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Friday roundup: Tampa plans for Rays keep going sideways; new stadium funding demands in Orlando, D.C.

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday to those of you who can see this through all the burning Canada! Everyone stay safe, mask up, and stay indoors to read the latest sports subsidy news, only most of which this week involves Florida men:

  • Hillsborough County Commission chair Ken Hagan said Wednesday that if the Tampa city council won’t go along with contributing tax money to a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium, maybe the county will just go ahead without them. Hagan did not go on to describe where he would find $180 million to replace the city’s planned contribution. Rather than object to being threatened with a good time, Tampa council chair Alan Clendenin warned his recalcitrant colleagues, “Unfortunately, there’ll be a cost of the city not having participated in the process.” He didn’t say what kind of cost he meant, but he gave his word that it was the case, and that’s good enough with old Clenny.
  • The chances of convincing Tampa elected officials to spend public dollars on a Rays stadium, meanwhile, could plummet if Florida voters adopt sweeping property tax cuts in November, which would decimate local budgets. On the bright side — sort of — that would at least make any property tax exemption for the Rays stadium project worth less, since there would be less in property taxes to exempt, though it still would leave Tampa in the same budget hole for the project.
  • And finally, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred also chimed in on the Rays stadium situation, saying at the All-Star Game, “Every delay just makes it more difficult to hit a timetable of when the stadium is going to open,” which, yes, that’s how time works. Maybe Manfred would like to impose a pitch clock on stadium talks?
  • The group of wannabe Orlando MLB expansion team owners say they have more than $2 billion in place combined for acquiring a team and building a stadium, and with MLB’s expansion fee expected to be more than $2 billion, they’re asking the state of Florida to kick in $975 million in tourist tax dollars toward a stadium. The prospective ownership group said this would 100% be worth it, as a new team in Orlando would generate $73 trillion dollars in new economic activity in the first week alone (or something like that, I didn’t write down the actual number, mine is equally likely to be accurate). It also raises the question of whether Orlando is really a move threat for the Rays if it would require state money too, meaning state officials would really be bidding against themselves.
  • Some rich people in Nashville would like an MLB expansion team too, but city officials there say that’ll only work if they can privately fund a stadium, good luck with that.
  • The Chicago city council, as expected, approved spending $425 million in property tax proceeds on roads and public plazas and stuff surrounding a new downtown Chicago Fire stadium. Alderman Anthony Beale called the project “what exactly TIF is supposed to be used for,” adding, “When you look at the jobs that are going to be created by this, when you look at the revenue that’s going to be brought into the city by this project, the restaurants, the parking, the ticket sales and all the things that go along with that, that’s how we make our economy grow.” Beale did not explain how moving the Fire from one part of Chicago to another was going to create all this new revenue — or, for that matter, how encouraging construction of new housing in one part of Chicago rather than another — but surely he knows what he’s talking about, no reason not to trust him just bceause he once attended a fundraiser in his honor held by the taxicab industry the week before before voting to water down taxicab regulations.
  • Washington, D.C. council chair Phil Mendelson has proposed spending $300 million in city money on expanding D.C. United‘s stadium to 28,000 seats and building a roof on it, with the team owners on the hook for the other $320 million. In exchange, the district would receive “stadium-generated revenues and economic activity,” which is to say no actual money, just “maybe it’ll host some more concerts and not everyone buying tickets would have been spending their money elsewhere in D.C. anyway.”
  • The city of Portland broke the stalemate in Portland Trail Blazers arena talks yesterday, sending team owner Tom Dundon a draft term sheet that doesn’t include rent payments but does include payments in lieu of property taxes starting at $3 million a year and escalating over time. This came after NBA commissioner Adam Silver griped that Dundon’s plan to get $600 million in public money for arena renovations while putting in nothing of his own money “seems to have gone off track,” then refused to promise that the Blazers would stay in Portland even if the $600 million was approved — which seems to be a violation of Extortion 101, but maybe you do catch more flies with vinegar than honey, who knew?
  • Cleveland’s Gateway Economic Development Corp. just got a $52 million bill for projected repair needs for the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, and doesn’t have $52 million to pay it with. Surely nobody could have seen that coming when the city agreed to cover the teams’ future capital expenses as long as they played there! Live and learn, or in Cleveland’s case, just live.
  • More World Cup economic impact data points: Some businesses in Atlanta are doing well, others are not; Arlington businesses are only doing well if they sell tourists on Texas-y things like barbecue or access to cattle drives; New York’s bars made out better during the event than its hotels; bars in England are doing great, too, despite England not actually hosting any games; downtown Seattle got an extra 3 million visitors on World Cup hosting days, but the Downtown Seattle Association didn’t release figures on whether the rest of Seattle got fewer visitors than normal on those days; and Miami and Los Angeles and Arlington should all see massive economic impact, report news sites (mostly former news site CBS) that only cite FIFA’s numbers.
  • Economist Geoff Propheter decided to get into the vaportecture game with AI designs for a new Blazers arena, and after some online kibitzing it ended up here, 10/10, no notes.
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Friday roundup: Manfred’s funny Rays poll numbers, Chiefs sales tax fight, MLS wants even more Big O money

access_time personNeil deMause

You probably noticed, but it’s Friday! Which brings us, with no further ado, to the rest of the week’s news:

  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has said that he’s “hopeful” that a Tampa Bay Rays stadium in Tampa will win final approval, given that “we think the polling runs about 60-40 in favor of the stadium.” Actual polling shows that residents would like a new stadium in the abstract by a 58-29% margin, but oppose the Rays’ funding scheme by 59-34%; congrats to Manfred, I guess, on figuring out how to dispense with the actual asking-people-questions business and pioneer vibe polling.
  • Meanwhile, the Tampa Sports Authority has issued a letter saying the Buccaneers should get first dibs over the Rays on any available public stadium money, which isn’t going to make any easier the already difficult road to approval of the couple billion dollars in stadium subsidies Rays owner Patrick Zalupski is seeking from the city, county, and state.
  • People in Wyandotte County is worried that the state of Kansas may try to bigfoot it into expanding its STAR district to redirect more county sales taxes to a Chiefs stadium; in other news, Wyandotte County included a poison pill in the STAR district legislation that if the state tries to expand it, the county automatically rescinds it. It looks like at the very least the county would have to go back and revote on a larger tax district, at which point hopefully residents would re-up their concerns like whether siphoning off more county sales taxes could force the county to, say, raise property taxes to make up for any resulting budget gap.
  • The province of Quebec is already spending $870 million (Canadian) to put a new roof on Montreal’s Olympic Stadium because it’s too big to tear down, but MLS commissioner Don Garber wants even more public money to make it a “best-in-class experience” for CF Montréal. The MLS team mostly doesn’t play at the Big O — it occupies the 18-year-old open-air Stade Saputo for all but big matches like the home opener and playoff games — but may need to more once MLS switches to a fall-to-spring schedule next year, plus Garber says the smaller stadium is “an MLS 1.0 stadium” and the team needs “an MLS 3.0 stadium.” Why any of this is Quebec’s problem to solve, Garber didn’t say, beyond insisting that CF Montréal’s owners are committed to staying in town but need to “have a best-in-class facility to be able to drive revenue,” hint hint.
  • Records obtained by Crain’s Chicago Business show that Bears attorneys called or met six times with their city counterparts in April, even as team officials insisted that remaining in Chicago was off the table by then. The team says these calls were all about their current lease at Soldier Field; a city source told Crain’s their lawyers wouldn’t have taken six calls on that. This all matters because Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is still holding out hope for keeping the Bears in Chicago while team execs insist they won’t consider it — if nothing else, it’s going to make for an even more complicated decision by team owner George McCaskey in coming weeks about whether to pull the trigger on a move to Indiana or keep pushing for public funding for a stadium somewhere in Illinois.
  • The start of the men’s World Cup is only a week away, and already fans are excited to maybe have to cross a picket line if they want to go to games or at least dodge flaming naked mannequins and certainly not be allowed to bring in water bottles during the peak of North American summer! It’s not great! At least a member of the L.A. Host Committee has described the deal U.S. cities got from FIFA as a “very tough, one-sided agreement,” and … oh, he means one-sided that way. Welp.
  • “Portland’s own study said the Moda Center needed $500M in repairs — so why are the Trail Blazers asking for more?” asks the Oregonian, and the answer appears to be that the $500 million figure was just to “maintain the building in its current configuration in good working order,” while $600 million is to conduct a “transformative renovation” that can “support the power, technology, and production demands of tomorrow’s largest concerts and events.” In exchange for which, Blazers owner Tom Dundon has agreed to extend his lease on the newly transformed arena by … oh, he hasn’t said how long, or agreed to a new lease yet at all? Welp.
  • And if even after all those bullet points you still want more stadium content for your weekend, I was interviewed this week by Heartland Labor Forum’s podcast about the Kansas City Royals stadium plans, check it out here.
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Friday roundup: Friends don’t let friends read stadium news coverage, Bears’ list of places not to move to keeps growing

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the things you learn if you read enough articles with the word “stadium” in them, as I am condemned by an ancient mummy’s curse to do, is how very many news reports are just about nothing. For every article that tells us some actual information, there are easily five to 10 that are just meant to fill pixels with something easily reportable, regardless of whether it qualifies as “news,” let alone “reporting.”

Just this week, we’ve had: MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is in favor of the Tampa stadium plan that his co-bosses the Rays owner wants and he’s “optimistic” about getting it done; a Baltimore soccer stadium is “gaining momentum,” according to a headline describing a press conference by Baltimore’s mayor, who didn’t actually even say that; Denver Broncos president says team leaders are “laser-focused” on building the tax-subsidy-funded stadium in a rail yard they already said they want; the Broncos president says actually the rail yard is only the “preferred” site and team execs are still considering other options; Minnesota Timberwolves co-owner A-Rod says a new arena is a “necessity” for the 6th-in-the-Western-Conference, $3.6-billion-valued franchise “to compete”; Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas says he’s determined to build a new Royals stadium that will create “economic development” in a way that’s “fair and transparent for our taxpayers,” no details provided.

