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Would Mamdani aide’s plan to limit stadium food prices cause ticket prices to rise? The answer may surprise Matt Yglesias

access_time personNeil deMause

New York City, you may have heard, has a new mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, who is currently working with his transition team to assemble a staff for when he takes office in January. While most of his team is made up of city political lifers, its co-chair is a somewhat unconventional choice: Lina Khan, who as Joe Biden’s chair of the Federal Trade Commission worked to find new ways to use antitrust law to rein in the power of big corporations. And as atomic news unit redesigners Semafor reported last week, one of her targets for New York, according to “people familiar with the transition,” will be “sports stadiums charging nosebleed prices for concessions.”

Semafor’s grasp on sports metaphor notwithstanding — “nosebleed” typically refers to how high seats are above the ground, not how much they cost — this is a reasonable enough goal, if maybe not the most important one to New Yorkers in making the city affordable. (Semafor did add that the Mamdani administration also plans to police hospitals that overcharge for drugs and companies that violate a new state law requiring transparency about algorithmic pricing.) And, citing no sources at all this time, the article said Khan has identified one old city law that prohibits “unconscionable” business practices as a potential route to banning the $8 pretzel.

Yesterday, though, Semafor followed up to report that “economists are fighting” on X over whether trying to reduce prices is even a good idea, with noted scholars like philosophy major Matt Yglesias arguing that “Price controls for in-stadium beer so that sober sports fan pay higher ticket prices to generate cross-subsidy for drunks is a very bad idea!!” while Columbia law professor Tim Wu replied, “This is just dumb and shows a failure to understand buyers.”

Like those two, I am also not an economist, and odds are neither are you, but we can think this through easily enough. One main reason food and drink prices at sporting events are so high is monopoly power: If you want a beer at a game, you have to buy it at a concession stand, you can’t run across the street to pick up a cheaper one at a bodega. (You can bring in your own pretzel to Mets and Yankees games, but not to Knicks and Rangers and Nets and Liberty games.) So sports fans have to make a decision before attending a game: Am I going to eat and drink beforehand and/or stuff my pockets with contraband granola bars and alcohol gummies, or am I going to factor in the cost of a trip to the concession stand before deciding whether to go to a game?

Matt Yglesias, being Matt Yglesias, doesn’t specify why he thinks “sober sports fans” will pay higher ticket prices if concessions prices are lowered — it’s possible that he thinks that sports team owners have a big number written on a whiteboard somewhere of how much money they need to bring in, and if they can’t get it from gouging on hot dogs, they’ll get it by jacking up ticket prices. If so, that’s easily enough answered: I wrote a whole book chapter about how that’s not how ticket prices work, either in theory or empirically, since team owners will always jack them up as far as they can regardless of what other money they have coming in (or going out).

If, however, Yglesias means that sports fans would celebrate the end of the $17 beer by using some of their savings to buy more expensive tickets, thus allowing team owners to jack up prices, sure, maybe? As much as sports fans also don’t have a whiteboard somewhere with their game budget written on it, as a sample size of one, I know that I have absolutely factored food costs into ticket-buying decisions: In particular, I’ve started skipping concerts when I didn’t want to pay a table food and drink minimum on top of the ticket price, especially when $18 will only get me a small plate of figs and goat cheese.

So, yes, it’s possible bringing down concession prices would allow team owners to raise ticket prices some. (It doesn’t appear that anyone has done an empirical study of this; I’m still digging.) Whether you think that’s a bad thing will largely depend on how you feel about price controls — economists generally hate them, on the grounds that they lead sellers to cut back on supply, though it’s less clear if team owners used to monopoly pricing would really start closing concession stands if forced to sell $5 beers. (Some teams have already voluntarily cut concession prices to get people to buy more food and drink, and possibly to spend more on tickets as well, it’s hard to tell from the limited examples.) And even if forcing teams to charge something closer to competitive market prices would put more money in fans’ pockets, allowing them to spend more on tickets if they want, that hardly seems like a burden — let alone a “subsidy” for fans who have the temerity to get hungry and thirsty.

Anyway, this is all for Mamdani and Khan and the corporation counsel to sort out, along with lots of other affordability promises the new mayor is going to have to figure out how to implement. In the meantime, bring in a turkey sandwich to your next baseball game, it’s allowed. In fact, maybe outlawing sports venue bans on outside food and drink would be something that everyone, economists included, could get behind? Undoing the K-shaped economy would probably do more to provide real affordability — $8 pretzels are also a byproduct of a society where $8 is no object for a significant minority — but one unconscionable system at a time.

