Loudoun United FC – Field of Schemes

The news has been coming hot and heavy this week, especially if you count self-generated rumors by the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays management teams to be “news.” Let’s make an attempt at corralling all of it, shall we?

After St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman declared that he wouldn’t engage in stadium talks with Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg while he’s being sued by his minority owners, Rays president Brian Auld met with selected Hillsborough County commissioners this week to discuss the possibility of reviving the idea for a stadium in the Ybor City area of Tampa that died in 2018 because nobody wanted to pay for it. There’s no sign that that funding situation has changed, but since it appears Auld made sure to meet with commissioners who he could trust to go straight to the media to say the parts he wanted (Ybor City is alive!) and not the parts he didn’t (anybody got $900 million to spare?), this qualifies as leverage, I guess. Kriseman is out of office next January, anyway, so maybe it’ll work on his successor.
Oakland A’s owner John Fisher is reportedly seeking a $1 billion stadium in order to move to Las Vegas, according to an unnamed Las Vegas Review-Journal source. Also that “the A’s are interested in pursuing a public-private partnership, similar to what the Raiders received when they relocated to Las Vegas from Oakland,” which ended up with Clark County on the hook for $750 million; and that “there is little desire from the county to offer much, if any, public funding to build a possible MLB stadium.” Of course, if Fisher is mostly using Vegas as a stalking horse to shake loose more stadium money from Oakland, it doesn’t matter much how much money he can or can’t get in Nevada, but expect to see lots more talk about this ghost stadium in the near future, eventually undoubtedly including renderings, because just showing pictures of other cities’ stadiums really doesn’t cut it.
Speaking of that Las Vegas Raiders $2 billion stadium with the $750 million in public subsidies, Clark County is pulling $11.7 million from a reserve fund to make its next debt payment on the building, after dipping into the fund for a similar amount last November, to cover for hotel taxes, which were anticipated as the funding source, falling short thanks to the pandemic. Boondoggle’s Pat Garofalo calls this a sign that “long arrangements between a particular business and the government are always going to be risky for taxpayers,” which I’m not quite so sure — this was just hotel tax money that Clark County otherwise could have used to spend on other things, so really there are two separate questions here: 1) Is the pandemic crushing tourism revenues in the nation’s tourist capital? and 2) did Clark County blow $750 million on a stadium for the Raiders that it will never see again? It’s hotel taxes that are risky, in other words; stadium spending, unless it can somehow generate three-quarter-billion dollars in new hotel tax receipts just from eight NFL games a year, is a sure terrible bet.
The USL’s chief operating officer and real estate officer Justin Papadakis — yes, a soccer league has a “real estate officer” — was asked by Forbes how his league has been able to put together so many stadium deals during the pandemic, and answered, um, something about millennials and multi-use facilities, that oughta hold the little bastards. Papadakis also said that the league is currently exploring 35 different expansion targets, so maybe its secret is more about offering a team to every podunk town in the country if they build a stadium and seeing who bites?
The Washington Spirit NWSL team moved its home opener to Houston after complaining that its home stadium in Virginia “is not compliant with NWSL stadium requirements.” My first thought here was, whoa, women’s soccer is getting into the “we need upgraded facilities or else we’ll take our team elsewhere” game, but then I noticed that 1) Segra Field, home to the USL’s Loudoun United F.C., was only opened in 2019, and 2) the “upgraded facilities” the Spirit are seeking mostly come down to having showers in the locker rooms, so clearly this is something different. (Also, the USL lets its teams play in stadiums with no running water? I guess that’s one way to get to 35 expansion teams!)
“The White Sox took an area named for a beloved stadium worker and renamed it for Tony La Russa” is really pretty much all you need to know about this story, but Defector includes the tidbit that the Chicago White Sox also threw out the old sign honoring Loretta Micele rather than giving it to her family, plus offers another recent article on what a horrible person and baseball manager Tony La Russa is, so see those for further context.
F.C. Cincinnati using its new stadium as a giant ad board for Old Spice? F.C. Cincinnati using its new stadium as a giant ad board for Old Spice.
Saskatoon’s mayor says he doesn’t want to “lose the race to Regina” to be the first to build a new arena. That’s it, that’s a perfect sentence about the state of politics in North America in 2021, have a good long (in the U.S., not Canada) weekend everybody!