That’s a whole lot of Important People giving press conferences in order to get their message out in the news media, which the news media is happy to oblige for them. For normal people, meanwhile, the only option is to try to get space on an op-ed page, if you can convince the op-ed editors that you should be allowed to have an opinion that diverges from that of Important People. It’s also an awful lot of reporters’ time spent on this when they could be trying to investigate all the open questions about what these stadium deals would actually entail for taxpayers and why elected officials are pushing them — but asking questions takes up valuable time that could be spent transcribing press statements. As the old journalism adage goes, “if your grandmother says she loves you, take her at her word and put it on the front page, so long as she owns a local sports team.”

Enough whining about the news media, time to attempt to do some actual reporting by, uh, seeing what’s in the news media:

  • The Chicago Bears have almost as many places now in neighboring states wanting to be their new home (without offering any money toward it) as they do in the Illinois suburbs: In addition to Gary, Indiana, there’s now Portage, Indiana, plus the entire state of Iowa. While the Bears moving to Iowa sounds like a joke and probably is, at least there’s a bill there to provide actual state tax credits toward a stadium; in Indiana, meanwhile, even the bill to create a stadium authority with no funding attached now isn’t going to move forward, Indiana legislators say, until the Bears owners first commit to moving there if it does. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and state legislative leaders might want to just bide their time and see if all the new Bears move threats evaporate just like the last round did, though it sure sounds like they’re more interested in throwing state money at the problem while the move-threat iron is hot.
  • Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Joel Glazer still wants the major stadium renovation he asked for last April before he’ll sign a five-year lease extension, and Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan has assured Glazer that the county’s plan to divert more than a billion dollars in tax money to a Rays stadium won’t get in the way of diverting money for the Bucs. In exchange for only a five-year extension, by the way, it would only take about $220 million in subsidies to break the record for priciest per-year lease extension in U.S. sports history, you can pretty much take it to the bank that that’ll be the plan.
  • On the subject of that Baltimore soccer stadium, D.C. United owners said on Thursday that they’re planning to build a 12,000-seat venue on the site of Carroll Park Golf Course, to host a minor-league MLS Next Pro franchise and a pro women’s team owned by former NBA star Carmelo Anthony. And by “planning to build” I of course mean “hoping to receive $216 million in state money to build.” One of the state lawmakers sponsoring bills to provide the cash says “the stars have aligned” now that Carmelo Anthony is on board, maybe somebody should call a local economist to see if studies have found that involving Carmelo Anthony increases economic impact? If nothing else, it would be interesting to see what they’d say if they could ever stop laughing.
  • Foxborough, Massachusetts officials say they may not issue a permit for men’s World Cup games to be played at the New England Patriots stadium in June unless someone helps cover $8 million in security costs that the town is currently faced with paying, Asked why Patriots owner Robert Kraft, whose team is worth an estimated $9 billion, couldn’t just cut a check, FIFA World Cup Boston 26 organizers said the Krafts are offering up the use of their football stadium for two months in “peak period” of the NFL offseason, what do you want from them, blood?
  • The Center Square is a libertarian-leaning news site that has generally been pretty skeptical of stadium subsidies, so for it to run the headline “Seahawks’ Super Bowl win temporarily jolts local Seattle economy” is pretty notable — or would be if the gist of the actual article weren’t “U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims Seattle will benefit from the Seahawks winning the Super Bowl, economist Victor Matheson says one study found a short-term bump in per-capita income from Super Bowl-winning cities but it may have just been a spurious finding because ‘when you test 100 different things, even if all those things are random, one of them is going to end up being the best.'” At least the Center Square called an actual economist, unlike those corporate stooges at Al Jazeera in their article on how the Super Bowl will be a windfall for the San Francisco Bay Area despite the 49ers not being in the game and also economists consistently saying no it won’t be.
  • If Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam can’t get money to build roads and pedestrian bridges around his new Brook Park stadium from the state of Ohio, he’ll ask for $25 million from the federal government instead, there’s got to be someone to stick with the bill that isn’t named Jimmy.
  • Also in K.C. Mayor Quinton Lucas news, marginally more newsworthy edition: The mayor wants to cut spending on everything except a Royals stadium and more cops.
  • Plans for an Indianapolis MLS stadium have gone from on hold to pretty much dead, according to Indiana legislative leaders, though in stadium deals just like in comic books, only Uncle Ben ever stays dead for good.
  • The Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas Athletics just applied for another billion dollars in building permits for their planned Vegas stadium, everyone gets that applying for a permit doesn’t mean you’re actually committing to spend the money on the project, right? Maybe requiring personal seat licenses to buy some A’s tickets in Vegas will help raise the needed funds to employ the permits, anything is possible.
  • Nope, nobody got back to me from Wyandotte County about how their Kansas City Chiefs stadium subsidy numbers were arrived at, I’ll just assume it was the traditional “dart board and add lots of zeroes” algorithm.
  • If you have time to kill next Thursday at 3 pm Eastern/noon Pacific, tune in to Alissa Walker’s Torched Talk with me and Chris Tyler from Strategic Actions for a Just Economy on whether it’s worth it to Los Angeles to host the 2028 Olympics, and what the city could do to try to extricate itself if it’s not. Zoom link is here, calendar it now, see you then!
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MLB has lockout and more revenue sharing on deck; what will it mean for the stadium game?

