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Friday roundup: KC approves $1B+ in Royals stadium subsidies over calls for public vote, independent analysis

access_time personNeil deMause

First things first: The Kansas City council voted on a proposed city funding package for a new Royals stadium yesterday, and as expected, it sailed through, with councilmembers voting 11-2 to approve a series of agreements promising $600 million in cash plus at least $500 million in tax breaks toward a new $1.9 billion stadium at Crown Center.

The council vote came amid more protests from members of the labor group Missouri Workers Power, who vowed to move ahead with plans for November ballot measure on the plan, which if it goes against the council’s verdict will likely spark a legal battle over which vote takes precedence. Councilmember Johnathan Duncan, one of the two no votes yesterday, said the council shouldn’t have voted without waiting for independent economic analyses of the plan; Mayor Quinton Lucas retorted that there will soon be a TIF district analysis made available along with other studies, and “if for some reason the third party financial review says, ‘this doesn’t work,’ then these things don’t go forward,” though it’s not clear what council action would be necessary to undo yesterday’s decision.

Kansas City Star columnist David Hudnall summed up the situation before the council vote: “Huge financial questions remain unanswered. Some pages in the agreements are literally blank. … They don’t want us to vote on this stadium, and pushing it through like this is their best chance of making sure the public doesn’t have a say.”

Fran Marion, a fast food worker and Missouri Workers Power leader, said in addition to the proposed ballot measure, “we see how our mayor and council members voted, and we know elections are coming up in April and June, and we will remember what they did today.” That’s absolutely been known to happen, though it’d be cold comfort for Kansas Citians to get revenge on local councilmembers (Lucas is term-limited out in 2027) while still being stuck with a huge public tab, just as it was for residents of Wisconsin and Cobb County and Miami before them.

And in other news of the week:

  • Tampa Mayor Jane Castor now says that a revised Tampa Bay Rays stadium plan could see the city of Tampa fronting $80 million while the Rays ownership would take out a $100 million loan, all of which would be repaid out of future property tax receipts. That would still 100% be replacing city tax money with city tax money, with the Tampa Bay Business Journal acknowledging that there’s “not much” difference between a Community Redevelopment Area district (the old plan) and a Tax Increment Financing district (the new one). Castor promised, “We’re not going to rush into an agreement just for the sake of time,” while also saying that a council vote could come as early as next week despite no one knowing yet exactly how the financing would work.
  • The Federal Railroad Administration has approved two grants totaling $659 million for relocating an Amtrak facility in Chicago, which could clear the way for the 14th Street rail yard to be used by incoming Chicago White Sox owner Justin Ishbia to build a new stadium there. Who would fund that project still remains very much an unknown, but it seems like we’re headed toward finding out.
  • After receiving $750 million in state money for his Las Vegas stadium, Raiders owner Mark Davis is now asking for another $75 million to fund a new entry plaza in advance of hosting the 2029 Super Bowl. The money would come out of a “waterfall” fund set aside for Raiders stadium upgrades from the same hotel tax money that paid for the first $750 million — but that’s still not without its costs in terms of draining funds you might need later for other repair needs, as Cleveland could tell you.
  • “I don’t think the Steelers have any plans of leaving” their 25-year-old stadium, said Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor this week, but “the reality is both stadiums need upgrades” and “I think to compete, we’re gonna have to have those conversations long term with the Steelers and the Pirates.” Left unspecified: What kind of upgrades the stadiums need, who would pay for them, and who O’Connor thinks he’d be “competing” with exactly.
  • Speaking of needs and wants and competition, Boston Celtics owner Bill Chisholm said this week that he doesn’t need a new arena to compete with other teams financially, but “I do think we need to have an arena that is consistent with the quality and the excellence of the Celtics.” Chisholm added, “if we can make it work, we’d love to stay where we are,” all of which sounds very much like gamesmanship with his current landlords, Delaware North, whose owner also owns the Bruins.
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World Cup economic impact still hard to find, but at least we’ll always have the “togetherness”

access_time personNeil deMause

The U.S. Men’s National Team is now extremely out of the World Cup, joining co-hosts Canada and Mexico on the sidelines, but North America still has two more weeks of the sweet, sweet international tourism that comes with hosting the tournament. Or, you know, not:

