Friday roundup: Moreno re-ups Angels lease, plus sports leaders mumbling incoherently

So this happened:

That’s it, I’m done, I can’t top that. RIP comedy (???? – 2025 AD), reality has finally become too absurd even to laugh at.

If anyone still cares about the rest of the news, here’s some:

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Judge okays moving ahead on Spurs arena deal that could cost $500m+ in tax money

One sports stadium patsy leaves, one enters: Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai, who last month declared that he would put a hold on any public referendum on using taxpayer money for a new San Antonio Spurs arena until somebody figured out how much it would cost, now says ah, hell with it, let’s get this show on the road:

The Commissioners Court voted 4-1 Tuesday to allow Sakai to negotiate a memorandum of understanding with the city of San Antonio and the Spurs that would create a framework for them to discuss holding a future venue tax election.

“This is just a starting point to collaboratively assess, explore and evaluate,” Sakai said. “There is no deal. There is no agreement.”

No, it’s not an agreement, but an MOU would be an agreement, so an agreement is very much what Sakai is now working on. The San Antonio Express-News reports that an arena deal could include two piles of tax money: county hotel taxes and county car rental taxes, which would be worth $397 million if the county hotel tas remains at its current 1.75% or $449 million if it’s raised to 2%. The newspaper neglected to indicate if those numbers are present value or cumulative over many years, and if so how many years. (RIP, editors, you had a good run.)

So let’s try to do some quick calculations: The county hotel tax amounted to $21.3 million in revenue in 2023, while the car rental tax was $12.2 million. Extend that out over 30 years, and you could pay off about $500 million in arena costs by siphoning off the taxes to pay for a new arena rather than keeping them to spend on other public needs — and likely more than that if hotel and car rental spending increases over time.

But wait!

Sakai and other county officials emphasized they also have a responsibility to maintain the Frost Bank Center and Freeman Coliseum, which are estimated to need at least $100 million worth of upgrades and help improve the surrounding area.

The tax has been used in the past for projects like San Antonio River improvements, performing arts and amateur sports facilities.

“That pool of money is the pool of money you have to do all of those things,” [Bexar County Manager David] Smith said.

Presumably all of that pool of money has until now been used to do other things, so really any money spent on an arena would come at the cost of not doing other stuff. It would be nice to have a list of where that money is going currently, but again, this is 2025 journalism we’re dealing with here, we need to temper our expectations.

All of this would still need voter approval in November, because Sakai missed the deadline for a spring referendum by waiting until now. At least that gives San Antonio residents nine months to ask some pointed questions — local journalists can start things off if they want, but I’m not exactly holding my breath.

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St. Pete mayor to Sternberg: Take the stadium deal we approved, or get offa my lawn

If you were going to place a bet on which elected official would be most likely to play hardball with the local sports team owner, you almost certainly would not have chosen St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch. This is a guy who on his election in 2022 promptly offered Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg $600 million despite Sternberg being out of stadium alternatives, then worked that up to a cool billion. If anything, Welch fit the mold of the get-things-done-no-matter-the-cost mayor, which is a great way to get things done at tremendous cost.

And yet, there Welch was yesterday, in his state of the city address, telling Sternberg that while he’d like to go ahead with the stadium deal they negotiated last summer, if the Rays owner can’t live up to his end of things, there’s a door with his butt’s name on it:

“We will not pursue the deal at any cost,” Welch told those assembled at the Palladium theater. “The greatness and future of St. Pete does not depend solely on this deal, and I am confident that we have given this endeavor our very best effort. It’s an effort and a process we can all be proud of.”…

Asked if Welch would consider new terms with the Rays, he said it was a “painstaking process” to get to the agreements in hand. For the Rays to now say the deal doesn’t make sense, “I think it would undermine any efforts moving forward,” Welch said.