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Friday roundup: Stochastic parrot edition

access_time personNeil deMause

Guys! The AI industry needs our help! Nobody wants AI, and AI has lots of AI, so AI is paying AI to make more AI and sell it to AI and making it up in stock price, and that can’t end well! Let’s help out by asking poor li’l ChatGPT to write this week’s Friday roundup, I’ll check in and see how it does:

Friday roundup: Bears still begging, Thunder still building, and Jaguars still staircasing

[Not terrible, not great. Really the headline should reference the top items, and also what the hell is “staircasing” supposed to mean?]

It’s Friday, which means it’s time once again to spin the roulette wheel of public cash and see which stadium and arena schemes landed on taxpayers this week:

[“Spin the roulette wheel of public cash” is a terrible turn of phrase. Also, to complete the metaphor, the wheel should be “landing on” various schemes, not the schemes landing on taxpayers.]

  • San Diego’s Midway Rising plan to replace Pechanga Arena with a new 16,000-seat venue and a pile of housing and retail is inching toward a December 5 planning commission deadline, with the city still wrangling over traffic impacts, affordable housing quotas, and who gets the upside from the $3.9 billion redevelopment. Because nothing says “revitalization” like betting on a 1970s arena site to turn into a housing solution via sports subsidies.

[I haven’t written much lately about Midway Rising, which would replace the former home of the San Diego Clippers, among others, with one of those mixed-use district that are all the rage now, including a new arena. The whole project would cost $3.9 billion, and if ChatGPT knew that it could look back at old articles to understand this week’s, it would have found Voice of San Diego’s explainer about how the project would get an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District, which is basically a TIF that would kick back property taxes around the site to the developers. How much in taxes? Voice of San Diego didn’t say, and ChatGPT didn’t email property tax economist Geoff Propheter to ask, and Geoff hasn’t gotten to my email yet, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The last line, meanwhile, is a decent attempt at FoS-style snark, but points off for it not meaning anything.]

  • Oklahoma City’s new $900 million Thunder arena is still on track for a 2028 opening, after voters okayed a 1% sales tax to fund most of it. The latest renderings feature lots of glass and “urban integration,” which probably means the public will be paying for a very expensive window. Construction could start in 2026, with the city touting it as a 21st-century civic monument and critics calling it a half-billion-dollar bribe to keep the team happy through 2050.

[Oh come on, you link to fresh vaportecture and don’t even run the images, let alone clown on the woman in the short-shorts who is about to jog right into a stair railing? Also, how is it a half-billion-dollar bribe when the public is spending $850 million? Zero stars!]

  • The Chicago Bears are back trying to convince Illinois taxpayers to help fund their new domed stadium in Arlington Heights, which team execs insist is the “only viable” site. They already own the land, but are still pushing for $855 million in public infrastructure money, because no NFL owner can resist a good subsidy play before kickoff. If they can pull this off, they say they’ll even be nice enough to bid for a Super Bowl in 2031.

[This is not news. Or rather, it was news last week, which is when we covered it.]

  • Penn State’s $700 million Beaver Stadium renovation keeps creeping forward, promising better luxury seating and a closer-to-the-field fan experience, though the main takeaway seems to be that even college football programs are now acting like pro franchises when it comes to stadium arms races. There’s also an Adidas sponsorship wrinkle, just to make sure the project stays as corporate as possible.

[College football programs have been acting like pro franchises for a long time, but they’re outside the scope of this site because life is short. If all it cost to cover college stadiums was consuming every last drop of water on the planet, I guess I might consider it.]

  • The Albany Firebirds’ Arena Football League announced an expansion team in Saginaw, Michigan — the Michigan Arsenal — which will play at the Dow Events Center. It’s minor-league stuff, but still one more example of how arena football owners keep testing the limits of how many taxpayer-subsidized arenas are lying around waiting for someone to fill a few dates on the calendar.

[The — what? First off, the arena football league is now called Arena Football One, and the Firebirds are just one of its nine teams. The Arsenal will indeed play in Saginaw, in a stadium built in 1972. I don’t see anything to complain about here, or even to care about, unless you are an arena football fan in central Michigan, in which case today’s your lucky day, I guess?]

  • Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium is getting a new 4,400-seat indoor concert venue next door, courtesy of Panthers owner David Tepper’s entertainment arm. The new hall will slot nicely into his plan to turn every patch of Uptown into “TepperWorld,” assuming the city doesn’t mind another dose of infrastructure subsidies wrapped in the language of “music tourism.”

