Category: USL

Friday roundup: Thunder owner wants 20-year-old arena replaced, Nevadans hate idea of A’s stadium subsidy

access_time personNeil deMause

Sorry for the relative paucity of posts this week — I’ve been a little under the weather (not Covid, or so the test strips say), and the stadium news cycle was taking a bit of a summer break, anyway. But things have started picking up again toward the end of the week, and nothing will stop me from my appointed Friday rounds, so away we go:

  • We start off with the latest news, which just broke late yesterday: Oklahoma City Thunder owner Clay Bennett, who is in the middle of spending $115 million in taxpayer money on upgrading his 20-year-old arena with new restaurants and video boards and the like, has put the project on hold because he might just want a whole new arena instead. “Obviously we want a long-term relationship with professional sports in this city,” said Mayor David Holt in yesterday’s State of the City address. “And to do that, you have to have facilities that are current and competitive.” Being built in 2002 doesn’t count as “current” anymore, apparently, even with three rounds of renovations that were costing $214 million total, because the arena doesn’t have enough “room for all the other elements of user experience” that aren’t watching basketball, though isn’t that what adding new adjoining buildings with new restaurants was supposed to be about? Anyway, even with the Thunder signing a new lease extension until 2026, Holt says the city needs to get cracking on a new arena, because “we have non-NBA cities checking our pulse every morning” and “if we want to be a top 20 city, we have to act like it” — he didn’t say whether Bennett would move the Thunder back to Seattle or what if he didn’t get what he wanted, but sometimes the most effective threats are the ones that leave the details to listeners’ imagination.
  • Clark County residents oppose “allocating taxpayer money in the budget for new sports stadiums similar to what was done to fund the Allegiant Stadium for the Las Vegas Raiders” by a 62-17% margin, yup, they’ll do that. Maybe the Oakland A’s aren’t getting a new stadium in Las Vegas so fast after all if their Oakland plans fall through — sure, elected officials can and do ignore the public will all the time, but given that public statements from Nevada officials about luring the A’s with a stadium have been lukewarm at best, this really does start to smell like savvy negotiators seeking leverage.
  • Knoxville’s $74.3 million Tennessee Smokies stadium subsidy may be getting held up as a model compared to the $79.4 million the Chattanooga Lookouts owners are demanding, but it turns out that $74.3 million figure may not be the final one: Rising interest rates and supply chain issues have the price tag soaring to “not yet been determined,” which means that Smokies owner Randy Boyd’s promise not to ask for any additional public funds may go by the wayside. Neither Boyd nor the government entities involved in the stadium have actually signed any of the stadium agreements yet; both sides say they plan to come up with a plan to cover cost overruns by a July 26 meeting of Knoxville’s sports authority, but would it be crazy to suggest that “Getting too rich for our blood, let’s call the whole thing off?” be at least considered as an option?
  • Speaking of the Lookouts, a Hamilton County commissioner wants to adjust the county’s spending plan to have the team owner front the money and the county repay him with tax money instead of having the county cover costs directly, because at least that would protect the public in case tax increment financing revenues fell short. This is not a terrible idea, though “don’t use tax increment financing at all, it’s almost always a terrible idea” might be an even better idea.
  • New Orleans is set to get a new USL franchise, because pretty much every city is, which will play in oh, someplace. No talk yet of how much a theoretical stadium would cost or who would pay for it, plenty of time for that once soccer fever has taken hold beyond the pages of Nola.com.
  • Some Brooklyn elected officials want New York City to impose a $10 million fine on the developers of the Pacific Park project (which used to be called Atlantic Yards, and which originally included the Nets arena though later those two elements were split between two different developers, really you don’t want to know all the details) because they failed to build a contractually promised “urban room” community space — one of the politicians called this a “field of schemes,” which, you know, it’s always nice to be part of the conversation, even if unintentionally.
  • The Portland Trail Blazers owners may or may not be trying to get a new arena to replace its (gasp!) 27-year-old one, but in the meantime they’re getting about a $1.5 million a year property tax discount thanks to a generous reassessment of the value of the old arena after they went to court to demand one, it really does pay to be able to afford the best lawyers.
  • Oh, did I forget to mention that the Chicago Bears owners’ response to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s proposal last week to put a dome on Soldier Field was “Nuh-uh, we only have eyes for Arlington Heights, at least right now?” Well, it was, but that happened all the way back last Friday after last week’s roundup was published — I may just need to place a moratorium on things happening after 9 a.m. on Fridays, don’t make me do it.
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Saturday roundup: Moreno demands Angels land sale approval now now now, and other bribery news

access_time personNeil deMause

Told ya! And now an abbreviated (though extended by one day) look at the week’s other news:

  • Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno has responded to a judge granting a 60-day stay to his discounted purchase of stadium land thanks to the deal being caught up in a corruption and bribery scandal involving the city being run by an unelected cabal by decreeing that the city must approve the sale by June 14, or else … well, Moreno, or really Moreno’s lawyer, didn’t specify what would happen if the deal is delayed beyond that date, but you don’t want to find out what it’ll be, you hear? The Los Angeles Times speculates that the Anaheim city council could move forward with the sale despite the stay on its agreement with the state over selling the land without meeting state affordable housing laws, which would almost certainly lead the state to sue, which isn’t going to get the sale resolved by June 14, but maybe Moreno wants that for some reason? Anyway, here, thanks to reader Moose, are some photos of Mayor Harry Sidhu throwing Easter eggs from the private helicopter he’s accused of illegally registering in Arizona to save money, I know that’s what you really want.
  • Speaking of bribery scandals, the Cleveland city council is considering a resolution to demand that the electric utility FirstEnergy have its name removed from the Browns stadium after it was accused of bribing a state official. Browns officials replied that FirstEnergy is “committed to upholding a culture of integrity and accountability” going forward and also the council resolution is non-binding, which is another way of saying “Sorry, we own the naming rights to this publicly owned and paid-for stadium because that’s just how these things are done, we get to decide whose name goes on it, what part of that didn’t you understand?”
  • Tennessee Titans CEO Burke Nihill says it would cost $1.8 billion to renovate the team’s current stadium because it’s in such “disrepair,” citing … well, he didn’t actually cite any study or report or anything, but just trust him, okay? Better to just build a new stadium that would cost — oh, look, Nihill says the price tag is now $2.2 billion, while the team’s share remains at $700 million, meaning the city and state would have to come up with $1.5 billion? That totally makes sense, after all, the old place is 23 years old, it’s pretty much a given that all buildings that old get torn down, right, isn’t that just how engineering works?
  • And speaking of inflation, the Kansas City Current women’s soccer team’s stadium price tag has gone up from $70 million to $117 million, and the team’s owners are asking state taxpayers to cover $6 million of it through tax breaks. Councilmember Eric Bunch says this is fine because it would be “using state tax dollars indirectly to support a project that’s going to benefit Kansas Citians,” which seems to be a novel use of “indirectly” and also “benefit,” though I guess the team owners are technically Kansas Citians in addition to being hedge fund goons, so it would benefit two Kansas Citians, anyway.
  • And speaking of stadiums having the shelf life of mayflies, Palm Beach County is spending $111 million to renovate the spring training home of the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals; Cards VP Mike Whittle, asked if the 25-year-old Jupiter stadium’s facilities are outdated, replied, “They are. They are,” which should be good enough for you.
  • And speaking of naming rights (which we were doing a few bullet points ago, do try to keep up), the Chicago Fire owners are in hot water for allegedly trying to sell the naming rights to the Soldier Field field when they don’t actually own them, which should make for a fun lawsuit.
  • A Kentucky sports business professor says if the Cincinnati Bengals keep winning, they’ll be able to demand more publicly funded stadium upgrades, which doesn’t really make more sense, but maybe he really means “if the Bengals start losing again, no one will write their elected representatives to demand that the team owners be offered whatever they want in order to keep the team in town, which does check out.
  • Some guy wants to build a USL soccer stadium in downtown Milwaukee, which would cost an unknown amount of money and require an unknown amount of public subsidies. But look, here’s a rendering of it! True, there are no fireworks or people pointing at the sky, but you can imagine those things, no?
  • This is already more bullet points than I meant to write, let me leave you with pictures of the possum that has made its home in the Oakland Coliseum press box. Honestly, given what the A’s owners left of a team for local sportswriters to watch on the field this year with their player fire sale, this maybe should be considered a feature and not a bug.
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Friday roundup: Possible VA locations for $3B Commanders project revealed, Tulsa mulls USL stadium on race massacre site, and more!

access_time personNeil deMause

Too much news to recap this week to have time writing an amusing intro, sorry!