As Toronto’s official FIFA World Cup 2026 hosting duties come to an end, data shows that the city saw little economic gain during the first two weeks of the tournament…

Data from payment processing company Moneris between June 12 and 26 — the first two weeks of the World Cup in Toronto — showed that debit and credit card spending at restaurants and bars in the city rose by just three per cent compared with the same time last year.

A 3% increase isn’t actually terrible in a city the size of Toronto, which can swallow 40,000 or so soccer fans without much noticing. The bigger problem, notes the CBC, is that Toronto taxpayers spent about $380 million on hosting six World Cup matches, which is tough to earn back one debit card charge at a time.

In Texas, meanwhile, the news site Border Report interviewed our old frenemy, sports economist Andy Zimbalist, and learned that “events like the World Cup generate little or no net economic benefit because FIFA keeps most event revenue while host cities absorb major expenses.” Then the site ran this under the whiplash-inducing headline “Impact of World Cup in Texas goes beyond the dollars and cents,” because Zimbalist said the games were maybe “worth it because there was so much togetherness.”

But anyway, who are you going to believe, some pointy-headed bean counter or a respected international sports business entity? Philadelphia’s 6abc digital staff doesn’t need any “experts” or “numbers” when it can just reprint the official press release:

With the final match at the Philadelphia Stadium in the books, FIFA is releasing new details about the World Cup impact locally.

More than 409,000 people attended the six matches — five of which were sold-out. …

Fans consumed 290,000 beers and more than 55,000 hot dogs.

After each match day, any food from the stadium that was not consumed was given to local food banks, totaling 15,000 pounds of food.

Getting 15,000 pounds of leftover food for a mere $380 million — who can put a price on that? Other than $380 million, sure, but that’s the bean-counter way of looking at things, whereas if you count up all the actual unused beans … I’ll see myself out.

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Suburban Illinois mayors are pitching Bears on stadium sites again as Indiana plans falter

access_time personNeil deMause

The Chicago Bears‘ search for the city that will lavish it with the most public stadium dollars has officially re-entered the throwing-stuff-at-the-wall stage, with fresh suburbs entering the fray. Last week, McCook, Illinois Mayor Terrance Carr and four of his top officials hand-delivered a letter to Bears execs spelling out a stadium proposal in his village west of Chicago. And while Carr wouldn’t say what was in it — no spoilers for Bears execs before they’ve read it! — he did provide some hints:

The proposed site is at the southeast corner of 55th Street and East Avenue, filled in quarry land. … [Carr’s] proposal: The Bears or the village would buy the land. Then the Bears would build a domed, 80,000-seat stadium, which the team would give to the village. In return, Carr would charge the team $1 a year in rent. As a publicly owned stadium, it would be exempt from property taxes.

That would provide the “property tax certainty” that Bears officials say they want — at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to the McCook treasury, plus the cost of buying the land from its current owners for around $160 million. (Estimates of the cost of a tax break on a similar Arlington Heights stadium came to $700 million, and there the team would still be paying current property tax levels, while in McCook it would pay nothing.) “It’s not a waste of money for me to do this,” said Carr, while also saying, “This is prime real estate. If we don’t get the Bears, I’ll get some development there.” Wouldn’t that seem to indicate it would be a waste of money, if the mayor thinks he could get development without putting up $800-million-plus in subsidies? Unless Carr just means “somebody is eventually sure to snap up my get-out-of-property-taxes-free card,” in which case he’s only leaving out whether a football stadium operating ten days a year would be the best bang for $800 million in public bucks.