[Nobody is calling it “TepperWorld.” And most of the $650 million in public money Tepper got for his stadium development wouldn’t be for “infrastructure subsidies.” And “music tourism” is an actual term (people traveling to go see music, I’m doing it myself soon), though not one that’s particularly in play in Charlotte.]

And that’s the week in stadium boondoggles: one new dome, one giant glass box, one mega-housing-sports mashup, and a staircase in Jacksonville that somehow counts as “progress.” Same time next Friday — unless one of these cities goes broke before then.

[Giant glass box? Staircase? Either ChatGPT is drunk or I am.]

Okay, let’s shrug off the italics and see what other actual news the robots chose to ignore:

  • The Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency has reassigned the Cleveland Browns‘ proposed road upgrade plan back to committee, with one county commissioner saying, “So many questions out there in my mind that I don’t know how we move forward at this point.” But Jimmy Haslam is hungry for his $70 million in road money nowwwww.
  • North Kansas City Mayor Jesse Smith said in a press statement yesterday that he’s engaged in “substantial” talks with the Kansas City Royals owners over a new stadium and remains “committed to transparency throughout this process” but also that talks will be confidential for now, which is a lot of mixed messages, frankly. North Kansas City has a population of 4,467, so it’s probably a fair bet that most of the talks are around how to get the county and state to foot the bill for this thing, even more than they already are.
  • The New England Revolution‘s attempts to build a stadium in Everett already drew complaints from Boston officials that they’d need to be consulted on traffic and other impacts, and now four other cities — Malden, Medford, Chelsea and Revere — want in on those talks too. This is maybe going to be a while.
  • Port St. Lucie is spending $27.5 million on a minor league soccer stadium, and WPTV asked two local barbers how it would it affect the economy.
  • Not to be left out, Denver7 examined how a new Broncos stadium would affect the local economy by talking to a coffee company owner and a personal trainer.

And that’s the week in stadium boondoggles: Some stochastic parrots, hallucinated staircases, and terrible journalism. The future, in other words! Same time next Friday — unless the robots have taken over and are talking to themselves by then, and we can go spend all our time on music tourism until the economy collapses.

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Friday roundup: Fire stadium wins Chicago approval, A’s set MLB record for alienating all their new fans already

access_time personNeil deMause

With all the ginormous stadium and arena wrassles like the Washington Commanders stadium and the San Antonio Spurs arena project and the never-ending Tampa Bay Rays saga, it’s sometimes easy to forget about all the other deals that are somewhere in the vicinity of the back burner. Let’s check in on some of those this week, along with some old favorites:

  • The Chicago city council voted yesterday to approve the Chicago Fire‘s plans for a new stadium at the The 78 site, which since Fire owner Joe Mansueto says he’ll build with his own money, so there should be no public funding involved. The Chicago Tribune, though, notes that “some details still need to be ironed out” for the larger redevelopment, including what to do about a new Red Line CTA station and relocating Metra train tracks after developer Related declared the original plan too costly. And what about the rumored parking garage that would, like the now-scrapped transit improvements, possibly use kicked-back property taxes via a TIF? Maybe it’s best to say there probably won’t be any public funding involved, fingers crossed, knock wood.
  • Sacramento Athletics fans are already fast on their way to being non-Athletics fans, reports ESPN, with one season ticket holder writing to the team: “Being a season ticket holder for the Athletics is embarrassing to the point that I regret telling my friends or coworkers. I cannot give away tickets, I cannot easily sell games I can’t make it to (at market rate-especially on SeatGeek), and I feel ignored by the team sales staff.” (The team responded by giving him a plastic bag of leftover giveaways that he already had.) SFGate, meanwhile, reports that an A’s fan this summer summed things up by declaring, “Fuck John Fisher. John Fisher’s a piece of shit,” while wearing a “Sacramento hates you too” cap. Things will surely improve once the team starts playing in Las Vegas in 2028, theoretically.
  • The San Francisco 49ers owners are supposed to cover the $6.4 million cost of hosting the 2026 Super Bowl, but the team’s nonprofit that is on the hook for the costs has no money, which is maybe a problem? Sports economist Geoffrey Propheter says he is “particularly concerned about the statement that the 49ers will reimburse the city for ‘approved expenses,’ with the 49ers seemingly being the judge of what is approved,” and sports economist Michael Leeds agrees, warning that “mega-events such as the Super Bowl almost invariably have costs that are higher than predicted and local impacts that are lower than predicted.”
  • A downtown site targeted for a possible new Kansas City Royals stadium was just sold to a Wichita developer, decreasing the chances that it will end up used for a ballpark. Not that Royals owner John Sherman has said much about where he might want to build a stadium as a December deadline approaches for accepting around $700 million in tax money from Kansas if he moves there, shh, he’s trying to get city or county money to go with his state money from either Kansas or Missouri, don’t bother daddy while he’s trying to concentrate.
  • Going with the headline “Brewers bolster ballpark after $500M deal” when $471 million of the money is coming from state taxpayers is a choice, Fox6 Milwaukee.
  • Marc Normandin has a good rundown on MLB commissioners Rob Manfred’s conflicting missions of doing what team owners want and doing what’s best for baseball, especially when owners themselves can’t agree on what they want: Some owners want to force the players union into accepting a salary cap at all costs, while others are more concerned about the damage an extended lockout in 2027 would do to the league’s broadcast value when it’s time to renegotiate TV deals after 2028. Explains Normandin: “Basically, he has to use this time to convince them of what they should want, so that he can then enact it just like they want him to — otherwise, he’ll have to do what they want him to, even if he thinks it goes against their best interests, because he is beholden to them in the end.” Shaking down players and cities and TV networks for money all at once is no easy feat, you try it sometime!
  • Fine, here’s an update on the Commanders stadium deal as well: The mixed-use district around the stadium will need to go through normal zoning procedures rather than being fast-tracked under a last-minute amendment, meaning they may not be ready for years after the stadium’s planned 2030 opening. That’s bad if you want to live in the promised affordable housing, but does at least also make the development rights less valuable to team owner Josh Harris, meaning the public subsidy is now more likely to be closer to $6.6 billion than $25 billion, yay?
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Bears to announce Arlington Heights stadium plan in coming months, isn’t this where we came in?