  • WUSA-TV “went in search of tax plans for the new [Washington Commanders] football stadium. What we found was so much more.” Actually, they didn’t find anything about the tax plans, but they did find an internal document from December, provided by “a source close to the Washington Commanders stadium project,” showing which three sites in Virginia team owner Dan Snyder is looking at for a stadium: the Loudoun Quarries in Sterling, across the highway from Dulles Airport; a plot of undeveloped land between Summit School Road and Telegraph Road in Woodbridge, off I-95 about 25 miles south of D.C.; and Potomac Shores in Dumfries, a new development even farther south along the west bank of the Potomac River. Each site would be developed with not just an NFL stadium and training facilities but “a 14,000-seat amphitheater, hotels and a conference center, residential buildings and mixed-used retail including nightlife.” No price tags were included ($3 billion has been the going figure), nor plans for who would pay for acquiring the land, whether it would be on the public rolls and thus skip out on paying property taxes, or anything like that, but if anyone wants to start debating the vital question of how long it would take to drive to Commanders games — up to 90 minutes during a Thursday night rush hour, according to WUSA — have at it.
  • One Orchard Park councilmember wants the Buffalo Bills owners to pay for extra police on game days if they get a new stadium, and one New York state assemblymember wants the Bills owners to lower food and drink prices if they get stadium subsidies. Both of which are reasonable asks — if you’re going to hand over close to a billion dollars in tax money for a stadium, you may as well get something in return — but both are also likely to amount to a rounding error compared to the state’s price tag for a stadium, so neither would be so much a win as a consolation prize.
  • Oklahoma Lt. Gov. Matt Pinnell says there’s talk underway of building a new stadium for the F.C. Tulsa USL team on the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre, and surprisingly this isn’t going over real well, not just because the city already built a Tulsa Drillers minor-league baseball stadium on a possible burial site for victims of the massacre, but because the surviving descendants of the city’s Black community still live there, and a soccer stadium isn’t especially at the top of their development list.
  • Bruce Murphy of Urban Milwaukee reports on the roots of the Milwaukee Brewers owners’ demands for upwards of $70 million in stadium upgrades under their state-of-the-art lease clause, and notes a list of things the money would go for, including replacing the air conditioning, replacing parts of the retractable roof, replacing all the seats, replacing all the lights, replacing the LED ribbon ad boards, replacing the LED ribbon ad boards again 10-15 years later, and upgrading the sound system to a “multi-zone system.” A Brewers exec said this list wasn’t “comprehensive,” so put on your owner goggles and imagine your own wish list as well!
  • “Will a new Denver Broncos owner mean a push for a new stadium, too?” The Denver Post actually has no idea, but the Broncos‘ current stadium is a whole 21 years old already, you can’t expect these things to just last forever before tearing them down and building a new one, and another new one, and another…
  • John Mozena of the Center for Economic Accountability, an FoS reader and maker of excellent stickers, published an essay at Baseball Prospectus asserting that the baseball lockout makes stadium subsidies even worse, since now stadiums aren’t even providing the meager tax revenues that they usually do when baseball games are being played. This prompted an email discussion between myself and John about whether the substitution effect means that when stadiums are shuttered people will just spend money elsewhere in the area so it’s really a wash; and then more emails between myself and an economist about what the data shows about whether, say, a stadium in a city can at least be a net plus by siphoning off spending from the suburbs. No conclusive evidence yet, will report more later if and when I find out if we have yet another reason to hate Rob Manfred.
  • Chris Fedor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer tweets: “NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said they are estimating a roughly $100 million economic impact for the city of Cleveland as a result of All-Star Weekend.” Asked and answered!
  • Neither the Boston Red Sox nor the Chicago Cubs are planning to move out of their popular, historic ballparks, and yup, that qualifies as a reason to write a whole Athletic article these days.
  • And here’s a whole article about the housing group that pointed out that the Los Angeles Angels‘ stadium land purchase likely violated the state Surplus Land Act, I guess there’s just a lot of sports-page space to fill what with spring training getting wiped out by the lockout. Not that I’m complaining, they’re interesting enough overview articles, but it would be nice if publications were investigating things we didn’t know instead of rehashing what we already do, that’s all.
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Friday roundup: Titans mull demanding whole new stadium, Howard Terminal A’s project lurches one more step forward

access_time personNeil deMause

A special note to FoS Patreon subscribers: If you’re signed up at any subscription level and have not been receiving posts via email, please drop me a line. I’m trying to determine if there’s a bug in the automated system that I need to address, thanks!

