Category: minor-league soccer

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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Friday roundup: Stochastic parrot edition

access_time personNeil deMause

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Friday roundup: Browns stadium gets airport okay, San Antonio mayor seeks cut of Spurs’ arena revenues

access_time personNeil deMause

First things first: The Ohio Department of Transportation changed course yesterday and granted a building permit to the Cleveland Browns‘ proposed stadium in Brook Park, one month after declaring it would not do so because the stadium would “impact the airspace of the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.” What changed? An outside consultant hired by the department reported that “the proposed stadium would have no adverse effect on the safety and efficient use of the aeronautical environment,” so ODOT gave the go-ahead.

This leaves the Browns stadium facing only two lawsuits over whether the team’s move from Cleveland to Brook Park violates the state’s Modell Law (the state attorney general says nuh-uh), plus additional suits over whether it’s illegal for the state to use unclaimed property to fund the deal and whether negotiating a move violated the team’s lease, plus $600 million in proposed city and county spending that hasn’t yet been finalized. Details!

In other news this week:

  • San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones says she thinks if the city is putting up money for a new Spurs arena, taxpayers should get a cut of naming rights, concessions, and parking revenues as well. Which, sure, it worked for the Minneapolis Metrodome, so well that the public ended up recouping its entire $68 million contruction cost over time. Admittedly, the Twins and Vikings hated this deal so much that they immediately started lobbying for new stadiums where they would keep all the revenues and eventually got them, but it’s nice to see some elected officials learn the lesson that so many sports team owners live by: You can’t get if you don’t ask.
  • USL Championship expansion team Buffalo Pro Soccer is still looking for a place to build a stadium so it can actually become an expansion team. “I think we could make the decision today if we chose to,” said team president Peter Marlette, “but we want to make sure we’re getting everything right and that we are considering every possible factor and whatever site we end up going with.” The team owners have said the stadium will be privately funded, but we’ve heard that before in other cities, let’s see how things look after any hidden costs like land subsidies or tax breaks are accounted for.
  • The libertarian Mackinac Center for Public Policy is suing to repeal Michigan state funding for stadiums for the minor-league Lansing Lugnuts and the Utica Unicorns, Eastside Diamond Hoppers, Westside Woolly Mammoths, Birmingham Bloomfield Beavers of the United Shore Professional Baseball League (which all share a stadium in Utica), on the grounds that “private or local” projects require a two-thirds vote of the state legislature, and these only got a simple majority. State court of claims judge Brock Swartzle said he’ll make a ruling on an injunction by the end of the year.
  • The Philadelphia Phillies want hotel tax money from Pinellas County to upgrade their spring training facility in Clearwater, more specifics to come when they’re good and ready.
  • The Athletics‘ stay in Sacramento may not be drawing many fans, but it’s apparently drawing enough to cut into attendance at Sacramento River Cats minor-league games, especially now that resale prices on A’s tickets are cheaper in many cases than River Cats prices.
  • Sports economists Dennis Coates (who organizes the annual sports economics conference in Baltimore County) and Brad Humphreys have had a research award named in their honor, here’s a nice article about them and it, see how many of the economists in the photo at top you can identify!
  • Columbus Fury pro volleyball team seeks $1 million in cash from the city of Columbus and Franklin County to keep playing in town next season, now I have officially seen everything.
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Friday roundup: Pritzker demands Bears pay off $534m Soldier Field debt before approving stadium tax break, it’s on!

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s not that often that one news story gets a place of pride ahead of the Friday morning bullet points, but I’d say this one qualifies: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has said that before he’ll consider granting the Chicago Bears owners tax breaks on their proposed Arlington Heights stadium, he wants them to pay off the remaining $534 million debt on Soldier Field first:

“We need the Bears to pay off what’s owed on the existing stadium. That’s going to be a really important feature of whatever happens.”…

The governor noted that the state works with a lot of private businesses on property tax incentives, but when it comes to the Bears, “if they want a … bill or some other help, we’re going to make that a pre-requisite.”