access_time personNeil deMause

The Chicago Tribune reports this morning that Bears management is expected to “publicly present their latest plans for a new stadium” in Arlington Heights sometime between now and November, according to Arlington Heights Mayor Jim Tinaglia. How will this differ from the last set of plans team execs issued (with nightmarish giant bear sculptures) in early 2023, or from their demands for property tax breaks on the site plus possible “billions” in additional infrastructure funding? We’ll just have to wait and see!

It’s a weird article overall, mentioning early on that “more than 130 studies have come to the consensus that the economic benefits of new stadiums fall far short of the public investment” but then insisting that this one is different, because “the Bears have decided to finance their stadium themselves, which is rare.” It’s also not at all true: The whole reason the Arlington Heights plan has been sitting around for years now is that the Bears owners have been holding out for what they’re calling “tax certainty,” which means a guarantee that property taxes on the former Arlington Park racetrack won’t rise even after they build a multi-billion-dollar stadium development on it. To a sports team owner, property tax breaks are every bit as good as a government check, which is why we don’t (or at least shouldn’t) say that the owners of Madison Square Garden have “financed renovations themselves” when it’s now received about a billion dollars in city tax breaks since the 1980s.

The Tribune could have found someone to explain that concept had it interviewed any of the authors of those more than 130 studies, but instead it chose to limit its quotes to:

  • Tinaglia, who called the project he himself is negotiating “a win-win for everybody, including Chicago.”
  • Marc Ganis, identified as a “sports business consultant” but actually someone who’s worked for so many NFL teams he’s been dubbed “the 33rd owner,” calling it “an outright gift of epic proportions” by the Bears to taxpayers.
  • An unnamed team official, saying “our plan to finance a new state-of-the-art stadium requires zero state dollars for its construction.”
  • State Rep. Mary Beth Canty, sponsor of a state bill to allow tax breaks for “megaprojects,” saying it “creates real opportunities.”

That’s four pro-subsidy sources, though Canty did say “We want to focus on getting it right, not getting it fast,” which I suppose makes her a relative skeptic in this context. How much would a freeze on the Bears’ property taxes, plus any added infrastructure expense, cost Illinois taxpayers? What do economists say about whether funding stadiums through tax breaks pays off any better than funding them through up-front public spending? What is the likelihood of Canty’s bill passing, and would it then automatically allow Bears execs to get the property tax kickbacks they seek? Sorry, the Tribune has fewer than 80 newsroom staffers left in the wake of its takeover first by leveraged buyout goons and then by hedge fund goons, the reporter on this story has to cover the entirety of “news and trends in Chicago’s suburbs” as his beat, he doesn’t have time for actual reporting, you’ve clearly watched too much Lou Grant.