Before anyone gets too excited, Welch is still committed to his billion-dollar stadium subsidy plan, if Sternberg chooses to accept it. (And he didn’t entirely rule out giving the Rays some kind of sweetener on top of the existing deal.) But Sternberg has been hemming and hawing on that — mostly recently mumbling, “We have to make a decision,” yeah, no duh — seemingly in hopes of extracting even more money from taxpayers. And Welch’s response yesterday was, at least: Cool, cool, walk away and then we get back full development rights to the stadium land, that works for us.

Is it possible that Welch is just reading the room, realizing that his city council is never going to approve more stadium cash for a team owner who’s being a dick about it, and deciding to get out in front of things by drawing a hard line at “one billion dollars, and not a penny more”? Absolutely. But that’s still more backbone than he’s shown before, and if nothing else is an indication that political pressure can get politicians to move, at least a little.

What happens next is entirely in Sternberg’s hands. Sports economist and Simpsons meme master J.C. Bradbury declared yesterday that “This deal is cooked, unless Sternberg is willing to crawl back through the supplicants door”; I’m less sure of that, unless Sternberg hates eating crow so much that he’d pass up a billion-dollar check in order to save face. It does mean he’ll have to back down and agree to swallow the “significantly higher costs” he says he now faces thanks to delays in stadium construction — delays initially caused by a hurricane, and now being extended entirely because Sternberg himself hasn’t been willing to sign the paperwork. I know a lot of people believe that the Rays owner secretly wants to walk away from the deal he himself spent the better part of a decade extracting from local officials, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense — or at least, would be incredibly short-sighted, but I suppose we’ve gotten plenty of reminders recently that sports team owners aren’t immune to that.

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Ohio Gov. DeWine wants to create a $2B+ stadium slush fund for Browns, Bengals

Ever since the Cleveland Browns owners let slip that they were looking for $1.2 billion in public money to help pay for a $2.4 billion domed stadium in suburban Brook Park, there’s been speculation about whether and how Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine would propose to come up with a pile of state cash. Yesterday, DeWine dropped one hell of an other shoe, proposing a new Sports Facilities Construction and Sports Education Fund that would collect between $130 million and $180 million per year to be used for stadium construction, specifically naming the Browns and Cincinnati Bengals owners as beneficiaries:

DeWine on Monday proposed creating a new stadium and youth sports education fund with money generated by doubling the state’s tax on sports gambling from 20% to 40%…

DeWine said the gambling revenues would be controlled by a newly created Sports Facilities Construction and Sports Education Fund, whose members would be appointed by the governor’s office and the legislature. He said fund proceeds could be used either on stadiums used by major or minor-league professional sports teams, or sports education. To illustrate what he meant by youth sports education, DeWine offered the example of helping needy families afford sports-related expenses that might otherwise prevent them from participating.

Oh, isn’t that nice, needy families, I’m glad they’re getting something ’cause they have a hell of a time! DeWine did not specify how the fund’s DeWine-appointed managers would determine how much to spend on each of its two disparate missions, though it’s hard to see the state of Ohio finding $180 million a year worth of family sports-related expenses to cover.

It’s still a bit uncertain how much money could be raised by doubling the state’s sports gambling tax, since no one knows how much sports gambling will take place in the future, especially once it’s saddled with a 40% tax. But if DeWine’s estimate of $130-180 million a year in tax revenues is correct, that would be enough to cover debt service on between $2 billion and $2.8 billion of stadium expenses — and potentially more than that if tax revenues rise over time. That would be enough to cover the public funding asks of both the Browns and Bengals owners, and likely leave room for more largesse in the future to other Ohio sports teams, who you know would be lining up once they heard about the DeWine handouts. [UPDATE ALREADY: The Columbus Blue Jackets have entered the chat.]

