Category: minor-league soccer

Friday roundup: Bears battle drags on, Blazers subsidy heats up, 15 teams now angling for Ohio unclaimed funds cash

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday! But because of other commitments, I’m writing this from Thursday evening! So if there’s any breaking Friday morning news, complain about it in comments, and we’ll get to it on Monday, which for me will probably be Sunday. You following all that? Doesn’t matter, just read your bullet points, they’re good for you:

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Friday roundup: Breaking down taxpayer costs of the proposed Indiana Bears deal, plus other stadium news

access_time personNeil deMause

The Indiana legislature’s amended bill for a Chicago Bears stadium project is finally up, and we can start to get a slightly better sense of what it would entail in terms of public costs. Tax expenditures would include: a city of Hammond admissions tax, Lake County and Porter County food and beverage tax surcharges, a Hammond food and beverage tax surcharge, a Lake County hotel tax surcharge, what looks like local income and sales taxes from a stadium district, and state sales taxes from a stadium district. The stadium authority would also own the stadium and lease it to the Bears (terms very much TBD), so it would presumably be exempt from property taxes.

That is a ton of moving parts, needless to say. There being no fiscal analysis attached to the bill to project how much each of these taxes will raise, it’s impossible to determine what the total public price tag would be, though something upwards of $1 billion seems likely given all the revenue streams involved. (WGN calls it $1 billion exactly, not sure where that number comes from, though Indiana house speaker Todd Huston did throw that number around as an estimate yesterday.)

The bill also says that “the stadium board is responsible for the operation and maintenance of the capital improvement upon completion of construction,” which sounds bad, and then two paragraphs later that “the authority has no responsibility to fund the ongoing maintenance and operations of the capital improvement,” which sounds good but also contradictory. (It’s possible this is just dividing up responsibilities between two state agencies, I need to keep going through the bill language to be sure; if so, it’s bad for taxpayers because it could end up a grift that keeps on giving.) Also “the stadium board will retain all revenues from operation of the capital mprovement,” which sounds very good for Indiana but also not likely something the Bears ownership would agree to if it really meant what it sounds like it does. So lots of questions still up in the air, we get another public hearing on this before the full Indiana house and senate votes next week, right? Right? Anyone?

Meanwhile, in other news this week:

  • The proposed Tampa Bay Rays stadium development at Hillsborough College’s Dale Mabry Campus would include relocating a middle school and some county offices to … somewhere, while the college’s buildings would be rebuilt in a compressed corner of the campus … somehow. The new Tampa Bay Times reporters on this story, one of whom was just promoted from intern and the other just graduated from college last summer, don’t appear to have actually asked anyone with the Rays or with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office about how this is all expected to work, sure do miss Colleen Wright’s reporting on the Rays stadium saga.
  • The Cleveland Guardians and Cavaliers would like some of that sweet state unclaimed funds money that the Browns are using for their new stadium, please, to use for upgrades to their current homes. The state can get right on that just as soon as that little matter of the restraining order against the state using the funds at all is cleared up.
  • The estimated $750 million cost of renovations to the Arizona Diamondbacks stadium — which only cost $354 million to build in the first place in 1998, about $700 million in today’s dollars — is now expected to be “much higher,” according to team CEO Derrick Hall. Hall didn’t say exactly how much higher, or whether it will all fall on the state to increase its planned $500 million cut of the costs, or when the D-backs will get around to actually signing a new lease in exchange for the renovations.
  • Athletics team execs say $300 million has now been spent on construction of John Fisher’s Las Vegas stadium and $989 million contracted for, out of a total price tag of still figuring that out. This is either the biggest bluff in sports history or the biggest dog-catching-the-car-and-having-to-figure-out-what-to-do-with-it, honestly looking forward to the inevitable cataclysmic denouement either way.
  • The waiting to see if the state of Connecticut will provide $127 million to build and MLS Next Pro soccer stadium in Bridgeport is over, and the answer is: Nope, go kick rocks. State Economic Development Commissioner Daniel O’Keefe cited the need to reduce state spending and what the Connecticut Post termed the “mercurial nature of the sports industry,” noting that the Connecticut Sun may be about to move to Houston and the Bridgeport Islanders may be about to move to Hamilton, fool me three times, shame on me. Developers plan to instead use the planned stadium site for a project involving youth sports indoor and outdoor fields, which apparently don’t require hundreds of millions of dollars of state subsidies like pro sports do.
  • The video of my interview yesterday on whether Los Angeles should try to renegotiate its 2028 Olympics hosting deal is now up at Alissa Walker’s Torched site, go check it out if you like. Chris Tyler of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, which commissioned me to do my Olympics report, joined as well, and the three of us spent a solid hour discussing what went wrong and options for trying to fix it — suffice to say that if former L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti’s ears are burning today, this is why.
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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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Friday roundup: What if schools got all the money they needed and sports teams had to hold bake sales to build stadiums?