access_time personNeil deMause

For the purposes of this site, I’ve been mostly ignoring the coming end to MLB’s union contract (and expected lockout) following the 2026 season, in part because it’s a bit tangential to Field of Schemes’ coverage area and in part because it’s just too damn depressing to think about how I’m going to spend my time next spring. (Watch the MLS transition season? Shoot me now.) Money stuff is money stuff, though, and as Marc Normandin pointed out in his newsletter yesterday, team owners’ stadium revenue strategies are affecting how they’re thinking about revenue sharing with players:

I believe there are owners who genuinely want a [salary] cap. I also believe there are owners who have not fully considered what having a cap would mean for them, in terms of having to argue with the MLBPA again and again about what actually constitutes baseball revenue. To go back to the WNBA again for a second, there has been a salary cap in place there for ages, and now that the players are in a position where they have more bargaining power, the two sides are arguing about what should count as revenue toward revenue sharing. There is much more money involved in MLB’s side, and just as significant of a grift — hello, baseball stadiums that are also real estate bonanzas of “non-baseball” revenue.

That’s a bit in the weeds if you don’t regularly follow sports CBA negotiations, but rather than me try to explain it, let me get Normandin to do so, since he’s the expert. Hey, Marc, get over here a minute!

Can you explain, briefly if that’s possible, what the pros and cons of a salary cap are for baseball owners?

MN: The pros are pretty simple. Owners will say that a cap would level the playing field, even though the parity of MLB is no worse and in some cases better than that of capped leagues, but the actual reason for one is to slow or outright inhibit spending. And with it, the expectation of spending to compete. It maybe wasn’t noticed enough in the negotiating for the existing CBA, but the owners offered a salary floor of $100M and a cap of $180M attached to it before dropping the subject.

My guess as to the low floor and ceiling there is less “this is the cap the owners expect to institute” and more checking the temperature on the Players Association in general. It’s either that or the owners don’t understand how a salary cap is actually calculated, based on revenue, which is where the con lies. The books are never opened for a reason, and MLB teams insisting that real estate revenue made at a baseball stadium isn’t baseball revenue is another reason to keep them closed. Having to open the books and argue about what is or isn’t revenue would take longer than the rest of bargaining combined, and it’s not even clear if the owners would agree with each other, never mind the players, about what constitutes baseball revenue.

So do you have a sense whether team owners have been hot for “non-baseball” revenue from mixed-use districts like the Atlanta Braves‘ Battery because that revenue is easier to hide from players (and other owners)? Or do they just want them because they’re free money, but then it becomes a reason to keep the books closed? (Also, wondering if you know how this works for, say, the NFL, which both has a salary cap based on total team revenue and is equally gung-ho about turning stadiums into real estate deals.)

MN: Being able to hide it is a plus, but that there’s simply more of it is a win, too. Get a city/county/state to pay for the land and the stadium, build a mall there financed with the kind of low-interest loans a billionaire can take out, profit. It’s a great deal for everyone involved besides the taxpayers, as you know!

The NFL breaks things into three sections (league media, postseason/NFL ventures, local) with the percentages going into sharing varying for each. Concerts held at NFL stadiums don’t count towards local revenue, though, so I imagine the league has successfully argued itself out of counting real estate around stadiums as football revenue.

Of course, the NFLPA hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory over the years, so “well the NFL does it this way” might not be a convincing argument in the MLBPA’s eyes.

Do any of these revenue-sharing machinations have anything to do with teams like the Pirates and A’s signing actual players to actual contracts all of a sudden? I know they have a reason to try to avoid grievances for cashing their revenue-sharing checks and never spending them, but this seems like more than the token efforts of the past where they’d sign a guy or two with plans to trade them come July.

MN: My read on this uptick in activity — from two organizations that literally could not be threatened into spending by the PA for years — is that they know it’s likely revenue-sharing is going to see an increase in the near future, via the next CBA. Which is not a move that requires a cap, either, as the existence of revenue-sharing in the present reminds.

But like in the late-90s and early aughts, the newer (or just more successful) streams of revenue some teams have access to and others do not in the same quantities means a rebalancing is in order. Bud Selig had to convince George Steinbrenner to agree to a system The Boss felt was socialist, but he got there. Rob Manfred probably has it a lot easier since the system is already in place and just needs redefining by nationalizing, as it were, local revenue streams to the same degree that the NFL has to eliminate some portion of the advantage that the Dodgers et al have. While (at least in theory) inspiring teams like the Pirates and A’s to spend their newfound funds, too. The Dodgers and Yankees and so on aren’t agreeing to a new system where they cut checks to teams that won’t use them, so this is teams showing they can be trusted with very large bags of money they otherwise won’t have access to.

So this gets us back to the central contradiction of revenue sharing of any kind: It makes it easier for small market teams to compete with big market teams if they want — but any leveling of the playing field also means that teams can be a lot more footloose, because it doesn’t matter if they play in Green Bay if they still get a cut of those national checks. Obviously we don’t know how revenue sharing will look exactly under a new CBA, but do you see a real possibility of a kind of NFLization of MLB, where market size doesn’t matter as much either for competitiveness or for relocations?

