Category: San Francisco soccer stadium

Can you believe we got through almost an entire week without talking about the Oakland A’s and their planned Las Vegas stadium and its path through the Nevada legislature? I already miss that crazy cast of characters: For-the-Record Jeremy Aguero, the relentless tweeters of the Nevada Independent, the blue recess screen. Yes, they botched the ending, but we’ll always have the memories.

And we’ll always have the future, where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives. Which will be the next stadium drama to become a breakout hit? You make the call:

• Josh Harris and his friends will get a potential half-billion-dollar tax writeoff for their $6 billion purchase of the Washington Commanders, and while I don’t totally understand Mike Ozanian’s explanation of how it will work — something about amortizing part of the purchase price as being for “intangible assets” — I hope it has something to do with the Bill Veeck depreciation dodge, because that’s a great story worth revisiting.
• San Francisco Mayor London Breed, in the middle of answering a question of whether her city is in the midst of an urban “doom loop” (spoiler: it’s not) by saying, “we could even tear down the whole [Westfield Mall] and build a whole new soccer stadium,” which is an interesting idea not least because San Francisco doesn’t have a soccer team in need of a stadium (it has the lower-division San Francisco F.C., but its owners haven’t been pushing for a new home), while nearby San Jose already does. Mayor Breed, I have some followup questions, oh crap, she’s gone already.
• NHL commissioner Gary Bettman “provided an update” on the Arizona Coyotes’ arena situation yesterday, and it is: “They’re in the process of exploring the alternatives that they have in the Greater Phoenix Area.” Does it actually count as an update when you’re just saying the same thing everyone already knew? Discuss.
• Time magazine asked MLB commissioner Rob Manfred about why a Las Vegas A’s stadium should get public financing, and the faux-pas-missioner replied, “I have read obviously peoples’ arguments about public financing. There’s an equal number of scholars on the opposite side of that issue,” which, I’m sorry, what? Is this one of those dark matter things, where there are thousands of economists who think that public stadium funding is a good idea, they’re just invisible? Mr. Manfred, I have some followup — oh crap.
• Nashville journalist Justin Hayes unearthed some emails between the Nashville mayor’s office and the Tennessean over the paper’s coverage of the Titans stadium deal, and they’re a gold mine of showing how the media sausages are made: My favorite bit is where the mayor’s communications chief asks for “two half sentences” to be inserted into an article to counter “the vocal echo-chamber of folks who are reflexively negative,” which it’s fair to say he eventually got and then some.
• Construction has stopped on Pawtucket’s half-finished Rhode Island F.C. soccer stadium after developers ran out of money, and one can only hope that the city will be left with a ruin half as impressive as Valencia’s.
• More on U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee’s proposed Moneyball Act, which would apparently require any baseball team that moves more than 25 miles to pay its former host city and state “not less than the State, local and or Tribal tax revenue levied in the ten years prior to the date of relocation,” or else baseball would lose its antitrust exemption. That’s a kind of arbitrary and vaguely defined price to hold over MLB’s head, but arbitrary and vaguely defined is probably good enough for government work that is never, ever going to pass anyway.
• If you’re really jonesing to hear me go on and on about the A’s again, check out my appearance yesterday on KPFA, which should ease your withdrawal symptoms. I did not provide any updates, but we did cover a lot of ground, including the enduring question of what John Fisher is thinking spending $1 billion to move his team to what would be MLB’s smallest stadium in its smallest TV market.