access_time personNeil deMause

Yes, that story about nobody knowing how much the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics cost because the Olympic committee literally set fire to its financial records is incredible, and yes, I really need to make a fridge magnet about it. This is more a note to myself than to you all, feel free to skip ahead to this week’s speed-round bullet points:

  • Cleveland mayor’s office chief of staff Bradford Davy said of the Guardians and Cavaliers owners’ insistence on more public money for venue upkeep and upgrades that “we are going to have to make sure that those relationships are strong and thoughtful,” but also that “the general revenue fund cannot be held accountable” and the city needs to look for other revenue sources that wouldn’t take away from spending on basic city services. I see where this is inevitably going, just be sure to say no to soufflés.
  • Also in Cleveland news, a federal judge has declined to issue an injunction against the state of Ohio’s use of unclaimed private funds to pay $600 million toward a Browns stadium plus more for other private sports projects, but is letting a lawsuit against the spending to move forward. It’s unclear what will happen if the Browns get their state check and the state then either loses its case or has its unclaimed private fund pool drained by state residents applying to get their money back — look for other revenue sources, I guess, it’s all the rage!
  • A consultant hired by the Wisconsin Professional Baseball Park District has issued a report concluding that the Milwaukee Brewers stadium parking lots could hold $700-800 million worth of development, which if fully built out and taxed would supply $18.8 million a year in property taxes. True, the land is owned by the state stadium authority and so is tax-exempt, but maybe the district could cut a deal for payments in lieu of property taxes with some as-yet-unidentified developer, despite “environmental issues” like the parking lots being partly in a flood zone? Anyway, the Brewers’ president of business operations called it a “good first step,” that’s enough to build an entire headline around, print it!
  • Ottawa Senators owner Michael Andlauer has hired a team of lobbyists to push for public money from the federal and provincial governments for the new arena that the team has been fighting for since before their old owner died. It’s not clear exactly how much the lobbyists are asking for beyond money for “infrastructure financing and other government programs,” but the Ontario government does have an $8 billion infrastructure fund sitting right there, which you know must get Andlauer salivating. The local media is also reporting that Andlauer wants a similar deal to the one the Calgary Flames owners got in which about $300 million is coming from the province of Alberta and $537 million from the city of Calgary, but also that the Sens owner “has publicly stated that the organization will not be asking the City of Ottawa for taxpayers’ money.” Say no to soufflés, Michael!
  • Springfield is still looking at building a pro soccer stadium. Which Springfield? All of them, probably?
  • Rhode Island officials have refinanced their Pawtucket soccer stadium bonds with the terrible interest rate and somehow managed to be both paying even more this time and also having the state treasury for the first time be the backstop for bond payments. GoLocalProv reports that “the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation and the Pawtucket Redevelopment Agency have refused to comment on the new financing scheme,” and can you really blame them?
  • If you’ve been craving a supercut of the Buffalo Bills-themed Hallmark movie (horrifyingly not the first NFL-team-themed Hallmark movie) only containing the parts where the male romantic lead talks about how great the new Bills stadium is, Defector has got you covered.
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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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Detroit’s own clown documents show taxpayers losing $39m on $45m soccer stadium subsidy

access_time personNeil deMause

After I reported here Friday about Detroit’s WXYZ-TV reporting without comment that the new Detroit City F.C. soccer stadium getting $88 million in tax breaks “is expected to generate $25 million in annual economic impact,” Kennesaw State economist J.C. Bradbury dug up the actual report making that projection, and hoo boy:

Good grief. This is the document being used to claim that the Detroit minor-league soccer stadium will generate a $25 mil economic impact *per year*. It's nothing but ridiculous assertions. Reporting this as some sort of credible assessment is negligence. detroitmigov.app.box.com/v/DCFC-CBO-R…

— J.C. Bradbury (@jcbradbury.com) 2025-11-29T14:12:14.831Z

“Report” is probably a misnomer: The document, produced by the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, is in fact a four-page slide deck, one of which is just a title screen. The remainder consists of numbers with no sourcing beyond “based on data provided by Detroit City FC and Visit Detroit,” and which assume 20 non-soccer events a year drawing 10,000 fans each. More troublingly, the projections also compare the economic impact from a stadium with the economic impact of nothing at all ever being built on the site (ignoring opportunity cost), don’t attempt to account for what spending at the stadium site might be cannibalized from elsewhere in the city (ignoring the substitution effect), and conflate present-day value with future revenue —it turns out that $25 million a year figure is actually the average over 30 years, with it starting at $18.4 million and growing over time.

The real kicker, though, is the slide posted by Bradbury, which rather than “economic impact” (money changing hands in your city) looks at “fiscal benefits,” which is how much tax money would come in as a result of a project. That projection comes to an average of $407,000 a year over the next 30 years. Even if we ignore that much of that tax revenue would be backloaded, that’s still only about $6 million worth of new taxes Detroit would bring in from the new stadium — in exchange for redirecting $45 million in taxes (the present value of $88 million over 30 years) to Detroit City F.C.’s ex-lobbyist owner.

(To distract from that sadly low tax revenue number, DEGC stuck the unrelated “annual new visitor spending” number at the bottom of that slide as well, which is some next-level misdirection, even for a clown document.)

It’s still unclear exactly what the whole $88 million would go toward: The DEGC document shows 84% of it as arriving via “brownfield TIF reimbursement” funding, but the act authorizing brownfield TIFs allows the proceeds to be used for all kinds of “infrastructure improvements,” demolition, and other things that aren’t specifically environmental cleanup. So it’s altogether possible that the soccer team owners will be able to use a large chunk of that $45 million worth of tax kickbacks on building, if not their stadium proper, amenities for their stadium, in exchange for contributing just $6 million in new taxes — and that’s the best-case scenario, according to the team’s own rosy projections. Good grief, indeed.

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Friday roundup: This Is So Dumb edition

access_time personNeil deMause

For U.S. Thanksgiving week, let’s take a moment to give thanks for the continuing gift of having lots of stupid to laugh and point at. We are truly in the golden age of laughing and pointing, which is … good? Better than nothing? All that separates us from spiraling into despair?

Whichever, this was a very good week for stupid, please enjoy a heaping helping:

  • Detroit City F.C. is set to get $88 million in property tax breaks for its planned $193 million stadium after the Detroit city council voted to give it the green light. “The stadium is expected to generate $25 million in annual economic impact for the area,” reports WXYZ-TV, no source given or needed, nobody would just make up a number like that, right?
  • The Dallas News has explored how cities in the Dallas area could spend money on a new Stars arena, and came up with “grants” and “loans” and “tax breaks,” that’s pretty much the way cities spend money, yes. Possible sources of the funding include pulling funding from regional mass transit and giving it to the Stars, or tax increment financing, or borrowing the money and paying it off by some means undisclosed in the article. At least economist Nola Agha shows up to give her evaluation of some of the possible options — TIFs, she notes, are “popular because [they’re] relatively hidden, meaning the taxpayers don’t have to know that a city is using property tax and giving it back to a developer,” which is really as much indictment as endorsement.
  • The Chicago Architecture Center assembling a team of “business executives, civic leaders, urban planners, architects and others” to spend three months seeing how stadiums can be a “Win/Win” is pretty dumb given that the premise assumes there’s a way to do so. For the resulting report to then conclude that “instead of treating stadiums as
    standalone facilities requiring public support, we propose thinking about them as anchors for thriving neighborhoods” without establishing whether stadiums are good anchors for thriving neighborhoods — they’re not — is, well, you know.
  • New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is looking to spend $200 million on Albany “revitalization” with part of that going toward a $75 million minor-league soccer stadium, but nobody’s saying how much. “I don’t understand the secrecy,” said a former staffer for the state’s Empire State Development agency who is trying to research the soccer project. “I think it would be good to have a public discussion about this.” So far the local development authority, Capitalize Albany, has responded by repeatedly denying Freedom of Information requests for information, with a spokesperson adding that “we expect there to be many opportunities for public input” once officials decide what they tell the public they can have input on.
  • Denver held a public event to see what residents think of plans for a new Broncos stadium (projected public cost: at least $140 million and likely a lot more) as expressed entirely through colored stickers and Post-It notes, because that’s just how democracy goes now.
  • The owners of the Union Omaha USL League One team can’t build a new 6,500-seat soccer stadium until they get kickbacks of state sales tax money that are being “bottlenecked” by Gov. Jim Pillen, that sounds awfully judgy, Nebraska Examiner. Pillen did get to say that he sees his job as to “look out for ALL taxpayers, not give subsidies to lobbyist and politician-supported special projects which could not move forward without them,” but Omaha Mayor John Ewing says spending tax money on a soccer stadium would be “great,” surely not just because it would be state tax money that wouldn’t affect his city budget.
  • Hamilton, Ontario’s arena just got a $300 million renovation, conducted by operators Oak View Group but aided by an unspecified amount of tax breaks, but the truly dumb part is the CBC headline that specifies the rehabbed arena’s opening concert as being by “Beatles, Wings artist Paul McCartney,” just in case readers weren’t sure which Paul McCartney they meant.
  • The prize for the dumbest headline of the week, though, has to go to Secret Los Angeles for its “California’s SoFi Stadium Is The Fifth Most Iconic Stadium To Host The 2026 World Cup.” That’s meaningless enough, but add in that the “iconic status” scores were compiled by a ticket broker using factors from capacity to measuring “each stadium’s roof using Google Earth to get a Golden Ratio score,” and we have a winner! Please select the trophy of your choosing.
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Friday roundup: Rays plan return to upgraded Trop, soccer stadiums in every city not working out so well

access_time personNeil deMause

This was a light posting week, as I was traveling and the airline mayhem as the result of the government shutdown … didn’t actually affect me at all, my flight was uneventful and actually landed ahead of schedule. The cab ride from the airport hit a lot of traffic, though!

Stadium and arena news was light as well, presumably everyone was distracted by one scandal or another, but there’s still plenty to chew on:

  • The Tampa Bay Rays confirmed that they’ll return to Tropicana Field next spring after roof repairs are done, along with “an expanded main videoboard, new video displays behind home plate and along both foul poles, a new sound system and updated suite interiors.” The city is, as required in the team’s lease, paying for $59.7 million in repairs ($7.65 million has been covered by insurance); the team owners are paying for upgrades, though they haven’t revealed how much they’re spending, and determining things like whether replacing the interior of a flooded luxury suite with a nicer interior is a repair or an upgrade could get dicey, hopefully someone either in city government or in the local media is keeping an eye on that, please?
  • “Can Soccer Stadiums Revitalize American Cities?” asks the New York Times, with the big reveal being: Nope. “Mixed-use development components, particularly ones that include housing, are often delayed or, to date, are incomplete,” reports the Times. “And those projects, experts say, don’t always bring in the revenue and economic activity that are promised.” Ian Betteridge is shocked, shocked.
  • The owner of the Des Moines Menace is seeking state money for a $95 million soccer stadium for that minor-league USL team as well as a yet-to-be-created women’s pro soccer team, and the Des Moines Register is asking if it will revitalize Des Moines like soccer stadiums have other cities, guess they couldn’t get past the Times paywall. (Psst, use archive.ph.)
  • The Los Angeles City Council officially voted to oppose the Dodger Stadium gondola project, with one councilmember calling it “an insult to our communities, and the process has been an insult to our collective intelligence,” yup, that tracks. The ultimate decision is up to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which wrapped up its public comment period on the proposal yesterday.
  • The Philadelphia 76ers arena plan for the edge of Chinatown is dead, but the controversy over how the site will be “revitalized” lives on, with Sixers owner Josh Harris planning to start demolitions soon and neighborhood advocates saying that’s only “going to make the situation worse with no real guarantees that it will get better.” But blight is good for getting development projects approved, so it could end up being better for Harris, why doesn’t anyone ever think of the poor little rich boy?
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Friday roundup: Royals “poll” fans on why they need a new stadium, plus still more soccer teams, so many soccer teams