Or to put it way more simply: Does any of this make it more likely that the A’s will move to Las Vegas?

MN: Someone would still have to foot the Vegas stadium bill, and it sure doesn’t seem like it will be John Fisher. But hey, MLB already waived the relocation fee for the A’s, maybe they will let him off the hook with the stadium costs, too.

You bring up a good point related to that, which is that this opens up the possibility for some new markets that previously had limitations, which in turn would mean expansion is finally on the table again and the expansion fees that come with it, never mind the larger shared revenue pools that can come with additional broadcasting deals, gates, merch sales, etc. Revenue-sharing getting a huge revision would impact so much on its own, which is another reason the cap talk just doesn’t seem realistic to me. Not when there is a solution that wouldn’t endanger 2027, or the broadcasting negotiations of 2028, and requires full player buy-in, too.

Thanks! Still more reasons to dread next spring, just what I needed!

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Hillsborough County considers raiding infrastructure fund to give $1.15B to Rays

access_time personNeil deMause

With the Hillsborough County Commission set to meet to discuss plans for a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium yesterday, on Tuesday Rob Manfred showed up in Tampa to meet with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and generally do Rob Manfred things. “Baseball belongs in Tampa Bay. Baseball can succeed in Tampa Bay,” DeSantis told reporters, while Manfred took on the more difficult jobs of trying to impose a sense of urgency in a stadium battle that’s been going on for decades, saying, “We’re at a point in the history of the club that something needs to get done.” DeSantis also said that he would be “looking to help” fund new Hillsborough College buildings on one portion of its Dale Mabry campus with state money, so the rest of the site can be handed over to the Rays.

As for how the public’s expected $1.15 billion share of the $2.3 billion stadium would be paid for, DeSantis didn’t breathe a word. So when the county commission sat down to discuss the plan yesterday, they had some questions. In particular, commissioners wondered if it would be kosher to use money from the county Community Investment Tax — a half-cent sales tax surcharge first approved back in 1996 — for a Rays stadium, given that when the CIT was renewed in 2024 two years before its initially planned expiration, it was designated “to fund infrastructure for transportation and public works, public safety, public facilities, public utilities and public schools” and the commission specifically promised that it wouldn’t be used for new sports facilities:

“We promised everyone on the public record that the CIT numbers would be ineligible,” [Commissioner Joshua] Wostal said. “We have not even began to collect that tax, and here is a suggestion that we already deceive the taxpayers that we made a promise to no less than two years ago.”

Commissioner Chris Boles echoed the concern.

“When voters approved the CIT, the discussion language primarily focused on maintaining the existing facilities, strengthening public safety and supporting core infrastructure,” said Boles, who was not on the board at the time. “And that, I believe, intent still matters today.”

Both Wostal and Boles stressed that they still might vote for a stadium deal, and indeed the commission voted unanimously to move ahead with negotiations with Rays ownership. But with Commissioner Ken Hagan already declaring that “this agreement does not happen without the CIT,” it looks like the first negotiations will be among county commissioners about whether it’s okay for a county without a ton of tax revenue streams to scrounge up $1.15 billion by first raiding the infrastructure and schools budget.

The Tampa Sports Authority, meanwhile, also met this week to discuss the Rays plans, and revealed that it will eventually release two, let’s call them “reports”, by their favorite consultants Skanska and AECOM — one on whether the $2.3 billion stadium will actually cost $2.3 billion, the other reviewing the Rays’ own economic projections for the project. (The AECOM report is expected to be ready by April 1, the Skanska one will be sometime later.) Board member Andy Scaglione also asked if anyone had appraised the value of the Dale Mabry campus (nope) and how much money was available in hotel tax funds for tourism spending that could go toward a stadium ($11-12 million, which won’t go far toward that $1.15 billion nut).

There’s still a lot to be worked out here, in other words, and while there’s no real deadline, presumably Rays owner Patrick Zalupski wants to get everything settled while his pal/$250,000 campaign PAC donation recipient DeSantis is still in his last year in office. Resolving a decades-old stadium demand by having a county with limited tax resources fund the biggest MLB subsidy in history will be no easy needle to thread, but you can bet that everyone involved is busy warming up their needle-threading fingers.

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Stop the presses: Rays stadium site search continues to search for stadium site

access_time personNeil deMause

Baseball’s winter meetings are on this week in Orlando, which means lots of opportunities for reporters to hobnob with team execs and fill column inches with whatever comes out of their mouths. So you probably could have predicted that Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times, who has made an art form of this or at least a job description, would be on hand, in this case giving Rays co-owner Ken Babby 13 full paragraphs to explain that the ownership group’s plans for a new stadium by 2029 are making progress, even if not in any particularly definable way:

“We are exploring sites. We are meeting with architects. We are meeting with public officials,” Babby told the Tampa Bay Times at Major League Baseball’s winter meetings. “We are conducting a lot of analysis on how you go about building a development in a ballpark that meet the criteria that we talked about (including a plot of at least 100 acres). We’re visiting a lot of other parks, a lot of other stadiums, understanding what’s possible with different structures.”…

“We discussed what we thought a construct of a public-private partnership could look like. And have really enjoyed our conversations with folks both in the city and the county, both sides of the bay. We’ve been really focused on building those relationships.”…

“We believe that to build a state-of-the-art development, it’s going to require at least that kind of acreage [that the Atlanta Braves got for their Battery project] and it’s also going to require a great public-private partnership. We’re going to do our part. We’re not out there looking for anything that’s unfair or unjust. We want to build something that is truly a win for the community. And that’s building a district, building a community, driving jobs, creating billions of dollars of economic impact.”