Random suburban officials delivering secretive manila envelopes to NFL teams wouldn’t normally be much of a news story, but all the other potential Bears stadium plans remain up in the air: Illinois officials are still in “tell us what we have to put in a tax break bill for you to commit to our state” mode, while officials in Porter County, Indiana continue to balk at a 1% restaurant tax surcharge to help pay for a stadium in Hammond, which is not actually in Porter County.

“I think there’s actually a negligible percentile of Porter County residents that support creating a food-and-beverage tax in our county and putting that money in an envelope and sending it off to Hammond,” [Porter County Commissioner Jim] Biggs told the Indiana Capital Chronicle. “We have our own issues here that need to be addressed.”

Outgoing Porter County Council president Andy Vasquez, who lost his primary for reelection this spring after supporting the Bears stadium tax, added, “Evidently people don’t want it because I’m no longer going to be here after December 31st. I’m not going to be here, so we’ll leave it to the next group.” It sounds increasingly like nothing is going to get decided until next spring, when Indiana’s bill to provide a somewhat hazy amount of money for a Bears stadium expires — if you were ever inclined to take sports team execs’ pronounced deadlines seriously, this might be a good reminder to quit.

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Illinois legislature adjourns without passing Bears bill, team to “finalize evaluation” of Arlington Heights, Hammond by summer

access_time personNeil deMause

The clock ran out on the Illinois state legislative session last night at midnight, but the decision on whether to pass legislation for a Chicago Bears stadium remained alive until this morning, when the Illinois house finally stuck a fork in it by adjourning without a vote. After the collapse of the team’s preferred megaprojects tax break bill over the weekend (Chicago Daily Herald: “Bears property tax break bill sacked“), state senators had worked frantically to issue a new bill (Capitol News Illinois: “Hail Mary effort to keep Bears in Illinois”), which cleared the senate at nearly 4 am (Chicago Tribune: “Illinois Senate in overtime passes last-ditch public stadium legislation”) and headed to the state house, which decided to take its ball and go home.

Setting aside sports metaphors equating passing stadium subsidies with scoring a touchdown — please, please stop doing that, people — what the hell actually happened this weekend, and where do things stand now with the Bears and their possible future homes? Let’s recap:

  • Late Saturday, after discussion of limiting legislation to only applying to the Bears to avoid handing tax breaks to billions of dollars of other projects, State Sen. Bill Cunningham declared the megaprojects bills dead, saying too many senate Democrats were opposed to the state subsidizing any Bears move out of Chicago to suburban Arlington Heights. Still, Cunningham said, he hoped to offer the Bears something by submitting legislation on Sunday that would put Chicago and Arlington Heights “on an equal plane.”
  • On Sunday night at 11 pm, Cunningham introduced a bill to allow any municipality in Cook County with more than 70,000 residents to create a sports authority to own new stadiums. This would enable the Bears to get out of paying any property taxes on a stadium — though the bill specified that they would pay property taxes on any surrounding team-owned stadium district.
  • Nearly four hours after the midnight deadline for a bill, the senate voted 37-17 to approve Cunningham’s sports authorities bill. Rather than fake an 11:59 pm time stamp as the Illinois legislature did for a White Sox stadium bill in 1988, this time the legislature used a different end run trick play gambit, evading a rule that bills passed after the session ends need a supermajority vote by putting no effective date on the bill, allowing it to go into effect next June, which would nullify the increased vote requirement.
  • The bill then headed to the state house, which at 4:30 am adjourned without taking action on the sports authority bill.

While it’s kind of moot now, it’s worth taking a quick look at what Cunningham’s bill would have cost relative to previous proposals. Under a sports authority plan, Bears owner George McCaskey would have gotten a bigger tax break for a stadium owned by a sports authority, paying no taxes at all rather than a negotiated payments in lieu of taxes rate. Instead of saving an estimated $39 million a year, he would have saved an estimated $53 million a year, pushing the total present value of the stadium tax break from around $670 million to around $900 million. Making the surrounding property taxable, though, would have prevented McCaskey from getting more than a billion dollars in additional tax breaks for the rest of his planned development.