On the one hand, this is kind of a dumb number to choose: As we’ve covered here before in detail, remaining stadium debt is just bookkeeping, and has more to do with how a city chose to finance a project than with the actual cost to taxpayers. On the other: Sure, hell yeah, if Bears execs are going to demand a pile of future tax breaks, come right back at them with a demand for cash up front. This is what hardball negotiations look like when you have leverage, and it’s nice to see an elected official get serious with the haggling, even if you can quibble over the details.

If the Bears owners don’t want tax breaks, noted Pritzker, they’re welcome to move wherever they like. No reply yet from team execs, but you have to imagine they’re trying to count votes to figure out how to get a Pritzker-proof majority in the state legislature, which looks like an uphill battle. Or they could, you know, build their new stadium without any public assistance at all, though the last time that option was presented to them they started shopping around for other sites in or new Chicago where they might get somebody else to help pay the bill, we could yet see this again.

Okay, enough about the Bears, let’s move on to the speed round:

  • After saying last month that his new stadium plan would require “city and state support for infrastructure and programmatic build out,” Detroit City F.C. owner Sean Mann has now put a price tag on that support: $88 million in property tax breaks toward a $193 million total project cost. (Mann previously said the stadium would pay full property taxes, but apparently had his fingers crossed behind his back at the time.) That’s $88 million for a team in the second-tier USL Championship, which is, I’m not going to say a record because that would take a lot of research to confirm on a busy morning, but I think we can all agree “a lot.”
  • How’s development around Worcester’s new Red Sox minor-league baseball stadium going, seven years after Worcester-based economist Victor Matheson warned that new housing could end up just cannibalizing development that would have happened anyway? Even worse than that, it turns out, as much of the land around the stadium remains undeveloped, and since tax revenues from that land were supposed to be siphoned off to pay off the stadium, now Worcester is having to dip into its general fund to cover those costs instead. Somebody please check in with the Worcester Chamber of Commerce to see if they still think that their project will be different.
  • Prospective Orlando MLB expansion team co-owner Rick Workman has bailed to become a minority owner of the Tampa Bay Rays, leading prospective co-owner John Morgan to bail as well, saying: “The fix is in. What I believe will now happen is this group will seek a sweetheart deal in Tampa, while stringing the prospects of Orlando as a bargaining chip. Get lots of free land and entitlements and make a real estate profit on the surrounding land at the taxpayers’ expense.” That was always the most likely scenario, especially since it seems like MLB expansion is going to put off until next decade sometime, but it’s bracing to hear a wannabe owner say the quiet part loud.
  • The Denver Post editorial board says the Broncos owners’ plans for a new stadium at Burnham Yard is “an announcement that all of Colorado can celebrate,” before noting several paragraphs later that the team hasn’t said if it will pay fair market value for state-owned land, siphon off stadium property or sales taxes, or receive any other tax subsidies. Editorial writing sounds real easy, no editors or fact-checkers telling you you’re not making any sense, just say whatever you feel like and hit publish, that’s the life!
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Friday roundup: San Antonio okays $489m arena subsidy to prove “love” for Spurs, plus: invasion of the soccer zombies

access_time personNeil deMause

First things first: As expected, the San Antonio city council voted yesterday to move ahead with plans to give $489 million in tax revenues to Spurs owner Peter Holt to use toward a new arena. The actual council action was two votes: One to reject Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones’s proposal to pause arena talks until an independent economic review could be conducted, and one to allow the city manager to “complete negotiations and execute a nonbinding Term Sheet,” notwithstanding that a term sheet already exists — it’s unclear what the city manager is authorized to negotiate going forward from here, not to mention exactly what the council has actually committed itself to given that the term sheet is nonbinding. Councilmember Edward Mungia said that “we still have the ability to get out of this deal at any point before other project deals are signed,” but didn’t specify if the council would have to vote to withdraw from the deal or still needs to vote on a binding agreement or what.