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As DC residents pack Commanders stadium hearing, poll shows 60% want city to demand a better deal

access_time personNeil deMause

After more than 13 hours of public testimony — WTOP called it “more than five hours,” which is technically true but maybe not the most precise — yesterday’s D.C. council hearing on the city’s proposed Washington Commanders deal finally wrapped up in the wee hours of the morning, after the last of the 503 people signed up to testify had finished. (I’d guesstimate that about three-quarters of those signed up never actually showed, or as WTOP would call it, “more than 20%.”) There were plenty of people both for and against the stadium plan, with most of the “yes” side talking about their love for the team or desire for more jobs for the Ward 7 neighborhood, while much of the “no” contingent focused on the extremely team-friendly lease deal that would see the district giving up billions of dollars in cash, tax breaks, and use of public land while getting almost nothing back in terms of rent or shared revenues.

You can read some samples of yesterday’s testimony here, or download individual statements, or even watch the entire thing over from the beginning if you’re a masochist. But perhaps more important than the opinions of those of us who had nothing better to do on a Tuesday morning/afternoon/evening is a new poll showing that D.C. residents overwhelmingly want the city council to reject the current deal and keep fighting for a better one:

60% of DC residents want the DC Council to continue negotiations with the Commanders to strike a better deal for District taxpayers, even if it risks the deal altogether, or to explore other options for the RFK site, according to a new poll commissioned by Greater Greater Washington and conducted by Tavern Research from July 27-29, 2025. Just 26% want the Council to approve the proposed deal as-is, with no amendments or negotiations…

  • 65% of poll respondents oppose exempting the Commanders from paying property taxes for 30 years.
  • 62% oppose exempting the Commanders from paying sales taxes on the sale of personal seat licenses, which give owners the right to buy tickets for a certain seat at any public stadium event.
  • 54% oppose giving the Commanders exclusive rights to develop housing and retail around a football stadium at RFK for $1 per year.
  • 63% believe the District should instead hold a competitive bidding process to assign development rights to the land around a football stadium.
  • 61% believe the DC Council should eliminate some stadium parking spots to pay for a new Metrorail station.

Notably, this poll was taken after council chair Phil Mendelson got Commanders owner Josh Harris to agree to pay some taxes he initially wasn’t going to, trimming the total public subsidy from more than $7 billion to more than $6.6 billion. (Or as WTOP would call it, “more than a dollar.”) No adjustments to any of those bullet-pointed items above are included in Mendelson’s revised plan, which is set to be voted on by the council at some point tomorrow.

Today the council will hear from representatives of the Commanders and the mayor’s office, who presumably won’t be required to stick to the three-minute speaking limit that the hoi polloi were given, but also will hopefully give time for some pointed questions from councilmembers. (Here’s a whole bingo card full of them, if anyone on the council needs some ideas.) Right now, with a little over an hour before the hearing starts, the official livestream says it’s for “invited guests only,” so refresh that page later to see if a better link shows up. And if you’re really desperate for some Commanders stadium-related entertainment, here’s what I testified via Zoom at around 9 pm last night:

Good evening. My name is Neil deMause, and I’m co-author of the book and website “Field of Schemes,” which investigates how public money is used to fund private sports stadiums. I’ve been studying this issue nationwide for three decades, and I feel safe in saying that the proposed Commanders stadium bill would be not merely a bad deal for DC, but one of the most wasteful uses of taxpayer dollars on a private sports facility in US history.

This isn’t a matter of believing that “any subsidy is unacceptable,” or that it wouldn’t be nice to have the Commanders back in D.C. at a reasonable price. But according to the best estimates of experts in tax expenditures, the total cost of the District’s cash expenses, tax breaks, and land discounts to Josh Harris would add up to at minimum $7 billion, money the district would never get back. Even restoring the handful of tax revenues that are proposed in the revised deal — revenues any other business in DC would pay as a matter of course, mind you — would still leave taxpayers holding the bag for well over $6 billion. That’s more than quadruple the most expensive public cost to date — it wouldn’t just break the record for the largest subsidy for a US sports stadium, it would completely shatter it.

One common theme I’ve found in my research is that city officials almost never realize they have leverage in negotiating stadium deals – all too often, they approach talks from the vantage point of “What’s the team owner asking for, and how can we make it not quite as bad?” Right now neither Maryland nor Virginia nor any other local government has offered Josh Harris anything, let alone the billions of dollars DC is proposing to provide. The District is, quite simply, bidding against itself, which is a great way to end up needlessly giving away the store.