The governor focused his announcement on all the reasons why hiking the sports gambling tax is a good idea — “These sports gaming companies … they’re getting Ohioans to lose massive amounts of money every year” — while skipping past the bit about who he’s hoping to give the proceeds to. In fact, DeWine portrayed a proposal to dedicate more than $2 billion in tax money to pro sports team owners as a way to save taxpayers money:

“This proposal that I have outlined has the added benefit of no longer will we have to, at any time in the future, go to the people of the state of Ohio and say, your tax dollars will go for this stadium or that stadium,” DeWine said.

I’m sorry, that is incorrect, but we have some lovely parting gifts. Or rather, DeWine is part right: He would no longer have to go to the people of Ohio to say “we want your tax dollars to go for this or that stadium,” but only because he would have created his own slush fund so he would no longer have to ask.

In any dedicated tax funding scheme like this one, it’s important to remember that there are actually two decisions at work: One on which taxes to tap for the money, and the other on where to spend the proceeds. There’s nothing stopping the Ohio legislature right now from doubling the sports gambling tax and spending it on education, or spending it on roads, or just putting it in the general fund and letting future legislators decide what the state most needs at the time. Once the 20% gambling tax hike is dedicated to stadiums, though, that money is gone and can’t be tapped for any other public needs. And that’s assuming the gambling tax revenue even comes in at the rate you hope for: As Minnesota found out to its chagrin with its Vikings stadium funding deal, sometimes the gamblers don’t show up right away, and you have to tap other state funds to cover your budget hole.

All this is merely a proposal at this point, and has to be approved by the Ohio state legislature, some of whose members represent Cleveland and will be none too pleased to hear about the governor hoping to use state tax money to help Jimmy and Dee Haslam move the Browns outside city limits. (Though they’re Democrats and the state legislature is Republican-controlled, so that may not matter so much.) While we wait on word of state legislators’ response, we do have a reply from Browns COO Dave Jenkins, which comes down to thanks, but we like our tax kickback scheme better:

“We appreciate Governor DeWine’s commitment to looking at creative ways to solve sports facilities development while positively impacting youth sports throughout Ohio. … At the same time, we continue to work with the appropriate stakeholders and other experienced experts to develop alternative funding mechanisms for an enclosed Huntington Bank Field in Brook Park, knowing the importance of not tapping into existing taxpayer funds that go to other pressing community needs. The model we’ve proposed on the state level would leverage only the incremental tax revenues from within the development itself to enable the project.”

Everybody’s tax kickback scheme is really a way to save taxpayers money, apparently! Funny how that happens.

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Friday roundup: Hamilton County hires guy who negotiated Rays deal for St. Pete to help with Bengals talks, this should go just great

This has been a week, but it seems they all are these days. One glint of hope on the horizon: The second annual Sports Economics Conference has been scheduled for the University of Maryland, Baltimore County for April, which means I get to hang out with some of the smartest (and funniest) minds studying stadiums and other aspects of the sports business world, and you get more liveblogs like this.

Until then, the regular weekly news will have to suffice. Let’s open up the ol’ news bag and see what — oh dear oh dear, best to get started right away:

  • I have advocated before for local government to hire professional help in their negotiations with sports team owners over stadium construction and leases, so it’s potentially welcome news that Hamilton County, Ohio has hired David Abrams of Inner Circle Sports to help with its talks with Cincinnati Bengals execs — “potentially” because until now I had never heard of Abrams, or Inner Circle Sports, so it’s hard to say whether he’ll be bringing inside knowledge of how the opposite side of the table operates or just feed them the league line that pouring lots of public money into private projects is good, actually. I do see that Inner Circle was paid $1.25 million to work for St. Petersburg and Pinellas County on their stadium deal with the Tampa Bay Rays, and that couldn’t have turned out worse for the public despite the Rays owner having zero leverage, so maybe let’s hold our applause until we see the results here.
  • A Boston city council vote to block the demolition of White Stadium so it can undergo a $200 million rebuild, $100 million of which would be paid for by the city, mostly for the benefit of BOS Nation F.C., fell one vote short Wednesday when councilor Liz Breadon didn’t show up to the meeting, leaving the council deadlocked at 6-6. One of the “roughly three dozen” people who showed up to protest the stadium plan yesterday called the tie vote a “huge win,” which isn’t really how huge wins work; there’s still a lawsuit in progress that could block the plan, but it’s unclear if it will be heard in time to halt the demolition, which if it progresses would take off the table a cheaper rehab of the existing structure just for high school sports, as opponents are hoping for.
  • Speaking of the NWSL, Denver is getting a franchise! And a new stadium, maybe, the expansion team’s owners say they’re planning one, more details about things like cost and public cost later, don’t worry your pretty heads.
  • The first phase of renovation work on the Milwaukee Brewers‘ stadium that’s costing taxpayers close to $500 million has been approved, and it will include such things as a $10 million “public gathering space,” because there just aren’t enough places to publicly gather at a baseball game. There’s also plans for a future vote to spend $25 million on winterizing the stadium so concerts can be held there in the winter — something that would work a lot better if not for the fact that, as Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson points out, big stadium concert tours take place pretty much exclusively in the summer. See why I’m looking forward to this Baltimore conference? (Side note to newbies: Once you’ve read this site for long enough, you’ll recognize that for the sick burn that it is.)
  • New York Gov. Kathy Hochul watched the start of the Buffalo Bills‘ playoff loss at a Bills sports bar in Albany, because of course she did, and the Times is on it! “I am just going to bury my head in my hands for eight hours straight,” one fan said afterwards, presumably at the game result, but there are lots of other good ways to intepret that.
  • Season tickets to Salt Lake Bees games will jump from $9-18 to $17-47 when the team moves into its new stadium this year, thanks in large part to the team’s stadium capacity going from 15,400 to 8,000, and much of that being made up of luxury sections that can only be purchased on a season basis:
    (Salt Lake Bees) Daybreak Field suite layout.
    Truly, we are not far from that glorious future where sporting events will only have one seat, and it will be sold to the highest bidder.
  • I recently recorded an episode of the great Conversations With Sports Fans podcast, and if you want to hear me talk in great detail about being a New York Mets fan, as well as a sports fan in general in this current era, click that link back earlier in this sentence, you know the one.
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Top AZ lawmakers propose $300m tax kickback to D-Backs to pay for stadium upgrades

It was hinted at earlier this month, and now the legislation has officially landed: A bipartisan group of Arizona state legislators has proposed funding renovations to the Diamondbacks‘ Chase Field by adding up all the sales and income taxes collected at the stadium and handing them back over to the team:

It calls for collecting the sales tax revenue from all purchases and transactions at the stadium and income tax paid by people who work there, including the team’s players.

Those taxpayer dollars would go toward stadium improvements, instead of funding state and local government services as they do now. At the state level, those tax revenues fund education, health care for low-income residents, prisons and other programs.

D-Backs CEO Derrick Hall stressed that this plan, which was devised by team execs before being introduced by Republican state rep Jeff Weninger, “avoids any new taxes,” which is only true if Arizona either doesn’t bother to fill in the resulting funding gaps for schools, etc., or finds some other way of producing money out of thin air. Cutting the D-Backs a check in the same amount as the check they would pay in state and local sales and income taxes has a kind of Casino Night logic to it, but to quote myself two weeks ago: No, no, no, no, no. That is not how taxes work at all.

As to how much money Weninger and his legislative pals — 12 state reps and 7 state senators, including house speaker pro tem Neal Carter and majority leader Michael Carbone, plus senate president pro tem Thomas Shope, majority leader Janae Shamp, minority caucus chair Lela Alston, and assistant minority leader Flavio Bravo — hope to generate with this sleight of hand, team execs project $15-20 million a year, which would be enough to pay off maybe $230-300 million in renovation costs. That’s a fair bit more than I estimated two weeks ago, when, after some initial math stumbles, I arrived at an estimate of just $2.7 million to $5.6 million a year in sales tax receipts; the final bill rolls in team income tax kickbacks as well, though, and it’s possible I underestimated total team sales, so maybe.