Jones, who votes as a member of the city council because San Antonio has that kind of city government, voted against the arena subsidy, as did councilmembers Teri Castillo, Ric Galvan, and Leo Castillo-Anguiano. Mungia and the “more business-friendly” councilmembers, as the San Antonio Report put it, voted in favor: Sukh Kaur, Marc Whyte, Marina Aldrete Gavito, Misty Spears, Ivalis Meza Gonzalez, and Phyllis Viagran. As Viagran explained her vote: “You either trust this team … or you don’t. I’ve heard so many people say, ‘We all love the Spurs.’ … But do you really?”

There’s still some possibility of an independent economic analysis down the road, or more hearings to see if public support for the project is still as “tepid” as it was earlier this year. (Jones is also pushing for a public referendum on the city’s spending next spring, but we’ve seen how her proposals go over with the business-friendly councilmembers.) And, of course, Bexar County voters can still throw a wrench into things in November if they vote down the ballot measure that would give Holt around $150 million worth of county tax money on top of the city funds. Regardless, in the first round of the Project Marvel arena battle, the San Antonio council has spoken, and its verdict is “Nothing says ‘I love you’ like half a billion dollars in public money so you can boost your sports team’s profits.”

Who else is loving who this week and how? Never thought you’d ask:

  • Like everyone else, I’m still trying to wrap my brain around MLB’s new set of TV deals that are supposed to be finalized soon, with Apple out and Peacock in and ESPN in on some things but out on others. As far as what it will mean for teams’ media revenues — and, by association, how footloose teams can be about moving into smaller media markets to seek more lucrative stadium deals — it sounds like teams’ cuts of media revenue won’t change much, it’ll just be that ESPN will increasingly be the ones selling the right to watch games, and they’ll be making you pay for an ESPN subscription on top of an MLB.tv subscription to do it. Only 17 years until the last World Series, get your baseball-watching in now!
  • Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula bought his $100 million superyacht in 2021, the year before he got $1 billion in state and county tax money for a new stadium, but people aren’t any less unamused at the juxtaposition. One wonders if this might even have become an issue in New York state legislative hearings on the stadium subsidy, if there had been any.
  • Manchester United seeking public money for their planned stadium project isn’t new news, but it did just get the attention of the Guardian, which called the team’s plan to seek hundreds of millions of pounds to clear land for the stadium a “sinister US tactic.” Which is fitting, given that Man U is owned by sinister Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners the Glazer family, though maybe not for much longer.
  • What would happen if a minor pro sports team — say, the Pittsburgh Riverhounds of the USL Championship — wanted to issue renderings of their proposed stadium expansion (to be “paid for with public and private funding, although details have not been provided“) but couldn’t afford the Pro version of Microsoft Stadium Wizard? We have the answer, and it is a hellscape of identical featureless soccer zombies, please enjoy your nightmares:
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Friday roundup: Reading the fine print on stadium and arena deals is a lost art

access_time personNeil deMause

A note to all of you Field of Schemes supporters who signed up to receive the daily posts in email — I’ve been made aware of a glitch that may have been keeping some new members from getting the emails. This should now be fixed, but if you think you should be receiving emails but still aren’t, please contact me; if you think you shouldn’t be receiving emails but are, then really contact me. (And if you’re not receiving emails because you haven’t become a monthly patron but would like to, just sign up!)

And with that business out of the way, let’s move on to the real excitement: the week’s leftover stadium and arena news!

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Friday roundup: K.C. area officials debate throwing more tax money at Chiefs and Royals, as does San Antonio for Spurs, etc. etc.

access_time personNeil deMause

Six posts already in the first four days of the week, and still there’s more news that didn’t make the cut? Legislative season is brutal, man — I can’t wait for it to be over so we can get back to things like wondering if St. Petersburg is going to finish fixing the Tampa Bay Rays stadium roof by next season. (Probably maybe, apparently! There’s one item off the list already!)