However, in a series of posts late last night, Center Square sports subsidy reporter Jon Styf noted that even though Cunningham said the Bears would pay for stadium construction, his bill would have allowed a stadium authority to sell bonds to pay for stadium infrastructure — and potentially pay it off by siphoning off sales tax revenues from a stadium district. It’s hard to guess how much this would have added to the total public cost, but it could have been hefty indeed if a stadium district were large enough.

Meanwhile, none of this would have actually authorized a stadium — it would just have authorized Arlington Heights, or Chicago, or Cicero or Schaumburg or Evanston, to create sports authorities to grant McCaskey his get-out-of-property-taxes-free card (and potential infrastructure bonds). With Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson having been vocal about wanting to offer team ownership a new stadium on the Chicago lakefront, it could easily have led to Chicago and Arlington Heights going toe to toe to win McCaskey’s heart, which could have gotten pricey for taxpayers.

None of that is happening now, though, at least not unless Bears execs decide to put off a stadium decision in hopes of a potential special session of the legislature later this summer. The team issued a brief statement this morning reading, “We will finalize our evaluation of both Arlington Heights and Hammond, and remain on the late spring/early summer timeline that we have previously communicated,” which manages to be a threat to move to Indiana without actually closing the door on Illinois, well played. Until we hear back from them, add the Bears mess to the Tampa Bay Rays mess as situations where we won’t know the final score (dammit!) for a while yet.

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It may officially be time to call the 2026 World Cup an omnishambles

access_time personNeil deMause

The start of the men’s World Cup is now just five weeks away, and we’re getting to the point where it may be time to ask what happens if the world’s richest country holds one of the world’s biggest sporting events and nobody shows up:

With only six weeks to go before the start of the World Cup, hotels at most of the cities hosting the tournament are facing a major problem: Bookings are running far below what they had expected.

For some metro areas such as Kansas City, bookings are running even below what a typical June or July would bring, according to an industry survey released on Monday by the American Hotel and Lodging Association.

Mega-events like the World Cup are always a risky proposition for host nations, which take on tons of added costs in the hopes of raking in spending from international visitors, something that doesn’t generally work out that well. But this year’s tournament, split among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, has been especially disastrous and especially for the U.S., marked by sky-high ticket prices, host cities jacking up train fares by more than 1000% to try to cover their costs (and fans threatening to walk to games along highway shoulders in response), and growing signs that fans from other countries who might normally travel to see their teams are planning to sit this World Cup out amid both soaring prices and fears of harassment by Trump administration immigration agencies.

All this won’t necessarily add up to the spectacle of international soccer teams playing before acres of empty seats: FIFA can always dump unsold tickets by lowering prices, though so far it’s showing no interest in doing so. But it’s looking more and more like a large share of the attendees will be locals, which cuts into any hoped-for economic windfall from hosting the cup, since those people would be spending money in their home towns regardless.

While some of these problems are specific to this particular World Cup — we haven’t even gotten into the issue of soaring airfares in the wake of Trump’s war with Iran — some are more a matter of ongoing FIFA money grubbing and of the high costs of putting on sports mega-events, which is why study after study shows things like the World Cup or the Olympics are not a very good way to create economic growth. In the worst-case scenario, residents of host cities will all skip town during the World Cup to avoid the traffic and transit nightmares (New Yorkers are already being instructed to work from home on match days), while tourists steer clear because of high prices and ICE fears, leading to a situation where nobody will go to the World Cup because it’s too crowded. In the best … it’ll look good on TV, and maybe that’s all anyone cares about?