Three hundred million dollars is a sizable chunk of change, even if it pales in comparison to some other recent baseball renovation subsidies. But it’s needed in order to cover … what was it Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick needs again?

“I’m a businessman who understands basic economics,” [Weninger] said. “There’s hundreds of millions of dollars in maintenance and repairs and upgrades that need to be done. And it’s not their building. So to me, this was improving a public asset while also preserving all the massive amounts of sales tax and hotel stays in and around the stadium.”

Yeah, it’s not their building only because they got the county to pay for it, then got the county to hold on to the deed so the team wouldn’t have to pay property taxes. In all other meaningful terms  — collecting all the revenues from it, including naming rights — it is 100% Kendrick’s building, but he would only be putting in half the cost of an estimated $600 million in upgrades, while reaping all the revenues.

The full state legislature still needs to hold hearings and vote on this, as presumably do the city of Phoenix and Maricopa County, since their taxes would be getting kicked back to the D-Backs as well. There’s no timetable for all that just yet, though the Arizona Republic stressed that “the clock is ticking” — the team’s lease expires in 2027, not that there’s anything stopping Kendrick from signing an extension if he has to, and not that he has any other real options to move to if he doesn’t. But, yes, clocks tick, that’s how they do, well observed, Republic.

Meanwhile, there’s still the question of what a lease extension would look like, how much if anything Kendrick would have to pay in rent for the mixed-use development he wants to build around the stadium, etc. The total subsidy could end up quite a bit more than $300 million — or less, if Arizona lawmakers play their cards right. There’s a first time for everything!

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Sternberg: I shall decide on Rays stadium by March 31, based on dunno really

Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg has opened his mouth again, this time to admit that the ball’s in his court to decide whether to commit to his end of a proposed stadium deal by March 31, or else the city of St. Petersburg can walk away from it. And he will absolutely make that decision, which is his, by means of something, he just doesn’t know what yet:

“We’ll decide how we want to proceed at that point, well before that point,” said Sternberg, who on Monday attended Suncoast Tiger Bay’s State of the Bay event at the Vinoy Golf Club. “We have to make a decision, so we’ll have something by then.”

Asked what would help drive that decision, Sternberg said he didn’t know. “I’ll make sure our organization does what’s necessary to meet whatever conditions we need to meet,” he said.

Well, that’s clear as Lena Blackburne rubbing mud! St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch said at the same event that he has met with Sternberg and that there’s “another issue that we need to work through,” but told reporters they would have to ask Sternberg what it was; Sternberg, in turn, deflected all questions, including how much more money he wants to receive from the city in compensation for the “significantly higher costs” he says he faces thanks to the start of the stadium work being delayed until the April deadline that he himself agreed to last July.

If that last sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, there is a fuckton here that makes no sense. The two most reasonable explanations for Sternberg’s continued foot-dragging are:

  1. The Rays owner wants to back out of the deal, but if he declares that he’s backing out, then he doesn’t get to keep development rights to the Tropicana Field land, so he’s hoping the city will back out first.
  2. The Rays owner wants to go ahead with the deal, but also wants to sweeten the pot for himself if possible, and keeping St. Pete officials on tenterhooks until March is his only leverage to get additional city money.

Neither of these is what you would call a good plan: The first would require city officials to score a phenomenal own goal by failing to realize they could just run out the clock; the second would require them to ladle on more public cash out of fear the Rays owner will walk away from the $1 billion already approved. If I had to put my money on one or the other, Door #2 seems the most likely: Sternberg’s I know we need to make a decision but I just can’t deciiiiiiiide pairs best with the international hand gesture for moar money pleeze, and Welch’s indication that he’s open to “working through” issues other than “take the deal we gave you, already” suggests that Sternberg might be able to get it.