And on with the show:

  • Kansas City, Missouri Mayor Quinton Lucas says he thinks he could fund the rest of a Royals stadium without having to go to voters to approve a new sales tax hike, by using “a different set of tools and entities, so much like you’ve seen the discussion in Kansas” — so that would involve kicking back existing sales taxes, presumably, instead of extending a sales tax surcharge? Meanwhile, Clay County Presiding Commissioner Jerry Nolte says if the Royals choose to build a stadium there, the county might hold a vote on a sales tax hike. None of this is going to get resolved by the end of the month, the time by which Kansas’s offer of state sales tax money for Royals and Chiefs stadiums expire; the Kansas legislature could vote to extend that deadline, but it looks like Kansas officials may be tired of being the teams’ spare-tyre lover: Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins says he doesn’t want to do that: “We gave them a year to get it done, and in a year, you know, they kind of keep messing around, going back and forth, and you extend it, and that’s what they’ll do. You know, the pressure is off. Then it could take another year and come back again.”
  • Bexar County voters could be asked to cast ballots in November on a 0.25% hotel and car-rental tax hike to raise about $175 million for a new San Antonio Spurs arena. This would only be one of many public revenue streams used to pay for it, presumably — the arena is expected to cost between $1.3 billion and $1.5 billion and Spurs owner Peter Holt won’t commit to how much he would chip in, just keep those subsidies coming until Holt says “stop,” thanks.
  • A 16-page slide deck from April on proposals for a new Cincinnati Bengals stadium lease has been revealed through a public records request, and some of the items include: $308 million in county spending on stadium upgrades from an existing escrow account, in exchange for the Bengals owners extending their lease through 2031; maybe a lease extension through 2036 if the county kicks in another $300 million by 2028; the Bengals paying $1 million a year rent either for the next five years (what the team wants) or for the rest of the lease (the county’s proposal); and a Bengals request to get half the tax revenue the city of Cincinnati gets from “stadium operations” to help cover stadium maintenance. And what about the question of extending that state-of-the-art clause requiring the county to build holographic replay systems if they’re ever invented, anything? No mention of that, really? Not that it matters, as this slide deck is two months old and there’s still a ton of haggling to go, but would have been nice to at least include one slide on it, just saying.
  • The Ohio Capital Journal describes the current debate over a Cleveland Browns stadium as state legislators and Gov. Mike DeWine “disagree[ing] on how to pay for it. Gov. Mike DeWine proposed increasing the taxes on gambling and Ohio House lawmakers favored issuing state bonds,” and no, Ohio Capital Journal, “issuing bonds” is not a way to pay for something, any more than taking out a mortgage is a way to pay for a house, it’s just a way to finance something but you still have to pay for it later, go back five spaces and lose a turn to think about what you have written.
  • The Connecticut state legislative session may have ended without passage of $127 million for a minor-league soccer stadium (plus other stuff) in Bridgeport, but the legislature did pass approval for Bridgeport to set up a TIF district to redirect its own tax revenues to pay for up to $190 million in development costs. This’ll surely go just great, remember how well the Bluefish worked out? Connecticut United is set to begin play in MLS Next Pro next season, probably not Bridgeport but somewhere.
  • This week was so hectic that I never got around t0 reporting on Marc Normandin’s excellent Baseball Prospectus essay from Monday about how Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf’s agreement to sell the team somewhere between 2029 and the time the sun burns out is timed to increase the savvy negotiator‘s leverage, since 2029 is when the team’s current lease expires, plus prospective buyer Justin Ishbia is a minority owner of the Nashville S.C. MLS team, and hint, hint, Nashville. The 89-year-old Reinsdorf seems determined to go to the grave leaving some juicy leverage for his son, or at least to cement his legacy as the most hardball extortionist of all time, guess you have to make your own fun when you realize you can’t take it with you.
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Friday roundup: Bengals reno plan called “PR stunt,” plus the return of the Rays two-stadium plan

access_time personNeil deMause

Thanks to everyone who generously donated (and in some cases more than generously, you know who you are) to the Field of Schemes spring supporter drive — I have a whole lot of fridge magnets to send out! But first, there’s a weekly news roundup to get to:

  • That Hamilton County agreement to spend $80.5 million on Cincinnati Bengals stadium upgrades and repairs in exchange for no lease agreement at all turns out to be not so popular with the Hamilton County Commission, where commissioner Alicia “hugging the zero down” Reece called it “a PR stunt” because there’s no new lease while commission president Denise Driehaus countered (?) that “No one at that meeting ever said this was related to the final lease.” The county commission only has three members and the third, Stephanie Summerow Dumas, didn’t show up to yesterday’s meeting, so it’s hard to say what this means for the stadium proposal’s ultimate fate.
  • Hey, what if the Tampa Bay Rays built two stadiums, asks Tampa Bay Times opinion editor Graham Brink, one outdoors and one a refurbished Tropicana Field? Would that be cheaper or better? Probably not? Too bad, I already wrote the op-ed, and anyway this is just “back of the napkin” stuff. (Or envelope, which actually has two distinct sides. NAPKINS GOT BACKS!)
  • WAMU-FM reports that “a source familiar with [Washington Commanders stadium] talks” says funding “will likely involve the city borrowing against new tax revenues expected to be generated by any new development,” i.e., tax increment financing. The station cites a 2020 study claiming that D.C. has turned a profit on average on TIF districts — on first look it appears that the study’s authors guesstimated that development would still happen in the districts without the TIF but would take longer, which is probably a reasonable assumption but could create huge swings in the revenue numbers depending on what you mean by “longer.” I have emails out to a couple of TIF experts, I’ll update here if they have anything instructive to add.*
  • Former Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial director Brent Larkin says the Cleveland Browns stadium plans should be submitted to a public referendum, arguing that Ohio voters usually approve sports subsidy referendums anyway, so where’s the harm? Oh, and also it would be “a wildly generous gift to billionaire professional sports team owners at the same time those same elected officials are cutting aid to schools, food banks, libraries and programs for poor kids.” But anyway, it’ll probably win, so let the voters feel like they’re having a say, that’s democracy!
  • St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch has issued a proposal for redeveloping the waterfront that would include demolishing Al Lang Stadium, the old spring training ballpark that is currently home to the Tampa Bay Rowdies USL team. City councilmembers don’t sound too enthused about this, but also Welch’s managing director of city development said the Rowdies owners are “involved and they’re aware” of the plan, so maybe there’s a new soccer stadium proposal in the works? Worth keeping an eye on, if nothing else.
  • A group of downtown Kansas City businesses put up a giant sign with a giant QR code asking that a Royals stadium be built downtown. Chair of the Downtown Council of Kansas City: Gibb Kerr, managing director of the K.C. office of Cushman and Wakefield, a major developer, who surely would not be in position to profit from a downtown stadium, the Kansas City Star would certainly tell us if it were.
  • Work has begun at the proposed Las Vegas A’s stadium site on making it even flatter, this is what passes for progress these days.
  • Los Angeles Dodgers ticket prices are going up, and so is their payroll, and Forbes “contributor” Dan Schlossberg (author of “41 books and more than 25,000 articles about baseball”) concludes that the payroll must be driving up the ticket prices — sorry, Dan, that’s not how it works, there’s a book you might want to read if you have time between writing them.
  • Economist Joe Cortright has done his own analysis of the Portland baseball stadium income tax diversion proposal that I estimated could leave Oregon taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole and determined that the total hole would be more than $600 million.
  • I was on WOSU’s “All Sides with Amy Juravich” on Wednesday to discuss the Browns and Bengals situations, and you can listen to it here. For those who are wondering: Yes, Andy Zimbalist and I did run into each other on the Zoom call as my segment ended and his began, and no, there were no punches thrown.
  • You can buy a piece of the shredded Tropicana Field roof at Tampa Bay Rays games for $15, with the money going to a Rays charity, and doesn’t the city own the roof remnants, shouldn’t the money be going to the general fund? Anyway, if anyone in the Tampa area has been looking for a National Hairball Awareness Day present for me, hint, hint!