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Bears hedge on Illinois vs. Indiana decision as public cost of Hammond stadium remains moving target

access_time personNeil deMause

When the Illinois legislature canceled Thursday morning’s planned hearing on a property tax break bill for a Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights, it turns out, it wasn’t just a bureaucratic scheduling glitch. Rather, the legislature did so at the request of Bears president Kevin Warren so that the bill could be revised — or, as Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker intimated, maybe just because “Indiana had asked them to say that they’re going to move forward with the negotiations in Indiana.” (Indiana officials had demanded some kind of commitment from the Bears before moving ahead with their own stadium financing package.) Either way, the Illinois bill is supposed to be resubmitted at a new hearing later this week.

Sports Mockery claims (citing no sources whatsoever) that Bears owner George McCaskey was “livid” with Warren for committing so heavily to Indiana, leading to the Bears president issuing a statement Saturday that “we continue to work with Illinois’ leadership and appreciate the progress being made.” All of which has led to even more speculation that McCaskey and Warren are mostly trying to play the two states off against each other to drive up the level of public subsidy, which of course they are, Chicago sports owners practically invented that game.

Indiana’s state Legislative Services Agency, meanwhile, issued a fiscal impact statement on Friday that starts to spell out how much each of the tax streams for a Bears stadium in Hammond, Indiana would cost state and local taxpayers:

  • The state would create a stadium tax district in Hammond that would divert all new property tax, income tax, and sales tax within the district above what’s currently collected there to paying off the stadium, for up to the next 35 years. Since no one knows how big the district would be or what would be built within it, there’s no way to know how much this redirected tax revenue would amount to; the fiscal note observes that other similar districts in the state divert as much as $10 million a year, but then immediately adds that “the amount of revenue deposited in the fund is
    indeterminable and will depend on the plan for the designated district,” which is legislativese for ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
  • A 1% food and beverage tax surcharge in Lake and Porter counties, on top of the state’s 7% level, would generate an estimated $12-18 million a year, or possibly more if a stadium district leads to more local food and beverage sales.
  • Doubling the Lake County hotel tax from 5% to 10% would generate “at least $5.4M annually,” again possibly more if hotel stays go up thanks to a stadium.
  • A 12% ticket tax would generate about $12 million a year.

(In addition, that previously reported bit that “the stadium board will retain all revenues from operation of the capital mprovement” appears to actually mean all net tax revenues from the stadium (“all excise taxes and net income from operation of the capital improvements”), which is far less exciting than it sounded when it appeared Indiana might actually get a cut of stadium revenues.)

How much would all those redirected tax revenue streams add up to? Given all the unknowns it’s impossible to say, plus the fiscal note doesn’t indicate if and how these annual tax expenditures are expected to rise over time. Discounting the ticket tax because that mostly ends up being paid by teams, we have a baseline of around $27 million a year, which would come to around $440 million in present value; but, of course, those unknown subsidies from a stadium tax district could easily add hundreds of millions if not billions more if Indiana diverts taxes from a big enough area, as Kansas is planning on doing with its infamous 293-square-mile district for the Kansas City Chiefs.

All of this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is expected to be signed off on by the Indiana legislature this week, while Illinois considers if and how to respond. Getting some more certainty about, at the very least, how big Indiana’s stadium tax district would be before holding a vote seems like the absolute bare minimum of due diligence, but it’s unclear if anyone will attempt that in the five days left before the legislative session ends; blank checks are seldom a good way for public officials to go into a stadium negotiation, but it sure looks like where things are headed.

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Friday roundup: Friends don’t let friends host the Olympics, and other cautionary tales

access_time personNeil deMause

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?
  • Speaking of the Rays, fresh Rays vaportecture! I’m sticking with my comment from yesterday: Glad to see the Rays acknowledge that even after a future stadium is built, fans still won’t buy jerseys with player names because they know they’ll be sold off as soon as they reach arbitration.
  • 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.
  • Just in time for the Super Bowl (what time does it start again?), here’s a Top 40 list of things the NFL demands from Super Bowl host cities. It’s impossible to pick just one favorite, but equally impossible to beat “three championship-level 18-hole golf courses and two top-quality bowling alleys, free of charge.”
  • Plans to build an Indy Eleven a soccer stadium for a new MLS team on Indianapolis’s former heliport are on hold because something about not rewarding a city that “continues to thumb its nose” at ICE; the FAA will soon be weighing in on the matter.
  • 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.)
  • And finally on the Rays front, Frank Nockels of Land O’ Lakes, Florida asks: “If we pay for half of the Rays’ new stadium, can we get free tickets?” Ian Betteridge has some bad news, Frank.
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Could FIFA really move the 2026 World Cup out of the U.S.?

