful information about where the Blazers’ owner’s head and/or leverage play is at. But aside from one article on the basketball news site HoopsHype, it didn’t even make a single headline, and the Oregonian appears to be the only other publication that even reported on it, way at the end of an article.
Contrast that with Oregonian columnist Bill Oram’s statement last week that “losing this team, be it to Nashville, Austin or Kalamazoo, is not some hollow threat by a greedy billionaire.” Despite the fact that Oram appears to have pulled those city names out of his butt — or in Kalamazoo’s case, whatever part of his brain stores “cities with funny names” — it spawned a flood of press coverage, including a much-reprinted Sportsnaut piece on how “a new rumor suggests” the team could end up in Austin, and one on Michigan news site MLive on how Oram’s mention of Kalamazoo sparked “buzz across social platforms and Southwest Michigan.” (MLive declared that such a move wasn’t “likely,” but that “It’s a reminder that no city is too small to dream big for a day,” which, sure, so long as Kalamazoo accepts that eventually it’s going to have to wake up and realize it’s only in the 43rd largest U.S. TV market.)
The fact of the matter is that the possibility of the Blazers trying to move if Dundon doesn’t get his $600 million in arena money is a threat, yes, but a very vague one, in the “don’t make me come in there” category of things people threaten while hoping they don’t have to decide whether they’re just bluffing. Portland is a bit larger than Nashville, and its arena is only one year older — and Nashville likely doesn’t have the stomach to give an NBA owner major renovation money right after coughing up $1.2 billion for a stadium for the Tennessee Titans. An attempt to move to Austin would likely have the San Antonio Spurs owners up in arms, and other cities have other problems. It’s still conceivable that Dundon would try to move if he doesn’t get any arena money out of Portland; it’s also very possible that, if push came to shove, he’d settle for less than the full $600 million. It’s elected officials’ job to try to find the cheapest price point possible, which some at least seem to be trying to do — and the media’s to report on the whole game of chicken honestly, even if “Are the Blazers moving to Kalamazoo?” makes for better clickbait.
I don’t want to make too big a deal about this trend of elected officials taking their time before voting on sports subsidy deals — looking stadium and arena demands in the mouth is literally doing their minimum job — but add Portland, Oregon to Tampa and the state of Illinois as local governments doing their minimum job this legislative season:
City and county lawmakers are pumping the brakes, saying it’s better to take the time to get it right than to sign away huge sums of public money under pressure from Portland’s professional basketball franchise, which has called the Rose City home since 1970.
“We’re not going to be held hostage, we’re not going to sign a bad deal,” Portland Council President Jamie Dunphy told The Oregonian/OregonLive, echoing a position expressed by many of his colleagues. “We’re not going to be a blank check for an out-of town billionaire. We are going to support our team and our local economy in the way that needs to get done. But we’re not doing it at all costs.”
Trail Blazers owner/big bad Tom Dundon has already won approval of $365 million in state funding for upgrades to his 31-year-old arena, but is seeking another $235 million in city and county money to make it an even $600 million. A Multnomah County spokesperson said that county commissioners will spend “the next several months” negotiating their part in any arena deal, while city council president Dunphy said “the City Council is going to take as much time as it needs because getting this right matters.”
Right now, reports the Oregonian, local officials appear to be debating less whether to send Dundon the nine-figure check he desires and more which account to charge it to: Portland Mayor Keith Wilson’s proposal to use a city clean energy fund to pay for basketball arena zhuzhing has been especially contentious. But the council is also seeking a more taxpayer-friendly lease, possibly including the city getting a cut of arena naming rights, which in the unlikely case Dundon agreed to it would help defray the public’s costs.