Unfortunately, cities do this all the time. Not because sports fans want them to sign a blank check to team owners — as a sports fan myself, I know well that fans hate the idea of handing over their money once at the ticket window and again on tax day. And I know that elected officials can’t truly believe that new stadiums are an economic boon when 40 years of research shows they create very few jobs, and very little new tax revenue, relative to their massive cost. But I also know it can be hard to say no when the other public needs that the money could be spent on can’t afford lobbyists like wealthy sports owners do.

There are still ways the council can improve this deal, as numerous witnesses have testified today. At the very least, the council should demand that Josh Harris come up with a competitive offer, with fair rent and sharing of revenues from the stadium, parking garages, and surrounding development, that matches what DC could get for a mixed-use development on the open market. To vote for the bill as it stands currently would just be taking public money that could otherwise be used on city services for all residents and handing it over to a single billionaire, and no one, no matter how much they love their NFL team, should want that. Thank you.

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Friday roundup: The world is increasingly an ocean of stadium disinformation slop, and sea levels are rising

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been another exhausting news week, so if you need a pick-me-up, please enjoy some videos of how I spent last weekend. Sometimes we all need a musical reminder to hang on to your humanity.

Once you’re sufficiently fortified, here’s what else happened this week in the world of sports stadium and arena shakedowns:

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DC council may delay $7B stadium vote, could Commanders owner seek Trump bailout?

access_time personNeil deMause

The battle lines, such as they are, on the proposed Washington Commanders stadium at the old RFK Stadium site in D.C. are pretty clear: Mayor Muriel Bowser has proposed a deal that would involve more than $7 billion in city cash, tax breaks, and land discounts, and wants it passed by July 15; council leaders, most prominently chair Phil Mendelson, say they want to wait until September to vote in order to “make the deal even better (sic) for taxpayers” in unspecified ways. Mendelson, undeterred by the mayor’s (and Commanders owner Josh Harris’s) preferred deadline, has even set public hearings for July 29 and 30, which temporal experts say is actually after July 15.

Bowser was asked by sports radio talk show host Kevin Sheehan on Monday how concerned she was about all this on a scale of 0 to 5, and stopped just short of Defcon 1:

Bowser: “That’s a good question. Listen, I’m concerned right now that everybody buckle down and get to work. I’m not concerned about our deal. Our deal is solid. It pays off for D.C. And at the end of the day, I think everybody wants the same thing. So I would put my level of concern, because, you know, when you’re a big city mayor, you’re concerned about everything, I’d put it at a 4.”

Sheehan: “Well, that’s one away from very concerned!”

Bowser: (laughs)

This looks like usual political standoff stuff, where Bowser is trying to bigfoot the council into rushing a Commanders stadium bill in the next two weeks despite all the outstanding questions about it, and Mendelson is saying all in due time. Bowser’s only real leverage is to threaten that Harris could walk away from the deal if it’s not approved promptly — which he could, sure, but he would be insane to do so, given that he has a shot at a record-shattering $7 billion and up in subsidies from D.C., whereas his next best offer from anywhere else is nothing at all, certainly not by July 15.

Though Fox 5 Washington suggests one other (don’t use a football metaphor, don’t use a football metaphor) end run (dammit) that Harris could theoretically attempt:

Speaking with Mendelson yesterday, he did confirm that he has heard talk that the Commanders have a Plan B which may involve going to President Trump and members of Congress to make it happen on time.

It’s unclear whether Mendelson said that before or after he and some other councilmembers had dinner with Commanders execs to discuss the stadium plans. Either way, it would clearly be unprecedented for the federal government to step in and force a city to fund an NFL stadium, but everything is already so far beyond unprecedented — both in terms of what Harris is asking for and what the Trump administration is up to — that nothing would be surprising anymore.

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Friday roundup: Bengals land $350m in county stadium cash, will seek more from state

access_time personNeil deMause

The stadium deals are coming fast and furious now: Hamilton County and the Cincinnati Bengals owners have reached an agreement on a lease extension, four days before the team owners could have extended their current lease unilaterally. The new lease, approved yesterday by a 2-1 vote (Alicia Reese, dada poet, abstained) will run through the 2036 season (with five two-year options afterwards), and the team will receive $350 million in county money toward $470 million in stadium upgrades. The team will start paying rent for the first time (beginning at $1 million a year, gradually rising to $2 million), while continuing to receive 93% of parking revenues.

That’s a little over $30 million in public money per year of lease extension, which would be high but still short of the $43 million a year that the Carolina Panthers received last year. But the real question is: Did Hamilton County succeed in getting out from under that state-of-the-art clause that requires taxpayers to buy the team anything that other teams’ stadiums have, famously including holographic replay systems should they ever be invented? Neither the Bengals’ statement nor the county’s statement mentions this, and if it’s still in place, then you have to wonder why the county didn’t just let Bengals owners the Brown family renew the old lease and pass on giving them $350 million in cash.