access_time personNeil deMause

Ever since the Donald Trump administration started ordering immigration officers to abduct people who don’t look like Donald Trump and the Supreme Court said “cool, cool,” questions have been raised about how it was going to work for the U.S. to co-host the men’s soccer World Cup this summer. With U.S. travel bans in place against several nations that made the tournament, on top of the risk fans from other countries would face of being grabbed by death squads and thrown into a waiting van, there was talk that maybe even FIFA would have second thoughts about the propriety of holding a major international sporting event in the U.S. — though also, you know, FIFA.

Now that the death squads are getting more deathy, though, the talk has suddenly grown louder:

A few caveats here: The “German soccer official” is the president of the German soccer club St. Pauli, which is famously activist and may not represent the rest of the nation’s soccer hierarchy. Blatter, formerly the face of FIFA, was ousted in disgrace in 2015 and has been vocal in criticizing the organization he once headed ever since. The UK bill to demand that the World Cup be moved out of the U.S. only has 26 sponsors out of 650 members of parliament, and in any case wouldn’t be binding on FIFA.

And yet! Headlines like “Calls for a Boycott of the World Cup Grow” were not what either the U.S. or FIFA anticipated when the 2026 World Cup was assigned to a combined bid from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and the possibility of tons of fans being either prevented from attending, too frightened to go to the U.S., or pissed off enough at Trump to stay home in protest has to have FIFA officials at least having second thoughts. And there’s a relatively easy fallback option: U.S. World Cup matches could be shifted to the other two host countries, though Canada and Mexico would have trouble selling tickets for quite as exorbitant prices as the U.S. would. Shifting games out of the U.S. has to still be considered unlikely, but it’s also the kind of thing where support for a boycott could snowball quickly, once enough Sepp Blatters start saying it out loud.

And why are we talking about this here at Field of Schemes? Only because getting to host major events like the World Cup is often held out as a carrot for public funding of new or renovated stadiums, and even if that’s wildly overblown to start with — how many World Cups or Olympics or even Super Bowls is one stadium likely to host in its expected 30-years-or-less lifetime? — the promised benefits start deflating if your prize event turns into an international embarrassment. Defenders of Olympics in particular counter reports showing that host cities almost always lose money hand over fist by arguing that you can’t put a price on the value of your city appearing on the world stage, but for every Barcelona Olympics that shows the world how awesome Catalonia is (albeit at the risk of then being besieged by too many tourists), there’s a Rio de Janeiro where most of the world ends up concluding “LOLBrazil.” The U.S. may yet escape being clowned internationally this summer — Fox Sports can be counted on not to mention it on air, certainly — but it’s yet another cautionary tale about the risks of putting too many eggs in the “this will bring tourism!” basket.

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New Jersey legislature okays $300m Devils tax break just one week after it was introduced

access_time personNeil deMause

Well, that didn’t take long: Just one week after it was first revealed that the state of New Jersey was considering giving Devils owner Josh Harris $300 million in new tax breaks to pay for arena upgrades, both houses of the state legislature signed off on the money this week (49-22 in the Assembly and 33-4 in the Senate) because re-vi-tal-i-za-tion!

Supporters argued that the tax break will nourish Newark’s renaissance.

“This is not a cash check,” said bill sponsor Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex). “This is ensuring that Newark stays revitalized and becomes the cornerstone or an economic engine and development, and a source of pride.”