Blazers execs, meanwhile, have continued their saber-rattling about moving the team if arena funding isn’t approved ASAP, though still without saying the words “move the team” out loud. (Team president Dewayne Hankins, in a tour de force of non-threat threat verbiage, declared, “The Trail Blazers have been deeply connected to Portland for more than 50 years and remain committed to this community. The fact remains: if city and county leaders can’t get a deal done, the Blazers’ lease at Moda Center will expire in 2030.”) And while city councilor Angelita Morillo called this “a massive bluff, and I think that we need to call them on that bluff,” Oregonian sports columnist Bill Oram, who had written in February that Dundon would move the Blazers without a deal, wrote essentially the same column again on Sunday, declaring:
The only thing that matters for the Trail Blazers this summer — really, truly, actually matters — is whether Portland’s politicians figure out that losing this team, be it to Nashville, Austin or Kalamazoo, is not some hollow threat by a greedy billionaire.
Oram liked this point so much that wrote pretty much the same column yet again yesterday, this time listing Nashville, Austin, Kansas City, San Diego, Vancouver, Mexico City, and Raleigh as potential relocation targets. He also insisted that economic studies showing that public sports subsidies are a waste of money are irrelevant because what Portland is facing is “completely without precedent,” then snapped back at economist J.C. Bradbury for pointing out that Oram is literally doing the title of Bradbury upcoming stadium book “This One Will Be Different.”
Is any of this going to end with Portland forcing Dundon to provide a significantly better deal for taxpayers? Probably not — officials are also seeking concessions like promises to use union labor and a community benefits agreement, which are more likely to pass because they wouldn’t cost Blazers ownership much money. But this is where we are with sports subsidies, 40 years in from when they first became an essential part of the sports business model: Even being allowed to ask for the public to get anything in return for their gift of tax money to a billionaire owner is seen in some circles as tantamount to running your team out of town on a rail. All this is continuing to take longer than we thought.
A special committee of Major League Soccer owners met earlier this month to discuss and evaluate the future of the Vancouver Whitecaps, including the possibility of relocation, sources briefed on the conversations told The Athletic.
A move to Las Vegas was the chief option discussed at the meeting, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. MLS has had discussions with a group looking to bring a team to the market, the sources said.
This is slightly off-brand for MLS, which in recent years has largely focused on handing out expansion teams like candy: six new teams in the last six years, 12 in the last 12. (MLS commissioner Don Garber said in 2024 that the latest new team, San Diego F.C., would be “the end of expansion for a period of time until we’re ready to expand again” but then also said “we would strongly consider expanding beyond the 30 teams that we have now” if “there’s a good market for us to expand in and that market makes sense with the right owner and the right stadium plan,” so who the hell knows what if anything he really meant there.) And this, the Athletic reports, could represent a stumbling block to moving the Whitecaps, as MLS owners would want to get a cut of any sale price in lieu of an expansion fee — likely meaning a relocation fee on top of whatever the current Whitecaps owners would get, which would cut into how much cash they would take home from a sale.
Whether a move threat is realistic, though, is almost beside the point if you just want to use it to shake down an existing host city for stadium dollars, which appears to be goal #1 here. Whether it’ll work is unclear: Some panicked Whitecaps fans are already blaming NIMBYs and local government for the team’s presumed imminent demise, while others counter, “that’s not true at all, it’s mainly down to greed.” It’s still unclear how Vancouver elected officials will respond to the Las Vegas threat, not to mention whether MLS owners would actually pull the trigger on a move to an increasingly crowded small sports market if they don’t get what they want; stay tuned.
Athletics owner John Fisher says he has now spent $300 million on a new Las Vegas stadium, and construction on the upper deck is set to begin soon on the $2 billion project. Next up, he can tap both a $300 million private construction loan from Goldman Sachs and $380 million in public bonds, which will get him to around $1 billion, with about another billion to go.
Is this a sign that Fisher is prepared to spend whatever it takes of his own family fortune — probably around $3 billion, mostly in Gap stock, I tried to find an updated figure but couldn’t get past this awesome AI-generated article that describes him as “one of the prominent figures behind the San Francisco Giants” — to get a stadium built in Vegas? Or that he’s still hoping to build enough momentum to lure in new investors — so far he’s pre-sold concessions rights and a minority share of the team to Aramark for $175 million and reportedly has another $70 million coming from a Korean investment fund, plus there’s whatever he can scrape together from “limited” seat license fees — in hopes of not having to raid his family’s savings?