For everyone else reading this via any and all communications media, here’s what all has been happening in stadium and arena news this week:

  • Plans by Tennessee Titans owners the Adams family to demand $300 million in state sales-tax kickbacks to help fund a $600 million renovation of their 23-year-old stadium have hit a snag, which is that the projected cost is now expected to be nearly double that — thanks to things like “antiquated” windows and a concrete structural frame that “needs” to be replaced with steel, people sure didn’t know how to build things to last in 1999! Since the Titans have a dread state-of-the-art clause in their lease requiring the city of Nashville to keep the stadium in the same condition as other NFL facilities, which presumably includes the latest in window technology, Mayor John Cooper says he plans to “closely review whether a new stadium would be a better long-term financial decision.” Since the Titans’ lease expires in 2028, Cooper might also want to closely review whether a better financial decision would be to just inform the Adamses that if they want to stay in town they will not be offered a promise of continual publicly funded upgrades, but Axios Nashville, which reported this “scoop” (you can tell because it says “Scoop” right in the headline), doesn’t seem to have bothered to ask about that, guess “local coverage worthy of readers’ time” doesn’t include followup questions!
  • The Oakland city council voted 6-2 to approve the final environmental impact report for a new Oakland A’s stadium at Howard Terminal, after a meeting that included construction workers demanding approval so that they can be hired to help build the thing. This isn’t actually the final vote that everyone is waiting on — that would be the final financing plan, which could cost taxpayers a billion dollars and still has about a half-billion-dollar hole in where the money would be raised, and which will be voted on someday, eventually.
  • The Arizona Coyotes are officially moving for at least the next three years to Arizona State University’s new 5,000-seat arena (which looks like this currently, if you were wondering), but team CEO Xavier Gutierrez says he doesn’t expect a “material financial impact” because of “how difficult our current situation has been financially.” Yes, the Coyotes have been losing money, largely thanks to nobody showing up to games, but it’s hard to see how spending $20 million on new NHL-only locker rooms won’t have at least a $20 million financial impact, you know?
  • The new owners of the USL’s Austin Bold F.C. are considering a move to Fort Worth now that Austin has its own MLS team, and are eyeing the construction of a 10,000-seat stadium to make it happen. The city would “support” construction of the stadium, and no total or public price tag has been provided, so in the meantime let’s just gaze upon this rendering and wonder what’s going on with that poorly synchronized flag display on the field, let alone why one entire end of the grandstand wouldn’t have a view of the game:

  • We already covered at the time the sad story of how the city of Anaheim responded to the 2018 expiration of Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno’s lease opt-out clause by just handing him a lease extension with a new opt-out clause that allowed him to continue his stadium subsidy demands, but if you want a longer recap in full gruesome detail, the Orange County Register has that for you.
  • Glendale, Arizona city manager Kevin Phelps is “very upset” that baseball spring training is being delayed by MLB owners’ lockout of players in a labor contract dispute, since he was counting on a stream of tourists to boost the local economy. Don’t worry, Kevin, spring training visitors don’t seem to provide any measurable economic boost anyway, so … yay?
  • Buffalo News columnist Rod Watson says New York state and local elected officials are being held “hostage” by Bills team owners and succumbing to “Stockholm syndrome” because they … aren’t insisting on building a new publicly funded stadium in Buffalo instead of in the suburbs. Keep on speaking truth to power, Buffalo News.
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Friday roundup: Guardians get their $285m public payout, Coyotes to play in teensy college arena for now

access_time personNeil deMause

What is the deal with these five-day workweeks? Why isn’t Juliet Schor president by now? Four days work for five days pay! Sorry, where was I? Oh, right, sports stadium scams siphoning off public money to rich dudes, same thing as every day, Pinky:

  • Cleveland Guardians owner Paul Dolan has officially extended the team’s lease through 2036 as part of a deal to provide $285 million in public funding toward a $435 million renovation of their 28-year-old stadium, two months after the Cleveland city council approved the annual tax subsidies. (Dolan was probably looking for a pen that worked.) Cleveland and Cuyahoga County can extend the lease for another five years by agreeing to pay for another $112.5 million in upgrades; getting your city landlord to pay you to play is truly the wave of the future, or the present, or whatever we’re living in these days.
  • Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo is reportedly in talks to play home games temporarily at Arizona State University’s new arena, which only holds 5,000 people, which, sure, cue up your favorite “that’s more fans than the Coyotes have anyway” jokes. “We would be glad to help the Coyotes by providing a temporary home while their new arena is built just a couple of miles away,” said ASU CFO Morgan Olsen, which is maybe getting the cart a little before the horse given that the current Tempe city council lost interest in providing $200 million toward an arena once Meruelo was revealed to have been failing to pay his city taxes in Glendale, managing to get his team evicted from there. Could the Coyotes’ saga end up with them stuck in a tiny temporary home for years while continuing to repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot over new arena plans? Probably not, but it would definitely be on-brand.
  • Greenville Triumph owner Joe Erwin wants a new $38.6 million soccer stadium, and are offering to pay, let’s see, they’ll “donate land they already own in the area” and “plan to bring upwards of a million dollars of equipment over from [their] temporary pitch.” The owner of the USL League One club is selling the stadium as multipurpose, enthusing, “We can play lacrosse on that field, American football on that field, rugby on that field. Heck, we can play ultimate frisbee on the field.” In my experience, USL League One teams can barely play soccer, but it’s nice to have self-confidence.
  • Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee says he’d be willing to talk about making a “significant investment” to host a Super Bowl in Nashville, and is “engaged in talks” about public funding for NASCAR, and thinks it would be “awesome” for and MLB team to come to Nashville but says that would take “partnerships.” He didn’t mention spending state sales tax money on Tennessee Titans stadium upgrades this time, but maybe that’d be part of the Super Bowl “investment”? Either way, move over, Glenn Youngkin, there’s a new contender for the crown of Governor Most Eager to Give Public Money to the Local Sports Team and/or Other Corporations.
  • Buffalo’s Investigative Post looks at how a Buffalo Bills stadium could be made to help the community it’s built in, and lands on the idea of community benefits agreements, which can “ensure the public receives some return on its investment.” Or, you know, not, as is often the case, especially in New York state.
  • The Tampa Bay Times is conducting a reader survey of where the Rays should build a new stadium and who should pay for it, which is going to be unscientific as hell — I just filled it out, in hopes that this would let me see the results so far, but no dice — but that’s modern journalism for you. At least team owner Stu Sternberg will be happy that the local paper is still flogging his new-stadium dreams, rather than moving on to some other news or issues that might also be able to use public money.
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Friday roundup: Sports team owners saying stuff, and the journalists who love to reprint it, Episode #736

access_time personNeil deMause

That wasn’t a swing, was it? It sure didn’t look like a swing to me.

Sorry, right, enough about actual sports, back to the business of sports business:

  • The owners of the new St. Louis City SC MLS team want a new parking garage built next to their new stadium, arguing that the stadium “will have a magnetic quality that draws people to the district 365 days a year,” according to the garage’s lead architect. Team officials already demolished several century-old mixed-use buildings to make way for the garage, which would seem to be a lost opportunity for things like stores and restaurants that might more likely be in use year-round, but far be it from me to argue with an expert in economagnetism.
  • Albuquerque city officials say they won’t decide where to build a New Mexico United USL soccer stadium until voters approve the money for it — which makes total sense, because the cost of a project doesn’t depend at all on what land needs to be acquired, and also no landowner would ever jack up the price of property knowing that the city needs it for an already-approved project. Today is Opposite Day, right?