That’s a lot of positivity — building relationships! a win for the community! — but no details at all, beyond that the Rays owners are considering sites throughout the Tampa Bay area (which we knew) and are “fully focused on opening a new ballpark in April of 2029” but know that’s “an ambitious timeline.” Even the requirement that any stadium site come with enough space for a Battery-style development came with a hedge: “While it’s not the only site and dynamic that we love, it’s certainly been a wonderful blueprint.”

All of which is fine and to be expected: When a friendly reporter sticks a microphone in front of you and presses record, it’s a team owner’s job to natter on about how much momentum their proposed stadium project has, even if it doesn’t have a site or any money identified to pay for it. It’s a bigger question whether Topkin is doing his job by letting Babby say all this stuff unchallenged — the only other quotes in the story are from MLB commissioner Rob Manfred — but now that the Times is letting other reporters actually report the news, it’s a bit less egregious.

The bigger problem here is letting team owners set the news agenda in the first place. Yes, the Rays’ lease at Tropicana Field runs out after the 2028 season (originally 2027, but it got automatically extended after a hurricane blew the roof off and sent the Rays to a minor-league stadium in Tampa for a year), but as we’ve seen before, leases can be extended — and in fact, St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch has already expressed an interest in doing so for the Rays, saying “the bones of the Trop are super strong, so once we get the electronics and the roof done, the Rays could be there for a decade.” So there’s no real urgency here, especially when it’s not at all clear that a new stadium itself would do much for the Rays’ finances — a new stadium with a pile of public subsidies might, but then the problem you’re solving isn’t so much “Where can the Rays play?” as “How can the Rays owners increase their profits via taxpayer money?” For that, you might want to talk to some taxpayers, or at least some of their elected representatives, but none of those seemed to be hanging around the baseball Winter Meetings, so you’ll just have to guess what they think of all this, sorry!

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Friday roundup: Everybody needs a soccer stadium for a pillow

access_time personNeil deMause

Soccer! All the kids today are digging it! It’s the future! And also the past! Your city is nothing without a genuine, bona-fide, electrified, 10,000-seat soccer stadium, which is why Mesa is creating a “theme park district” to kick tax money back to a soccer stadium district that nobody wanted to give to the Arizona Coyotes but this is soccer, and Oklahoma City is spending $121 million on one so that Oklahomans can raise their fists to support of not nearly enough players spread out over way too much of the pitch, and MLS commissioner Don Garber says Vancouver had better give the Whitecaps a “better lease” or it’ll be “untenable” if you know what he means, and the co-chair of the Congressional Soccer Caucus — of course there’s a Congressional Soccer Caucus, get with the times, bruh — wants to allocate $50 million in federal tax money for cities to use for transit programs during big events like the (soccer) World Cup and the Olympics (one event: soccer)! Soccer!

There are only a limited number of soccer teams, though (a number that is thought to exceed the number of Planck volumes in the observable universe), so some cities still must, sadly, spend public money on pro teams in other sports instead. Not that elected officials are sad, they seem downright psyched:

  • The Columbus Blue Jackets have gone from thinking about maybe asking for public arena renovation money from the state now that the Browns and Bengals are getting it to receiving $200 million in state money plus $25 million each from the city and county, all in the course of less than five months. “I think this is an incredibly important community asset, and we have an opportunity to advance this …. and ensure the future of the facility for the next 30 years,” arena authority director Ken Paul said; if you think the Blue Jackets owners are going to wait 30 years for their next grab at the brass subsidy ring, you can place your prop bet at the arena’s gambling kiosks.
  • Cleveland Browns fans are not psyched about having to pay personal seat license fees for tickets at the new Browns stadium. Many say they’ll give up their season tickets before paying for PSLs, and yeah, that’s what Bills fans said too, and now the Bills PSLs have almost sold out, though to be fair things may be different once Browns fans realize that buying Browns tickets obligates them to actually watch Browns games.
  • YouTube channel entrepreneur (?) Ashkan Karbasfrooshan says he has a plan for bringing the Expos back to Montreal, and “money is not the constraint.” Rather, doing so “requires capital, political alignment, real estate vision, a winning outlook, patience, and a lot of humility.” Note to Karbasfrooshan: “Capital” is another word for “money.” (You can look up “humility” while you have your dictionary open.) Rob Manfred did say recently that he might like a second Canadian team, but reportedly he meant Vancouver and not Montreal, if baseball is even going to expand at all, maybe Karbasfrooshan meant that money is not the only constraint, that tracks.
  • The Philadelphia 76ers and Flyers owners are still planning on building a new arena … maybe? They’re not saying anything publicly about any moves to get legislative approval, what on earth could they be waiting fo — “[Governor’s office spokesperson Kayla Anderson] didn’t address questions regarding the state’s role in the project and whether incentives or tax breaks will be involved,” oh I see, never mind then.
  • The Tampa Bay Rays‘ Tropicana Field is starting to look more like itself again, which is, to be clear, to be taken as a good thing. The brown and white alternating roof panels are expected to be all bleached white by the sun by opening day, at least, so it will still look like the dome that Rays fans have come to know and, I’m going to go with “love.”
  • No disrespect to sports barons, but they still can’t hold a candle to Amazon when it comes to wielding monopoly power to get rich at someone else’s expense. This week: Forcing school systems to use dynamic pricing solely so Amazon can charge the public more for supplies, presumably only because the infinity gauntlet is no longer available.
  • The Athletics of Nowhere In Particular have opened a new Las Vegas “interactive space” (read: room) where fans can view a scale model of their planned stadium, plus also enter an “Immersive Cube” (read: room with lots of video screens on the walls) where they can view what it will look like from the inside, if it’s ever finished, and it will be, team execs swear. Early reviews on social media from fans who probably didn’t get personally immersed are that the design is “garbage” and an “abomination” and “the f*** is this ugly thing?” Me, I’m wondering how the A’s architects managed such a distant upper deck at a stadium with only 33,000 seats, plus whether at the real stadium everyone who enters will have to remove their shoes like in the simulation.
  • Sad, soft caves for indoor sportsmen, check.
  • Ex-AEG/Oak View Group stadium developer Tim Leiweke won’t be going to jail for bid rigging after all — no, not because he’s necessarily not guilty, the other reason this happens these days.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen is getting his stadium-side casino, saw that coming.
  • The 2026 Winter Olympics hockey arena in Milan is running behind schedule and has the wrong rink dimensions for international standards. Defector doesn’t report whether this will lead to it going over budget, but c’mon, you know how this movie ends.
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Friday roundup: Denver mayor says he’ll fight to the death to give George Lucas’s wife $170m for a soccer stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

I had a birthday this week, and nothing says “Yes, you’ve been writing this blog since you were 32 years old and you’re apparently going to have to keep at it well into old age, you got a problem with that?” than becoming a Field of Schemes supporter! There are both one-time and recurring payment options, many of which give you the chance to get one of just ten remaining copies of this Vaportecture art print before they’re gone forever, so act now!

Or just keep on reading and commenting, honestly, that at least makes me feel like this entire project has been worth something, even if the central problem it has detailed shows no sign of slowing down. I remain inspired by the Straight Dope‘s tagline “Fighting Ignorance Since 1973 (It’s Taking Longer Than We Thought),” though the fact that the Straight Dope stopped publishing in 2018 without declaring victory over ignorance is sobering, admittedly.

Anyway, onward!

  • Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has heard the NWSL expansion Denver Summit owners’ threat to pursue a “parallel path” in unspecified neighboring cities at the same time as trying to win over a city council not crazy about handing them maybe $170 million in cash and tax breaks, and he knows just how to respond: by offering to do whatever it takes to get Summit co-owner (and Broncos co-owner, and wife of billionaire George Lucas) Mellody Hobson to build in his city. “Over my dead body will I let the Broncos stadium leave Denver,” said Johnston on Wednesday. “Over my dead body am I going to let the Summit stadium leave Denver. We want that site to be here.” Noooooo, that’s not at all how you haggle, you’re doing it all wrong! It remains to be seen whether the Denver city council will take up Johnston on his “dead body” offer.
  • Residents of Kansas’s Johnson County are “seething” over the possibility of the Kansas City Royals building a stadium there, according to the Kansas City Star, though the Star also reports that a poll found 53% of residents support the idea and 40% oppose it. But also 40% of respondents said the Royals should stay put at Kauffman Stadium vs. 26% who wanted them to move to Kansas, a good seethe is so hard to find these days.
  • How did New York Mets owner Steve Cohen take his plans to build a casino next to his stadium from distant longshot to likely winner? One part, two local anti-casino activists write in the New York Daily News, involved hiring two community board members (one now the councilmember-elect for the district) as consultants, while also holding fundraisers for the local state assemblymember. The main reason for Cohen’s success may still be that the state senator who was his main opponent also turned out to be the most disliked person in Albany, but throwing money around to local officials couldn’t have hurt, either.
  • Buffalo Bills fans appear to have given up and bought the hated personal seat licenses required to get tickets at the new publicly funded stadium scheduled to open next year, with nearly 90% of the PSLs reportedly having sold. All of the $250 million in proceeds so far will go toward paying Bills owner and superyacht captain Terry Pegula’s $1 billion in stadium expenses, none of it toward paying New York state and Erie County taxpayers’ $1 billion in stadium expenses, because standard business practice something something.
  • It’s still not clear where Athletics owner John Fisher will find the $1.4 billion he needs to build an entire ballpark in Las Vegas, but he’s certainly building something: Construction crews started pouring concrete for the lower deck this week. There’s been no word when he’ll hit the $100 million spending mark that will allow him to access $380 million in public money, let alone what he’ll do once that money runs out as well, but if nothing else Fisher is committing to the bit.
  • The owners of Sacramento Republic F.C. have only just started building their new soccer stadium, and they’re already seeking permission to expand it from 12,000 to 20,000 seats, just in case they ever want to.
  • Asked how new Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski is doing at coming up with plans for a new stadium, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred somehow managed to say, “With respect to the go-forward issue, Patrick and his group are hard at work getting the lay of the land in the Tampa Bay region to find out what their options are.” Language is always evolving, and Manfred is truly an inspiration in breaking new ground about where it will go in the future, or as he would say, the go-forward time.
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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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Zalupski completes Rays purchase, now has to figure out which city to shake down for stadium money