And it could end up being more than $350 million: Hamilton County stated that “Commissioners plan to pursue state support as capital grants become available to grow the size of the renovation project” — which would be insane for the state to do in exchange for exactly nothing in return from the team owners, but the Ohio state legislature isn’t exactly known for its sanity lately.

More news as events warrant, then, but it certainly looks like a big win for the Browns, not to be confused with this week’s big win for the other Browns. And while we await more news, here’s more news:

  • The Kansas City Chiefs owners have officially requested an extension on Kansas’s offer of state money for a new stadium, either because they really want to move to Kansas or because they want to scare local Missouri lawmakers into sweetening the pot on the state money that was already approved there. The Kansas legislature will discuss the extension proposal on July 7; in the meantime, state senate president Ty Masterson declared: “The letter from [Chiefs president] Mark Donovan indicates that the drive to bring this historic project to Kansas is moving down the field. Now that we are in the red zone, this extension will provide stakeholders sufficient time to ensure the ball crosses the goal line” — at which point the English language itself died of metaphor overload.
  • The community revitalization levy (Canadian for TIF) that provided $300 million in tax money for a new Edmonton Oilers arena is set to expire soon, so of course the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce wants it extended for another 20 years, or else: “Extending the CRL is about making a generational investment in our city, and it directly responds to what we’re hearing from local businesses. A vibrant Downtown isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a must-have,” said ECC CEO Doug Griffiths. Some of the money would go toward expanding the Oilers’ ICE District Fan Park, which is less a park than an event space that Oilers owner Daryl Katz can use to hold GWAR concerts; “We shouldn’t be doing secret deals behind closed doors for one or two businesses. That’s just wrong,” objected city councillor (Canadian for councilmember) Michael Janz in advance of public hearings yesterday and today.
  • The Tampa Bay Rays need to figure out where to play their home playoff games if they make the postseason, and if you want to read Ken Rosenthal expounding semi-coherently on it — sample text: “Come October, a team known for disrupting the sport might provide its wildest wrinkle yet: a public-address announcer bellowing, ‘Welcome to the 2025 postseason at Steinbrenner Field!'”— here’s the Athletic paywall, go to town. (Or, psst, you can always try archive.ph.)
  • The Marietta Daily Journal reports that the Atlanta Braves‘ stadium is producing more tax revenues than it’s costing Cobb County in tax expenditures; no, it’s not, points out Kennesaw State economist J.C. Bradbury, who notes that this fails to account for the 60% of county costs that are covered by sources other than property taxes, which puts the county comfortably back in a sea of red ink.
  • The Washington, D.C. city council has scheduled public hearings on a proposed Commanders stadium for July 29 and 30, which makes it clear that the council won’t be voting to approve the potential $7-billion-and-up subsidy deal on July 15 as team officials and Mayor Muriel Bowser had hoped. Any delay past July 15 would “jeopardize D.C.’s ability to attract premier concerts, global talent and marquee events — including the 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cup” and “slow new jobs at a time when the District needs them the most,” a Commanders spokesperson harrumphed. Council president Phil Mendelson says he still expects a stadium deal to be approved this summer; the big question is whether the council will do anything to trim the proposed record-breaking public costs or will just greenlight basically what Bowser approved. If nothing else, the hearings should be a good opportunity to fill out some of our bingo cards.
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Behold, the future of soccer stadiums, Chicago Fire vaportecture edition

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a long, dismal spring of record-breaking stadium subsidies making their way through state legislatures (not to mention other even more dismal stuff), so let’s have some fresh vaportecture as a respite from all the horror! And it’s for the proposed Chicago Fire stadium, which will allegedly be built entirely with the team owner’s own money. (The overall development itself will get a ton of tax kickbacks, but we won’t think about that right now.) Roll it!

Okay, sure, that’s fine enough. The stadium looks like a stadium, the sun is actually setting in the west at game time, nobody spelled the city’s name wrong. I do have some questions about what appears to be a practice (or youth?) field next to the stadium and whether all those tents and people walking on it before the game won’t destroy the turf and make it unplayable, but as these things go, that’s a minor quibble.

Likewise, let’s look at everything the interior image got right: There are 11 players on each team, and no one is reacting to the exciting play on the pitch by standing up and holding a scarf to face the back rows. And what exciting play it is: A Fire player looks to have just dribbled an opposing defender so ferociously that the defender just straight-up face-planted on the pitch, leaving the Fire player open for a likely goal. Too bad so many of the photographers lining the field seem to be looking in the wrong direction to get any good photos of the play, but you can’t have everything.