Either way, it’s some dicey gamesmanship — to make this whole gambit worth his while, Sternberg will have to end up with more additional public cash than he’s losing by twiddling his thumbs until March and delaying a stadium opening by another couple of months. You can’t get if you don’t ask, though, and Sternberg probably figures he stumbled into his first billion-dollar public check despite having no leverage, maybe lightning will strike twice? He, and we, may have to wait until the final seconds before the clock runs out on March 31 to find out.

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3 of 3 Ohio budget watchdogs agree: Funding Browns stadium with state money is stoopid

The Statehouse News Bureau asked three budget watchdogs what they thought of the idea of spending perhaps $600 million or more in state money on a new Cleveland Browns stadium, and the headline that resulted was “Possibility of state money for new Browns stadium leaves Ohio funding experts skeptical.” Read the actual quotes, though, and you’ll see that that significantly underplays the actual story: Two conservative budget groups and one progressive one all said that this would risk throwing perhaps $600 million or more down a hole:

“We’ve taken a look at a lot of stadium proposals over the years, and we’ve never been supportive of any of them,” said Greg Lawson, a research fellow at conservative Buckeye Institute. “When you look at a lot of the literature that’s out there, the academic literature from a lot of economists, what they and almost invariably say is these don’t really end up with true benefits.”…

“Moving this outside of downtown for a project just to line the pockets of the Haslams is not really a great idea for the taxpayers to fund,” said Bailey Williams, a researcher focusing on tax policy with Policy Matters Ohio.

“You’re trying to hope for a lot of economic gains on the back or down the road. That’s really just an IOU to the taxpayers,” Williams said. “I don’t really trust that, and especially when we have other needs and issues that the state could be addressing.”…

“Stadium projects are great ideas,” said Donovan O’Neil, state director for Americans for Prosperity-Ohio. “Where the concern comes in, I think, we need to have a robust conversation around the taxpayer obligations here.”

“These are multi-million dollar businesses. The NFL is a large enterprise. The Browns franchise is a large enterprise,” O’Neil added. “We have a lot of concerns and a lot of hesitation about early conversations around taking money from the taxpayers in the state of Ohio and investing it in the new Browns Stadium.”

Lawson added that he’s also concerned about the “cascading effect” of sending a signal to other Ohio sports team owners that the state treasury is open for their business. “You do something in Cleveland, what’s the next thing to happen?” Lawson said. “Because I’m assuming that at some point Cincinnati is going to want to add something, and you got the baseball teams that are going to ask for things.”

This is one of the rare articles that doesn’t try to “balance” economists who know what they’re talking about with consultants who are paid not to, and props to Statehouse News for not doing that. Still, “skeptical” is not quite the right way to describe these three groups’ positions, and the headline also leaves out the fact that this is multiple budget analysis from across the ideological spectrum. Still, if the headline writers only had 87 characters to work with … nope, I did, you could have done it too, only partial credit for you!

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Allen Sanderson, stadium economist and sports fan, has died at 81

If Allen Sanderson, who died recently at the age of 81, will be remembered most for one thing, it will likely be a single remark: “If you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark.” That statement, which Sanderson used variations on multiple times (I first saw it in reference to a proposed Minnesota Twins stadium in 1997), ended up inspiring a movie title (as well as a Field of Schemes coffee mug) and generally encapsulated the attitude of pretty much every economist toward sports subsidies: Spending money on anything will result in some economic impact, but it’d be hard to find one with less bang for your buck than a pro sports stadium.

Sanderson should be remembered for much more than that, though: As a longtime professor at the University of Chicago — according to his faculty page, he’s taught more students there than anyone in school history — he co-wrote a ton of important studies of sports stadium economics, including three chapters in the great 1997 tome Sports, Jobs, and Taxes and more recently a study making the case for paying college athletes. And he was always happy to provide journalists and the public with plain-English explanations of economic concepts, whether about why income inequality drives higher ticket prices or the lack of an Olympics bump for cities that host the Games; his other frequent aphorisms included “There are two things you should never put on a valuable piece of property: a cemetery and a football stadium” and, with regard to claims of stadiums’ economic impact, “Take whatever number the supporters are giving you, move the decimal point one to the left, and you’re pretty close.” (Here’s a nice video of one of his talks if you want to see him in action.)