  • Arash Markazi no longer works for the L.A. Times after being exposed for promoting friends’ projects in his columns and reprinting press releases almost verbatim, but Substack and Twitter don’t care if you’re ethical so long as you get eyeballs, so we have Markazi announcing, unsourced, that “The Oakland Athletics are expected to announce a handful of finalists for a potential $1 billion stadium in Las Vegas after the World Series,” and that getting turned into entire news articles elsewhere. Never mind that A’s exec Dave Kaval already said as much last month, or that “narrows down sites for stadium that nobody has proposed to pay for” isn’t really breaking news anyway, a famous reporter guy said a thing about famous business guys maybe saying a thing, everybody quick post updates at once!
  • Tennessee Smokies owner Randy Boyd says he’ll pay stadium construction workers at least $15.50 an hour but won’t sign anything making that promise enforceable, and won’t promise to pay concessions and other stadium workers anything above the cheapest the labor market will let him get away with. The Knoxville News Sentinel reports that Boyd says since he’s “a longtime community member, a community benefits agreement won’t be necessary,” a sentence that it’s amazing the News Sentinel production staff could type without busting out in visible lolsobs.
  • Pawtucket’s McCoy Stadium is in bad shape after the Pawtucket Red Sox left for Worcester and took all the kitchen equipment and office chairs with them. The city is considering whether to rehab the stadium for an indie-league team, but the two that kicked the tires said that at 10,000 seats it’s too big for them; or to redevelop the site for something else, but there are worries it will sink into the swamp.
  • Charlotte officials have noticed that they’re paying city police officers to provide security at Carolina Panthers games instead of having the team hire off-duty officers, because no off-duty officers want to work for the $42-an-hour rate that the team offers. I spent a bunch of time reading local articles to try to figure out if it’s the Panthers or the city or someone else chintzing on security wages, and felt bad that I couldn’t figure it out until I saw a quote from Charlotte’s police chief saying, “Listen Panthers or whoever, enough is enough?” and decided that if he doesn’t know, I shouldn’t be expected to either.
  • Do you really want to read NFL uber-insider Mike Florio speculating about whether the NFL will settle the city of St. Louis’s lawsuit against the league for moving the Rams by offering the city an expansion team? Even though Rams owner Stan Kroenke has promised to cover any losses the league is stuck with, and Florio doesn’t provide any sources at all other than “an acknowledgment in league circles of the possibility”? Probably not, but you’re a grownup, make your own decisions.
  • The Tampa Bay Rays may have been eliminated from the postseason, but that’s not going to stop the Tampa Bay Times editorial board from taking the opportunity to stump for a new stadium on the grounds that, um, let’s see, “far too few people will buy tickets to watch them play at their current stadium” and “the hard work needs to be done now to ensure the team stays in the Tampa Bay area, even if it’s part time.” One could point out that there’s no solid evidence that significantly more people would buy tickets at a new stadium, especially for a team that would disappear to Canada all summer, but the Times also says that “this is not the time to clam up or for grandstanding or unhelpful posturing,” so I guess they wouldn’t want lots of people writing them about this, huh?
  • Did you know that the USL is creating a new women’s soccer league, to be an adjunct to/compete with the NWSL, currently reeling under a sexual harassment scandal that has already brought down its commissioner and forced the relocation of its championship game? I had not, but more women’s pro teams can only be a good thing both in terms of growing the women’s game and providing more teams so that cities don’t have to outbid each other for them, though also more opportunities for teams to demand that cities outbid each other for them, because city officials are pretty much morons when it comes to this stuff.
  • Lots of times sports team owners argue that there’s no way to fund venue construction and repairs without public subsidies, but did they ever consider growing and selling soybeans? On free public land, oh, Canada, you just had to ruin this feel-good story, didn’t you?
  • Tokyo’s Olympic white-elephant stadiums are facing increased maintenance costs because they’re under attack by oysters. That is all.
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Friday roundup: Guardians, Rays, Bills updates, plus soccer vaportecture meets Death Race!