Okay, now you’re talking! What on earth kind of act is this that involves one guitar player and one dancer (?) while a sparsely arranged crowd generally pays no attention to the stage, despite it being lit by multiple spotlights? Is this what future stadium shows will look like now that currently popular artists are all canceling stadium gigs because they can’t sell enough tickets?

Anything else? Overblown quotes from team officials, perhaps?

Fire president Dave Baldwin told the Sun-Times the team wanted the design to harken back to “the City of Broad Shoulders” and its “rich industrial manufacturing heritage.”

“It has that Chicago warehouse feel, but also has a little bit of an enduring elegance to it — the brick facade, the steel, the glass, those are all things that were really important to Joe as we designed this,” Baldwin said. “Whether it’s opening day in 2028, or you fast forward 50 years and you come back to the stadium, it should still feel relevant to Chicago.”

Sure, brick, glass, steel, all things that scream “Chicago.” Or, you know, Baltimore. It probably would be too much to expect a stadium incorporating deep-dish pizza or sausages made of dead rats into its façade, but we’ll have to take what we can get.

As Baldwin noted, the projected opening date is 2028. That’s pretty aggressive given that it’s already halfway through 2025 and Chicago isn’t exactly known for its balmy winters and all-year construction schedules, but we can’t entirely rule it out.

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D-backs execs to fans: Please lobby state legislators to give us $500m in tax money, no pressure

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a few weeks since we’ve heard much about the proposed Arizona Diamondbacks stadium renovation subsidy bill, and apparently that’s because it’s been spinning its wheels a bit. Earlier this month, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego declared the original plan — which would redirect between $400 million and $500 million in sales in income taxes to team owner Ken Kendrick — “deeply troubling” but said she hoped “we are close to a more fiscally responsible bill”; the legislation is currently stuck in the state senate appropriations committee, which met last week but didn’t discuss it. Now, with the state legislative session winding down, team officials have apparently turned up the heat by trying to get D-backs fans to lobby the senate on their behalf:

Friday morning, Diamondbacks season ticket holders received an email from team president and CEO Derrick Hall with the subject line: “Help Us Keep the D-backs in Arizona.” In it, Hall thanked fans who have reached out about how to support House Bill 2704, which would capture some sales and income tax revenue to pay for major stadium upgrades. Noting there “is absolutely no pressure,” he also gently nudged other fans to take up the cause.

Hall’s email directed season ticket holders to a site called Keep Arizona Major League, which doesn’t exactly threaten that the team will move without stadium subsidies, but doesn’t exactly not threaten that either. “Arizona is a world class state with a world class sports culture. We have to keep it that way,” it declares in large all-caps letters, before insisting, “The Arizona Diamondbacks have consistently said that they don’t plan to leave Arizona and that they would prefer to stay at an upgraded Chase Field. However, we know from experience, seeing the Coyotes moving to Utah, that these things can happen.” The site also argues in not-at-all-ChatGPT-written prose that “even if you’re not a baseball fan, everyone benefits from the Diamondbacks’ location at Chase Field in downtown Phoenix,” asserting that the stadium has generated $5.4 billion in GDP for Arizona over 25 years. (Citation very much needed; all sources for this figure online appear to originate with D-backs officials themselves.)

KeepAZmajorleague.com was created in March by someone who doesn’t want their identity known; listed sponsors include a bunch of local chambers of commerce. The Phoenix New Times article that revealed the email campaign deadpans, “a Diamondbacks spokesperson told Phoenix New Times he would look into the question of the team’s involvement but has not yet provided an answer.”

New Times further reports that while Hall’s email told fans that “the legislature” would be voting on the stadium funding bill “in the next 10 days,” it’s not at all clear that any vote is actually pending. The legislative session is set to wrap up on June 30, and with a whole lot of budget negotiations still to be hashed out, writes news editor Zach Buchanan, “the bill would appear to be trailing in the ninth inning” — oh man, and just when we were so close to getting out of this without a sports metaphor.

One recent development in the bill is that it would set penalties if the Diamondbacks moved out before 2035 — though the penalty is only $10 million, or as Buchanan describes it, “roughly the salary of two mid-tier free-agent relief pitchers.” That does seem deeply troubling; hopefully Arizona residents and Diamondbacks fans can get some more clarity soon on what the legislature is considering, so they can tell their elected representatives what they actually think of it.

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