access_time personNeil deMause

I’m posting this week’s roundup from the road, so apologies if any news slipped through the cracks, and I’ll try to catch up with it next week. But at least I’m not shutting down my site to take a full-time editing job: While I’m very happy for Tom Scocca’s bank balance and health coverage, he’s one of the best writers and most astute political analysts in an increasingly threadbare media landscape, and his writing at Indignity and elsewhere will be sorely missed.

In happier news … hahaha, what am I saying, most of this news is dismal as always. But anyway in LOLdemocracy news:

  • Kansas City Royals officials are surveying selected fans about their thoughts on three potential stadium locations — Downtown/Near Downtown, Clay County/North Kansas City and Johnson County/Overland Park — some of which surely is meant to serve as a push poll, given that it only includes one positive option about the team’s current home (“Kauffman Stadium is still a great place to watch a game; There is no reason for the Royals to leave”) and two negative ones (“Kauffman Stadium is past its prime and needs to be replaced by a modern ballpark that is surrounded by an entertainment district with shops, restaurants and bars” and “I love the ‘K’, but it lacks the amenities of modern ballparks and our region would be better served with a brand-new ballpark in a different part of town”). And while surely team owner John Sherman will use the actual responses in some way, you know that his main concern is who he can extricate the most public money from — and by naming three potential locations, he also creates leverage to get the most public money from whichever site he or fans might prefer otherwise, so really win-win-win for him!
  • Raleigh may be asked to build a new stadium for the NC Courage and North Carolina F.C. (currently about to go on hiatus before jumping to the USL’s new top tier intended to compete with MLS) soccer teams, and Green Bay may build a stadium for new minor-league soccer teams, and Rancho Cordova may get tax incentives to help build a $175 million arena for an indoor soccer team, hands up everyone who knows where Rancho Cordova is or that the U.S. has an indoor soccer league! In any event, everybody still gets a soccer team, cities really don’t have to rush to pay for stadiums to get one, you have to beat them away with sticks at this point.
  • Tampa Bay Business and Wealth (?) headline: “The data is in: Mixed-use stadiums win big for cities and fans.” Actual report (?) by consultants JLL (“We believe in the power of real estate to shape a better world”) linked to in the article: “Attendance trends from the 2025 MLB regular season show that stadiums in Lifestyle Market ecosystems drive elevated attendance, even when team performance is poor” (mostly based on the success of the Atlanta Braves, who drew well in 2025 despite sucking largely because people still  bought tickets thinking the entire starting rotation wasn’t going to get injured) and “By 2040, we predict that at least half of MLB organizations will announce plans to develop a new stadium or perform a major redevelopment of their existing venue” this seems to be more winning big for team owners than for fans or cities, you know?
  • MLS commissioner Don Garber is headed to Vancouver to complain that the Whitecaps don’t get first dibs on dates for playoff games and have to share food and beverage revenue with their government landlords, can you imagine the nerve of those Canadians?
  • On Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb’s proposal for a sales tax surcharge district to fund Guardians and Cavaliers upgrades, Cleveland.com reports that “on Reddit, users on r/cleveland and r/cavs were largely united around the same message: billionaire team owners should pay for their own stadiums. They rejected the idea that beers or hotdogs should cost more,” while “on Facebook, the reaction was more skeptical — and often sarcastic.”
  • We already knew that the Baltimore Ravens were working on a nearly-half-billion-dollar renovation funded mostly by tax dollars, but “The Ravens are investing an additional $55 million for the improvements, with the stadium authority set to reimburse the team up to $35 million of that amount” is a new twist, not to mention a new definition of “investing.”
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Friday roundup: Bears offer Illinois dimes on the dollar toward stadium, Browns considering $150k-a-seat PSLs