*UPDATE: Eight minutes after I hit publish on this post, sports economist and tax expert Geoffrey Propheter replied to my question about the D.C. TIF study. Propheter said it “falls short of academic standards for economic policy analysis” because it doesn’t try to analyze how tax revenue from TIF developments compares to comparable plots of land, but rather just compares actual developments to hypothetical ones that would (according to the study’s assumptions) see different kinds of development take place. He concludes: “I don’t understand how anyone would use this study to justify a TIF for a Commanders stadium.”

And while I was writing the above, Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First (disclosure: I’m doing some paid work for them, not on the subject of stadiums or TIFs) chimed in to note that D.C. TIF districts like the one for Gallery Place have had to be expanded to siphon off sales taxes from other nearby neighborhoods in order to break even.

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Friday roundup: Oregon okays $800m in MLB stadium spending because “transformative”

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a minute since I’ve issued an appeal for new supporters for this site, so: If you aren’t already a supporter of this site, please consider becoming one! There are both monthly and one-time options, and in addition to subscriber benefits like receiving all the stadium and arena news in your email inbox and getting whatever tchotchkes I come up with next, you ensure the piece of mind that comes from knowing you’re helping to keep this site going into its 28th year, which just began this month! Shedding light on the sports subsidy game in any way that affects actual policy turns out to be harder than even a professional cynic like myself thought — for all the reasons this site covers every day — but if we can all just keep it up for another 28 years, I think we might finally start getting somewhere.

As always, thanks to everyone who is contributing now or has contributed in the past — it not only lets me pay the ever-increasing costs of hosting this site and enables me to spend time writing it without going broke, it’s heartening to know that people think this issue is important enough to devote your hard-earned dollars to. Or maybe you just like pointing and laughing at billionaire failsons, that works, too. I hope to be able to keep this site going until it’s no longer necessary, at which point you’re all invited to the victory party, if any of us are still mobile enough by then to dance.

And with that cheery thought, here’s your weekly dose of ways everything still mostly sucks now:

  • The Oregon state senate voted 24-5 to approve $800 million in public bonds toward building a Major League Baseball stadium, just as soon as Portland gets a Major League Baseball team. Senators say the project will pay for itself by using money from player income taxes (it won’t) and that it will be a “forward-thinking, transformative opportunity” and “a showcase of what is beautiful, central, core to our constituents of Portland,” which is giving money to ex-Nike execs so they can have their own private sports team, I guess? Please enjoy your requisite J.C. Bradbury Simpsons meme, it’s well earned.
  • What do Washington, D.C. councilmembers think of the news that their mayor is on the brink of agreeing to spend $850 million toward a Commanders stadium at a time when the district budget is just red ink up to its eyeballs? “Is this really going to cost us close to a billion dollars?” asked council chair Phil Mendelson, while economic development committee chair Kenyon McDuffie called it a “once in a lifetime opportunity” before being asked how the city could afford it and replying, “I haven’t seen the details.” It’s okay, all the other kids are doing it!
  • Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman says he does not support the Cincinnati Bengals owners’ request for $350 million in state money toward stadium renovations, and wants to hold out for a deal where taxpayers “can actually make money” like … the Cleveland Browns deal? I’m getting kind of tired of linking to my explanation of the Casino Night Fallacy, but seeing as this seems to be some sort of mass delusion that state legislators are signing up for, maybe it can’t be explained enough.
  • The Kansas City Chiefs and Royals owners are still kicking tires on potential stadium sites, yep, that’s excuse enough for a news story, nothing else journalists should be spending their time covering, probably. Local business leaders say it’s important, anyway, and if we didn’t have a free and independent press taking its editorial directives from the local chamber of commerce, where would this country be?
  • Modesto, California is trying to build a stadium to get a soccer franchise. Of all the 2025 things that you never expected we would be living through, that’s one of the 2025iest.
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