Either remains possible, and either would betray a certain stupidity on Fisher’s part. There’s almost no way the A’s owner can hope to earn back $1.6 billion in personal outlay (more like $1.4 billion after additional tax breaks, but still) just from the proceeds of running an MLB team in the league’s smallest market; it’s possible he’s hoping the Vegas move will increase the value of the team, but even if you start with the team’s pre-move estimated value of $1.2 billion, the A’s would have to become worth as much as the Los Angeles Angels for Fisher just to break even, and that ain’t happening. On the other hand, if he’s hoping to fob the cost off on investors, that would come at the expense of diluting his share of the team and dedicating future stadium revenue streams to repay his new partners, which again will almost certainly leave Fisher in the red.
That said, it’s a billionaire’s prerogative to spend their money on really stupid shit, so just because it’s a dumb idea doesn’t mean Fisher isn’t prepared to do it. It’s unlikely his fellow MLB owners are going to step in — they just voted Fisher onto their executive committee, so they’re not preparing to push him out — and if his family members are planning to pull the plug once his spending hits a certain point, they’ve been really good at remaining mum. While I have zero inside information, at this point I’m tentatively ready to shift my bet from “John Fisher will never move the A’s to Las Vegas” to “John Fisher will eventually move the A’s the Las Vegas and it’ll be a beautiful train wreck,” though I’d still prefer if you gave me favorable odds.
One of the things you learn if you read enough articles with the word “stadium” in them, as I am condemned by an ancient mummy’s curse to do, is how very many news reports are just about nothing. For every article that tells us some actual information, there are easily five to 10 that are just meant to fill pixels with something easily reportable, regardless of whether it qualifies as “news,” let alone “reporting.”
Just this week, we’ve had: MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is in favor of the Tampa stadium plan that his co-bosses the Rays owner wants and he’s “optimistic” about getting it done; a Baltimore soccer stadium is “gaining momentum,” according to a headline describing a press conference by Baltimore’s mayor, who didn’t actually even say that; Denver Broncos president says team leaders are “laser-focused” on building the tax-subsidy-funded stadium in a rail yard they already said they want; the Broncos president says actually the rail yard is only the “preferred” site and team execs are still considering other options; Minnesota Timberwolves co-owner A-Rod says a new arena is a “necessity” for the 6th-in-the-Western-Conference, $3.6-billion-valued franchise “to compete”; Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas says he’s determined to build a new Royals stadium that will create “economic development” in a way that’s “fair and transparent for our taxpayers,” no details provided.
That’s a whole lot of Important People giving press conferences in order to get their message out in the news media, which the news media is happy to oblige for them. For normal people, meanwhile, the only option is to try to get space on an op-ed page, if you can convince the op-ed editors that you should be allowed to have an opinion that diverges from that of Important People. It’s also an awful lot of reporters’ time spent on this when they could be trying to investigate all the open questions about what these stadium deals would actually entail for taxpayers and why elected officials are pushing them — but asking questions takes up valuable time that could be spent transcribing press statements. As the old journalism adage goes, “if your grandmother says she loves you, take her at her word and put it on the front page, so long as she owns a local sports team.”
Enough whining about the news media, time to attempt to do some actual reporting by, uh, seeing what’s in the news media:
The Chicago Bears have almost as many places now in neighboring states wanting to be their new home (without offering any money toward it) as they do in the Illinois suburbs: In addition to Gary, Indiana, there’s now Portage, Indiana, plus the entire state of Iowa. While the Bears moving to Iowa sounds like a joke and probably is, at least there’s a bill there to provide actual state tax credits toward a stadium; in Indiana, meanwhile, even the bill to create a stadium authority with no funding attached now isn’t going to move forward, Indiana legislators say, until the Bears owners first commit to moving there if it does. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and state legislative leaders might want to just bide their time and see if all the new Bears move threats evaporate just like the last round did, though it sure sounds like they’re more interested in throwing state money at the problem while the move-threat iron is hot.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Joel Glazer still wants the major stadium renovation he asked for last April before he’ll sign a five-year lease extension, and Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan has assured Glazer that the county’s plan to divert more than a billion dollars in tax money to a Rays stadium won’t get in the way of diverting money for the Bucs. In exchange for only a five-year extension, by the way, it would only take about $220 million in subsidies to break the record for priciest per-year lease extension in U.S. sports history, you can pretty much take it to the bank that that’ll be the plan.