access_time personNeil deMause

Apologies for this week’s late roundup — I had to retrieve my now-repaired laptop from the shop and get settled back in before writing this. On the bright side (for you, the information-craving consumer of sports subsidy news, surely not for me, the lowly scribe of such reports), even more stuff happened while I was at the store, so you get to enjoy bonus material as a result!

  • The Chicago Bears owners responded to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s demand that before getting any state help with a new stadium, the team must pay off the state’s $350-500 million in remaining debt on Soldier Field: How about $25 million instead? The response from legislators has been mostly LOLBears: State Rep. Kam Buckner called the offer “inadequate” and “disrespectful,” while Pritzker deadpanned, “I’m not sure what it’s tied to, what they’re asking for in return for it. I think if they’re donating $25 million to support the people of Chicago or the people of Illinois, that’s always a good thing.”
  • Did the Cleveland Browns owners forget to mention that as part of their new stadium in Brook Park, they’re considering charging personal seat license fees of as much as $149,300? Must have slipped their mind, along with how much of those fees would apply to the Haslams’ share of stadium costs and how much to the public’s $600 million and up cost. (Pretty sure the answers are “all” and “none,” respectively, since that’s how it always works.)
  • Also on the Browns front, the Crain’s Cleveland Business editorial board writes that Mayor Justin Bibb’s proposed deal to get $80 million worth of payments in exchange for letting the team move to Brook Park “leaves a bit of a bitter taste” but may be the best Cleveland can get given that “team owners hold the leverage in an environment where cities are desperate to retain their teams.” Or, at least, they do when the state legislature hands out $600 million to the team to help it move from one part of the state to another. Fixed that for you!
  • The Seattle Sounders owners are seeking outside investors to buy a minority share of the team, with the proceeds possibly being used toward building a new soccer-only stadium, possibly at its Longacres training site in nearby Renton. That’s a lot of possiblys, for sure, but Sportico values the Sounders at $825 million and soccer-specific stadiums generally go for less than half that, so … possibly.
  • CT United F.C. will begin play in MLS NEXT Pro next year playing home games at venues scattered across Connecticut, while it waits for a new stadium to be built in Bridgeport — which is to say, while it waits for the state to decide to give it $127 million to build one. “On the merits of the actual math, the jobs, the housing, the economic impact and aligning with what the priorities have been stated for this administration, it aligns perfectly,” said CT United owner Andre Swanston, take his word for it, he’s just a disinterested hundred-millionaire.
  • “Will the College Football Playoff title game bring economic boost to the Tampa Bay area?” WTSP-TV actually looked at the results the last time it hosted the CFP championship in 2017, and nope: A promised $250-350 million economic impact turned out to be just $720,000 in added sales tax receipts, while hotel tax receipts actually went down. “If that were the case, why is every major city and community bidding on these major events?” asked Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan. Because you’re all idiots?
  • No, the “sky stadium” Saudi Arabia plans to build for the 2034 World Cup doesn’t look like this, it looks like this. The former is AI generated, the latter, honestly, is probably AI generated at well, but maybe AI generated on purpose by the people who actually plan to build it? With more than half of the internet now AI slop, it’s arguably bigger news when something isn’t a fake, no?
  • And finally, if you’ve worn out the entertainment value of the yule log, we now have the Athletics Las Vegas stadium construction camera. You’re welcome.
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