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So how’s everyone out there, you know, doing? As the pandemic slowly feels less like a momentary crisis to be weathered and more like a new way of living to be learned (I refuse to say “new normal,” as nothing about this will ever feel normal), it’s tempting to occasionally look up and think about what habits and activities from the before times still make sense; I hope that FoS continues to educate and entertain you in ways that feel useful (or at least usefully distracting) — from all accounts the entire world being turned upside down hasn’t been enough to interrupt sports team owners’ important work of stadium shakedowns, so it’s good if we can keep at least half an eye on it, amid our stress-eating and TV bingewatching.

So get your half an eye ready, because a whole bunch of stuff happened again this week:

There’s a new plot of land open near the Carolina Panthers‘ stadium now that Charlotte Pipe and Foundry is getting $50 million in tax breaks to move to a neighboring county, and billionaire Panthers owner David Tepper should demand a new stadium there because Tepper “has influence and credibility” and the current 24-year-old stadium is “outdated because it lacks the suites the new stadiums offer and because it lacks a dome” and “all great stadiums should be built downtown” and “there’s a price to doing business, and we accept it,” writes Charlotte Observer sports columnist Tom Sorensen, whose Twitter bio calls him “occasionally retired” but apparently he comes out of retirement when there is important reporting like this to be done.
USL Championship team Loudoun United F.C. is asking to defer its stadium rent payments to Loudoun County, Virginia, and instead make them over the next six years, which is for some reason a reasonable ask while New York and Los Angeles residents withholding rent is “alarming.”
And speaking of the spoils going to whoever has the most lobbyists, both Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball have been lobbying Congress for pandemic relief loans, even as the former makes plans to wipe out a good chunk of the latter and/or force a takeover of the minor leagues, because why let a good pandemic pass without taking advantage of the opportunities it affords to consolidate your monopoly power?
Plans for a USL stadium in the East Bay city of Concord have been dropped amid the uncertainty of when and how sports will restart, and so maybe have plans for a CFL stadium in Halifax, though neither one was especially likely to happen pre-Covid, and there’s nothing to stop either from being revived down the road. Also Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg probably isn’t getting twin new stadiums in Montreal and Tampa Bay anytime soon, though given that he has to wait till 2027 to leave St. Petersburg anyway, he can take the time to regroup and work behind the scenes on stadium deals, just like the New York Yankees and Mets did when forced to step away from their new-stadium plans during the post-9/11 slump.
As team owners lay off staff and demand bailout money, Marc Normandin helpfully reminds us that Miami Marlins principal owner Bruce Sherman has a yacht that costs the same as his team’s projected Opening Day payroll.
Louisville’s plans to pay off its arena costs with incremental sales taxes look real bad now that there’s a pandemic and no sales of anything around the arena, but then they looked pretty terrible in the first place.
The German Bundesliga will resume play tomorrow in empty stadiums — with teams set to forfeit games if fans evern show up outside to cheer — and three sports economists want to take the opportunity to point out that home-field advantage pretty much evaporates without fans, because apparently it’s almost entirely about referees subconsciously tilting their rulings in favor of the home team when they get booed by crowds every time a marginal call goes the other way. I’ve seen studies on this before — if I remember right, basketball home-court advantage is mostly about foul calls, and in baseball it’s mostly ball-strike calls — and I actually find it kind of endearing that so much of sports is about fans influencing games by going “Awwwwwww!” en masse, something I’m sure we’ll all miss not just now that fans have disappeared, but also in the longer-term future once game officials are replaced by robots because players are afraid to get breathed on.
Elon Musk successfully bullied Alameda County into allowing him to restart his Tesla factory against the order of health officials, and was aided and abetted by other states’ officials offering to lure his factory away if California was going to be so mean as to require it to obey laws, because of course he was given that Musk’s real genius is in extracting public subsidies, it sure isn’t in reinventing public transportation.
Sports journalism has died after a long illness. Please send expressions of dismay for the future of democracy in lieu of flowers.

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Category: Loudoun United FC

Friday roundup: Rays revive Ybor City plan from dead, A’s set $1B price tag on Vegas stadium, and other self-serving rumors

Friday roundup: Rattling sabers for Panthers stadium, leagues large and small seek bailouts, and a very large yacht