access_time personNeil deMause

The sale of the Tampa Bay Rays to Patrick Zalupski and friends for $1.7 billion is now official, and the Tampa Bay Times is on it! Here’s what their three staff writers on the story are reporting:

With no official plan for a new stadium and Tropicana Field still under repair, the new owners have big questions to answer.

Well, yes, though Tropicana Field is set to no longer be under repair by next spring, so that’s less a big question than “Can they find someone willing to build them a stadium, and would whatever subsidy it came with be enough to make it worth spending a pile of their own money moving from one part of Tampa Bay to another?”

“This is exciting for the Tampa Bay area,” Pinellas County Commission chairperson Brian Scott said Monday. “It opens up exciting new possibilities for the future of baseball.”

No idea what that is supposed to mean, other than “We sure are glad to see the back of that guy.”

“There’s an awful lot of opportunity for them if we can find the right home and the right deal for the team and the city,” said Tampa City Council chairperson and Tampa Sports Authority board member Alan Clendenin.

Likewise, though Clendenin being from the Tampa side of the bay means this could have the added subtext of “Sure would love to have the Rays in Hillsborough County, not that there’s much public money available to make that happen.”

The sale of the team also includes the Tampa Bay Rowdies, a United Soccer League franchise. The professional soccer team plays at Al Lang Stadium in St. Petersburg. It’s unclear whether the Rowdies would stay at their waterfront home or move wherever the team goes.

“Rowdies May or May Not Join Rays in Stadium That Isn’t Planned Yet” would have been a hilarious headline, and I am sad to see the Times chose not to run with that one.

Zalupski and his group of buyers are purchasing a team without a permanent home.

Can anyone truly be said to have a permanent home? Yes, the Rays’ lease expires after 2028 (moved back a year after the hurricane damage made Tropicana Field unplayable for 2025), but every team’s lease expires eventually, at which point the options are always the same: extend it or move somewhere else. Zalupski is in the same boat that Stu Sternberg was the last decade or so, really: He has a stadium to play in, but no one loves it much, but also a new stadium would come with most of the same problems as the old one unless someone can figure out how to build a stadium that doesn’t get overly hot or rained on all the time and is in the exact middle of the bay. And for a price that would earn Zalupski more profits, so no fair proposing this.

Depending on the timeline for a new stadium, the owners may seek a short-term lease extension at Tropicana Field.

Given that it’s September 2025, and it takes close to three years to get a stadium built after it’s planned, and nothing is being planned right now, that “may” seems to be an understatement if anything. Surely Zalupski is going to want to leave the lease expiration hanging to push local governments to offer new stadium deals, but it’s hanging over his head too, perhaps even more so since he’d be the one with nowhere to play if it runs out too soon. A set of year-to-year extension options would be nice for him, but if St. Pete officials are smart they would drive a hard bargain before offering those, since it would reduce their leverage and get them absolutely nothing in exchange.

“They’re going to have to build and make relationships and contacts with people throughout the region to decide what’s the best place for the ballpark in order to make the Rays successful over the long haul,” [MLB Commissioner Rob] Manfred said at a Front Office Sports summit in New York.

As usual, Manfred wins the prize for using the most words to say the least, which comes down to “They need to figure stuff out soon.” Though he does manage to do the standard commissioner thing of making the decision seem like “The team owner needs to decide where to put a new stadium” rather than “The team owner needs to figure out how much a new stadium would cost him and if it would be worth it,” which is the actual calculus at work, but which is less useful for creating a bidding war among different governmental bodies.

The article then helps out making site selection seem like the main hurdle by launching into a list of possible sites, including Tampa’s Ybor Harbor (currently targeted for a women’s soccer stadium but that could change), the Dale Mabry Campus of Hillsborough College, WestShore Plaza, the Florida State Fairgrounds, the former Tampa Greyhound track in Sulphur Springs, or somewhere in Orlando, according to Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan, though he may have just been using it to try to light a fire under his fellow Hillsborough elected officials:

“If for any reason we’re unable to get over the finish line, then the team may ultimately be in Orlando,” he said this month. “It’s Tampa’s to lose.”

Sure must be nice to be a billionaire and to have local elected officials levying move threats against their own cities and counties on your behalf! You don’t even have to pay them except maybe for some free tickets, it’s the best.

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