access_time personNeil deMause

First off, thanks to all the FoS subscribers for your patience with the bumpy launch of posts-by-email: The good news is that I think I’ve finally landed on a solution that will consistently get the latest news into your inboxes — and better yet, do so as soon as the posts are live, rather than waiting till 10 am Eastern time like the old system did. The glorious future will arrive soon, I’m sure!

But this weekly roundup post is not about the future, but about the recent past, although it’s past events about requests for subsidies in the future, which — you know what, let me just shut up and get to the news:

  • The Cleveland Guardians owners’ request for up to $400 million in public money for stadium renovations had its first hearing this week from the Cleveland city council’s finance committee, and several committee members said they’d have a tough time selling constituents on handing over more money to the local rich guy: “I hope this conversation gets to be about the economic importance in our community and not just about rich sports owners,” said councilmember Blaine Griffin said. “I have families that are struggling every day just to keep a roof over their heads,” said councilmember Mike Polensek. “This one’s going to be a hard sell, and I understand the economic impact. When everyone comes to the table, come prepared,” said councilmember Brian Kazy. The committee didn’t vote on anything, though, so it’s tough to say whether this was an indication that these councilmembers will actually oppose the subsidy, or just that they want a better explanation — or maybe some new mental health centers like last time — to cover their butts with angry constituents.
  • The Tampa Bay Times editorial board thinks Tampa Bay Rays president Brian Auld’s explanation of how the team plans to build stadiums and play games in two different countries is “cogent” and “practical” and could be “a newfound engine for tourism and economic development,” all words that sound good until you actually think about them. The Times has a long history of shilling for local sports team owners, going back to when it was the Tampa Tribune (which was bought and merged into the St. Petersburg Times in 2016), with one former Tribune sportswriter explaining back in 1999 during a Buccaneers stadium dispute that ““I don’t think it was any secret in the Tampa Tribune newsroom that if we lose the Bucs, there’s going to be a good chunk of advertising revenue out the window.” Or maybe the editors actually do think that asking fans in Montreal to buy tickets for games all summer to a team that if it wins the pennant will play its postseason games in Florida is cogent and practical! There’s a fine line between stupid and clever.
  • That study of potential Buffalo Bills stadium sites that is not the cost-benefit study that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is refusing to release to the public is set to be released in November or so, and everyone is all excited for some reason that it may look at a site in downtown Buffalo in addition to the current stadium location out in the suburbs. Meanwhile, the Erie County legislature was set to debate a resolution yesterday requiring three public hearings to be held before the county can vote to approve any stadium deal, but it doesn’t look like the minutes have been posted yet, and modern newspapers can no longer afford to have reporters watch legislative hearings even when they happen online, so we’ll have to wait a bit to find out what happened there.
  • Lexington is getting a USL team … as soon as it builds a 6,000- to 10,000-seat stadium. According to the Lexington Herald-Leader, prospective owner Bill Shively “insisted Tuesday the franchise will not be supported by city dollars. Still, there has to be city support to make this thing go, support in terms of interest, involvement and ticket sales.” Guess we’ll have to see what that word salad ends up meaning, but “will not be supported by city dollars” traditionally means “will be supported by city dollars that we can pretend aren’t city dollars,” so don’t get too excited just yet.
  • In May, the Nebraska legislature passed a law allowing state sales taxes in districts around a sports complex to be kicked back to pay for the venue — a STIF, in other words. If you predicted that this would lead to an application for pickleball subsidies, you’re our lucky winner!
  • College football games in Florida haven’t been reducing capacity or requiring fans to wear masks, yet there have been no reported Covid outbreaks so far this fall among fans attending games. This is good news, and is further evidence that pretty much no coronavirus infections take place outdoors, even with the Delta variant, so we should mostly worry about masking up and requiring vaccinations for indoor activities. (No, this has nothing to do with sports subsidies, except that it affects teams’ bottom lines, but since I’ve raised the alarm about outdoor sporting events and Covid transmission here previously, I wanted to present the latest data point. Also, you know, proper Covid precautions could save thousands and thousands of lives, so there’s that.)
  • I’m sorry, you there in the back, did you say you wanted to see some Des Moines soccer vaportecture? Sure, enjoy this image of soccer fans about to be run over by a car! (I mean, it’s probably a woonerf, but knowing American sports-fan drivers, they’re totally about to be run over by a car.)
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Friday roundup: Rays revive Ybor City plan from dead, A’s set $1B price tag on Vegas stadium, and other self-serving rumors

access_time personNeil deMause

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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With college football season on the brink, what can we learn from sports leagues that have restarted play?

access_time personNeil deMause

College football’s Mountain West conference canceled its fall season yesterday, with the possibility of holding it next spring instead, and the “Power Five” conferences (Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 12, the Big Ten, Pac-12, and Southeastern) are reportedly set to meet today to discuss doing the same. This has led to a flurry of reactions from across the sports and political world as to whether it’s a good idea to play contact sports during a raging pandemic (players: yes, if there are safety protocols; doctors: maybe no if you don’t want players to risk lasting heart problems; Donald Trump: blarrrrrrgh!), with lots more tweets surely to follow.

This makes it a good time to take a step back and see what we’ve learned so far from sports leagues that have restarted since Covid took hold this spring, and what it can tell us about how to proceed from here. Unfurl the data points:

That is, honestly, not a terrible track record overall — back in the spring, it wasn’t clear that any sports leagues would be able to finish out their seasons, so a range from successful restarts to “limping along but might make it to the finish line” is better than expected. And there are definitely some lessons that we can learn from the spread of results:

  • If you want to play sports without an outbreak of virus, start with less virus. I mean, duh: The best way not to get infected is not to be around people who are infected, and in places like Taiwan, players could pretty much be sharing forks without much worry about contracting Covid. Likewise, even if NHL players busted out of their Canadian bubbles and hit the casinos (which are open), the level of community spread there is low enough that they’d stand a good chance of rolling the (metaphorical, virus-related) dice and coming away lucky.
  • Bubbles work. There was tons of skepticism that the NBA could pull off its bubble in the middle of the world’s biggest Covid hot spot without tons of infections, but so far it’s working well. Of course, we’re not even two weeks into the resumption of the season, and the entire two-month playoffs are still to go, so it remains to be seen if the league can keep its protective wrapping intact through October, especially as players start going stir-crazy. (Though player families will be allowed to enter the bubble at the end of the first round on August 30, after they’ve quarantined for two weeks.)
  • Testing works, sort of. The Marlins and Cardinals outbreaks have gotten lots of attention as a sign that MLB didn’t really have a plan for its bubble-less season — and, indeed, there are lots of signs that it didn’t, especially when the decision on whether the Marlins would play after positive tests at one point came down to texting their shortstop to see what he thought. And the uncertainty on when it was safe for teams to resume play has exposed all kinds of issues with how to interpret test results, thanks to everything from false positives and false negatives to the problem that it can take a few days for someone to test positive even after contracting the virus. But on another level, it’s a success: MLB has been aggressively testing its players — to the point where there are concerns that athletes are soaking up testing capacity and causing delays in test results for civilians — and managed to keep any outbreaks from spreading beyond those two teams. That may be the best you can hope for in a non-bubble league.
  • Actually playing sports doesn’t seem to be a huge risk. Unless I’ve missed something, there remain zero cases of athletes catching the coronavirus from opponents during games, even in higher-contact sports like soccer. (Early speculation that the Marlins got infected from the Atlanta Braves‘ catchers appears to have been incorrect — the Braves players never tested positive, though they did have Covid-like symptoms — and it’s more likely someone picked it up by going out for coffee or drinking at the hotel bar.) That actually jibes well with research that shows that “Successful Infection = Exposure to Virus x Time“; it’s simply hard to get infected if you’re only in close proximity to another player for a couple of minutes at a time. What’s super-dangerous is being in a clubhouse (or hotel bar) with teammates for extended periods, as witness how both the Marlins and Cardinals outbreaks spread like wildfire through those teams, even taking out the Philadelphia Phillies‘ visiting clubhouse attendant who shared indoor breathing space with the infected Marlins.
  • Indoor sports, and those with more contact, are less charted territory: The only good examples we have so far for indoor sports transmission are the NBA and NHL, which have barely begun play, and which are taking place in virus-free bubbles, so we haven’t seen how an outbreak would play out there. Likewise, nobody’s played any American football since the pandemic began; Australian Rules Football teams have been forced to bubble in hotels and move games to less virus-y parts of Australia, but don’t seem to have suffered major outbreaks among players, at least.
  • Getting Covid can be really, really serious, even for young, healthy athletes. As noted above, one of the concerns pushing college football to consider postponements is that doctors are noting an increase in myocarditis — basically, inflamed heart muscle — among college athletes, something that could be a passing thing, or could be a chronic problem. Boston Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez has already been ruled out for the entire 2020 season thanks to Covid-related heart problems, and while team execs say they’re “very optimistic” he’ll make a full recovery, with a disease that’s only existed in humans for less than a year, they’re really only just guessing.

That’s still very much a work in progress, and lots more questions remain unanswered, including what on earth MLB should do if one of its teams suffers a Marlins- or Cardinals-style outbreak in the middle of the playoffs. Baseball officials are reportedly considering setting up bubbles for its postseason, though they’d still have to figure out how to have teams and their traveling parties quarantine first for two weeks; also, right now the only advantage teams finishing with better regular-season records would get in the expanded playoffs would be home-field advantage, which wouldn’t mean much if no teams were playing at home. As for college football, it’s hard to say what the risks are until someone starts playing and we see how many people turn up sick, though the indicators for a sport with tons of teams and huge rosters and no bubbles sure don’t seem too promising.

Still, there are some lessons here, and they’re reasonably hopeful ones: If you can manage to play in a nation with low virus levels, or keep your players and staff from ever interacting with the outside world, you can play sports, and maybe even allow fans in, relatively safely — though “relatively” is obviously less reassuring if you wind up being one of the few players getting sick. Really, the most important message here is the same one as for the rest of our pandemic world: If you want to reopen things that are important to you, keep wearing masks and stay away from house parties. The best way not to contract Covid remains having fewer infectious people to catch it from, so if it means shutting down restaurants and bars to keep schools open — or shutting down college football to allow other activities to proceed, or even shutting down everything until viral levels are down to near-zero — that’s the kind of calculus we need to be making right now. It worked for New Zealand!

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Friday roundup: What if a stadium tax break fell in the forest and there were no journalists around to hear?

access_time personNeil deMause

Sorry if the posts were a bit light this week, but, one, it’s August (checks — yep, August, holy crap) and local governments are mostly out of session so it’s usually a slow month for stadium news even during what we used to call normal times, and two, I’ve been spending some time working on an FoS-related project that hopefully you will all enjoy the benefits of down the road a bit. (I also took a brief break to write about how Melbourne, Australia has declared a “state of disaster” and imposed strict new lockdown measures for virus rates that in the U.S. wouldn’t even get states to ban house parties.) If you were really missing me chiming in on the latest in baseball not shutting down just yet and instead adding a billion doubleheaders, maybe I’ll get around to a longer post on it next week.

For now, a quick tour through some of the news items that didn’t make the full-item cut this week:

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