On the subject of that Baltimore soccer stadium, D.C. United owners said on Thursday that they’re planning to build a 12,000-seat venue on the site of Carroll Park Golf Course, to host a minor-league MLS Next Pro franchise and a pro women’s team owned by former NBA star Carmelo Anthony. And by “planning to build” I of course mean “hoping to receive $216 million in state money to build.” One of the state lawmakers sponsoring bills to provide the cash says “the stars have aligned” now that Carmelo Anthony is on board, maybe somebody should call a local economist to see if studies have found that involving Carmelo Anthony increases economic impact? If nothing else, it would be interesting to see what they’d say if they could ever stop laughing.
Foxborough, Massachusetts officials say they may not issue a permit for men’s World Cup games to be played at the New England Patriots stadium in June unless someone helps cover $8 million in security costs that the town is currently faced with paying, Asked why Patriots owner Robert Kraft, whose team is worth an estimated $9 billion, couldn’t just cut a check, FIFA World Cup Boston 26 organizers said the Krafts are offering up the use of their football stadium for two months in “peak period” of the NFL offseason, what do you want from them, blood?
The Center Square is a libertarian-leaning news site that has generally been pretty skeptical of stadium subsidies, so for it to run the headline “Seahawks’ Super Bowl win temporarily jolts local Seattle economy” is pretty notable — or would be if the gist of the actual article weren’t “U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims Seattle will benefit from the Seahawks winning the Super Bowl, economist Victor Matheson says one study found a short-term bump in per-capita income from Super Bowl-winning cities but it may have just been a spurious finding because ‘when you test 100 different things, even if all those things are random, one of them is going to end up being the best.'” At least the Center Square called an actual economist, unlike those corporate stooges at Al Jazeera in their article on how the Super Bowl will be a windfall for the San Francisco Bay Area despite the 49ers not being in the game and also economists consistently saying no it won’t be.
If Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam can’t get money to build roads and pedestrian bridges around his new Brook Park stadium from the state of Ohio, he’ll ask for $25 million from the federal government instead, there’s got to be someone to stick with the bill that isn’t named Jimmy.
The Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas Athletics just applied for another billion dollars in building permits for their planned Vegas stadium, everyone gets that applying for a permit doesn’t mean you’re actually committing to spend the money on the project, right? Maybe requiring personal seat licenses to buy some A’s tickets in Vegas will help raise the needed funds to employ the permits, anything is possible.
If you have time to kill next Thursday at 3 pm Eastern/noon Pacific, tune in to Alissa Walker’s Torched Talk with me and Chris Tyler from Strategic Actions for a Just Economy on whether it’s worth it to Los Angeles to host the 2028 Olympics, and what the city could do to try to extricate itself if it’s not. Zoom link is here, calendar it now, see you then!
Last week I teased a big project of mine that would drop this week, and it went live yesterday morning: a 57-page report, commissioned by Los Angeles economic justice advocacy group Strategic Action for a Just Economy, on whether L.A. can or should be trying to extricate itself from its hosting obligations for the 2028 Summer Olympics — something some local critics have suggested, especially in the wake of the city’s wildfire crisis and budget crisis and immigration enforcement occupying force crisis. You can probably get a pretty good sense of the report’s findings from its title, “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t,” but if you want slightly more details, here’s the nut graf:
While there are numerous unknowns—the history of the Olympics shows that budget questions are never resolved until it’s far too late, a path that L.A. has headed down with its agreements for the 2028 Games as well—the available documentation and history of international event hosting shows: Yes, if Los Angeles officials, or voters, decided to withdraw from hosting the Olympics, they could do so. This would come at the risk of potentially billions of dollars in damages from a breach-of-contract lawsuit and losses from expenses already undertaken. However, continuing as host also comes with a potential risk of losses that, if history is any guide, could similarly amount to billions of dollars.