It is undeniably a cash check — the only question is what, if anything, New Jersey residents will get out of the deal. Assembly sponsor Eliana Pintor Marin, who represents the district with the Devils arena in it, said that if the Devils “were to pack up and leave, the economic detriment it’d cause the City of Newark — my home base in the Ironbound — would be substantial.” That’s very debatable, but more to the point, Harris hadn’t threatened to move the Devils anywhere, and has a lease in Newark through 2038, and would be hard-pressed to find another metro area the size of New York City’s if he did want to move. But, you know, details!

Moreover, from the looks of the bill language, Harris isn’t required to sign a lease extension or do anything else in exchange for the tax subsidy, so it’s not only a cash check, it’s one with no strings attached. Even if unbeloved lame-duck governor Phil Murphy signs the bill before leaving office on Tuesday, state senate appropriations committee chair Paul Sarlo said Harris will still have to negotiate final details with incoming governor Mikie Sherrill, the state Economic Development Authority, and the city of Newark, so it’s still possible that the state could put some conditions on its $300 million, but probably best not to hold your breath.

 

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Friday roundup: Trail Blazers, Lightning owners join Devils in asking states to fund their arena upgrades because reasons

access_time personNeil deMause

The way this week has gone, you can be forgiven if you just want to avoid the news entirely. If you’ve come here to be cheered up by some less depressing news … that’s never a good idea, but there are maybe some amusing bits, and nobody has gotten killed (so far), so I guess those are pluses!

Feel free to try to find the glass half full in these items:

  • The Portland Trail Blazers owners are about to ask that Oregon hand over all state income taxes paid by home and road players and staff to help fund a $600 million renovation of their 30-year-old arena. (The cost is estimated at $20 million a year, which if salaries rise enough could easily end up amounting to $600 million worth of future taxes.) The Oregonian notes: “Team employees, notably players who earn millions, have been paying into the state’s general fund for decades, dating back to the franchise’s founding in 1970. Will lawmakers have the stomach to divert those funds from essential services to rebuild an arena that is home to a team that will soon be owned by a Texas billionaire?” Then it says that “the income tax dollars the general fund would lose in this proposal will vanish anyway if the Blazers relocate,” which, no they wouldn’t, not if Portlanders spent their basketball ticket dollars elsewhere locally, which the numbers show is what would mostly happen. Securing approval of the tax money before Tom Dundon (the aforementioned billionaire) officially steps in as owner, one source told the Oregonian, “guarantees the Blazers’ future,” though they didn’t say what kind of lease extension Dundon would agree to in exchange, so it’s always possible it would only guarantee the Blazers’ future until it’s time to ask for more tax money again.
  • Hillsborough County is discussing paying for $250 million in renovations to the Tampa Bay Lightning‘s arena in exchange for a six-year lease extension until 2043, which has some Tampa Sports Authority officials worried the Buccaneers and Rays owners may make similar demands if the arena project is approved. Also that would be $41.7 million per year of lease extension, which would be close to the record for most expensive ever.
  • New Jersey’s proposed $300 million Devils arena subsidy only has a few days left of the legislative session for approval, and “some lawmakers,” per New Jersey Digest, have “raised concerns” that rushing a major tax break through in a lame-deck session with a lame-duck governor might not be the best of ideas. Not that state legislatures don’t do it all the time, but not the best of ideas does check out if you’re a fan of transparency and due diligence and all the other democracy things that are out of fashion right now.
  • Kansas officials want to make clear that the state could still build a Kansas City Royals stadium, just not with STAR bonds since the deadline for those expired at the end of 2025, so they’re just for the Chiefs and for Barbie/Hot Wheels theme parks. And the state doesn’t really have many other good revenue sources, says house speaker Dan Hawkins: “It would be tough to use those and develop enough money to really support a stadium, and so, I just can’t see that happening.”
  • The Ohio judge who issued a 14-day temporary restraining order against the use of unclaimed private funds to pay $600 million toward a new Cleveland Browns stadium has extended it indefinitely while he hears arguments on whether to issue a permanent injunction.
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