Allen was also a big sports fan, particularly of the Chicago White Sox, something he would invariably admit with chagrin. He once told me about a memorable conversation he had with a sports marketing expert to whom he was complaining about all the unnecessary noise and ad boards and attempts to sell you things that have become part of the modern live sports experience. The marketer, as Allen told it (I’m paraphrasing from memory here), replied, “We have different categories that we separate fans into, and you’re what we call a ‘traditional fan’: You go see sports just to watch the game. Let me tell you something, Allen: There aren’t that many of you.”

There definitely aren’t that many Allen Sandersons, and now we have one fewer. RIP, and thanks for all the insight and good humor that you brought to the world.

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Friday roundup: Hamilton County spends $30m on Bengals parking land, Oakland Coliseum may get second life as soccer venue

Note to reporters seeking help with your research into sports economics issues: I’m more than happy to talk with journalists from all over the political spectrum, as the great stadium swindle is, as has been discussed here time and again, one that neither Republicans nor Democrats have a monopoly on. But if you’re asking for my assistance, maybe don’t include a link to a page with a report your site did saying anti-trans legislation is about “banning males from competing on female sports teams” — if you can’t keep at least one foot on the ground of factual accuracy, what you’re doing isn’t journalism.

Speaking of factual accuracy, here’s your weekly news roundup, fact-checked as well as I can do myself while my fact-checking department is, apparently, out on a long lunch or something:

  • Hamilton County may still be negotiating a lease extension with the owners of the Cincinnati Bengals, but that hasn’t stopped the county from spending $30 million to buy a parcel of land next to the Bengals stadium to use as additional parking and green space. “The Bengals have forgiven us for our [game day] payments,” explained Hamilton County Commission president Denise Driehaus. “It’s about $30 million total. That happened to be the asking price for this property. And so, in essence, the Bengals are paying for the property, and the county owns it.” That “in essence” is doing a lot of work there: From what I can tell from this report, it was back in 2018 Bengals management first agreed to hand over the disputed game day payments, which is money the team owners wanted the county to provide to cover operational costs of holding home games, in exchange for parking — though if they were “disputed” it’s not clear that this was ever team money to begin with.
  • Remember how, just last month, the owners of the Oakland Roots and Soul soccer teams said they wanted to build a temporary stadium before maybe eventually moving to a permanent stadium at Howard Terminal? Forget all that, they were just pulling our legs, now they want to remain at the Oakland Coliseum for “a longer stay.” Guess resident opossums are only an existential threat to baseball teams, not soccer teams?
  • Your occasional reminder that when the Los Angeles Dodgers owners do renovations to their stadium, they spend their own money on it. That likely has something to do with the fact that they have some of the highest attendance numbers and highest ticket prices in baseball, so they benefit the most from upgrades — though it does raise the question of whether, if less popular teams are asking to be subsidized for renovations that won’t pay for themselves, if that’s really about needing renovations or just wanting an excuse to ask for taxpayer money.
  • Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren has upgraded from “steadfast” to “adamant” that his team will break ground on a new stadium in 2025. I do not think that word means what you think it means.
  • The St. Petersburg city council has approved funding for the repair of … Al Lang Stadium! The Tampa Bay Rowdies, who play at Al Lang, are owned by Rays owner Stu Sternberg, so at least St. Pete officials can’t be said to be holding a grudge.
  • The Super Bowl’s coming to New Orleans, everyone get ready to benefit from that cushy NFL spending that will provide … $12/hour jobs to assemble the stage for the $10 million halftime show? Well then.
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