The report also contains a wealth of information about Olympic financial history, including other locales’ attempts to back out of hosting major international sporting events for fiscal reasons (the Denver 1976 Winter Olympics that never happened, plus the 2026 Commonwealth Games that the Australian state of Victoria bailed on in 2023 amid concerns about snowballing costs), as well as mention of my new favorite Olympic factoid: that time they held a Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan and nobody knows how much it cost because the local organizing committee literally set fire to its financial records. It’s all here, dig in if you’re in the mood for a long, enraging read — or if not, you can instead read the excellent summaries in Torched (which includes a quote from me on this week’s revelations about L.A. Olympics chief Casey Wasserman’s history with Jeffrey Epstein) and LAist.
And now that that’s off my plate, I have plenty of time for stadium and arena bullet points, and good thing, too, because this week brought craploads of them:
The Wyandotte County Commission followed suit with its neighbors in the city of Olathe and voted 7-3 to approve devoting local sales and hotel tax revenue to pay off part of the state’s $2.775 billion in bonds for a new Kansas City Chiefs stadium and surrounding development. The county, to be clear, gets absolutely nothing out of kicking in its own funding (total price tag still TBD), given that the state has indicated it will go ahead with the stadium deal regardless. Kansas City, Kansas mayor and county commission chair Christal Wilson, who didn’t vote because no ties needed to be broken, wrote on Facebook that she thinks kicking in county money is warranted because it gets the county “a seat at the table” — okay, though it’s questionable whether getting to sit at the table is worth having to split the check.
Indiana state Rep. Earl Harris Jr. on his bill to create a sports authority to build a Chicago Bears stadium in northwest Indiana with money from (feigns coughing fit until you go away): “Indiana does sports things like this very well. When you look at the Pacers, the Colts, the Speedway, we’re very good at figuring out a good financial plan that does not hurt the taxpayer.” Um, about that…
Will the Portland Trail Blazers move if the city and county decline to spend $600 million on upgrades to their arena? It’s an “urgent race against time” and “the clock continues to tick,” writes The Oregonian, citing a deadline of … huh, seems like they didn’t mention any deadline, must have run out of room. (Though there was room for “Are you ready for the Nashville or Kansas City Trail Blazers?” to cite two cities that are not particularly shopping around for NBA teams.)
Tampa sports radio host JP Peterson insists that spending upwards of $2 billion on a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium is warranted because it “will produce millions in tax revenue and bring major events, Super Bowls, National Championship games, World Baseball Classic, MLB All-Star games” — [citation needed], my man. Also, I can save you some time: Even if a new baseball stadium does bring in millions in tax revenue, from hosting, uh, football games, when it costs hundreds of millions a year in tax expenditures, maybe that’s … not good?
And if you want still more Rays commentary from me, I spoke with both WMNF radio and Tampa Bay 28 TV about the ongoing dispute this week; the former is much longer, the latter offers a view of what I have on my living room walls, pick your poison.
Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson has met with NBA commissioner Adam Silver, though not in the sense of actually meeting meeting like in person, and “offered to be helpful in bringing back the Sonics” as an NBA expansion team. Seattle already has a practically brand new arena, though by the time the NBA is ready to expand it could be pushing 10 years old, is that too soon to ask for upgrades?
San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones says Spurs owner Michael Dell donating $6 billion to Donald Trump’s “Trump accounts” savings plan “really pissed me off” because “if you can give $6 billion for these accounts, you could have paid for your own arena.” But then Dell wouldn’t have those billions he saved by getting taxpayers to build his arena! Sounds like somebody doesn’t understand what the whole point of being a billionaire is. (Hint: It’s getting billions of dollars, not spending it.)
