Category: Misc

Friday roundup: Friends don’t let friends host the Olympics, and other cautionary tales

access_time personNeil deMause

Last week I teased a big project of mine that would drop this week, and it went live yesterday morning: a 57-page report, commissioned by Los Angeles economic justice advocacy group Strategic Action for a Just Economy, on whether L.A. can or should be trying to extricate itself from its hosting obligations for the 2028 Summer Olympics — something some local critics have suggested, especially in the wake of the city’s wildfire crisis and budget crisis and  immigration enforcement occupying force crisis. You can probably get a pretty good sense of the report’s findings from its title, “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t,” but if you want slightly more details, here’s the nut graf:

While there are numerous unknowns—the history of the Olympics shows that budget questions are never resolved until it’s far too late, a path that L.A. has headed down with its agreements for the 2028 Games as well—the available documentation and history of international event hosting shows: Yes, if Los Angeles officials, or voters, decided to withdraw from hosting the Olympics, they could do so. This would come at the risk of potentially billions of dollars in damages from a breach-of-contract lawsuit and losses from expenses already undertaken. However, continuing as host also comes with a potential risk of losses that, if history is any guide, could similarly amount to billions of dollars.

The report also contains a wealth of information about Olympic financial history, including other locales’ attempts to back out of hosting major international sporting events for fiscal reasons (the Denver 1976 Winter Olympics that never happened, plus the 2026 Commonwealth Games that the Australian state of Victoria bailed on in 2023 amid concerns about snowballing costs), as well as mention of my new favorite Olympic factoid: that time they held a Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan and nobody knows how much it cost because the local organizing committee literally set fire to its financial records. It’s all here, dig in if you’re in the mood for a long, enraging read — or if not, you can instead read the excellent summaries in Torched (which includes a quote from me on this week’s revelations about L.A. Olympics chief Casey Wasserman’s history with Jeffrey Epstein) and LAist.

And now that that’s off my plate, I have plenty of time for stadium and arena bullet points, and good thing, too, because this week brought craploads of them:

  • The Wyandotte County Commission followed suit with its neighbors in the city of Olathe and voted 7-3 to approve devoting local sales and hotel tax revenue to pay off part of the state’s $2.775 billion in bonds for a new Kansas City Chiefs stadium and surrounding development. The county, to be clear, gets absolutely nothing out of kicking in its own funding (total price tag still TBD), given that the state has indicated it will go ahead with the stadium deal regardless. Kansas City, Kansas mayor and county commission chair Christal Wilson, who didn’t vote because no ties needed to be broken, wrote on Facebook that she thinks kicking in county money is warranted because it gets the county “a seat at the table” — okay, though it’s questionable whether getting to sit at the table is worth having to split the check.
  • Indiana state Rep. Earl Harris Jr. on his bill to create a sports authority to build a Chicago Bears stadium in northwest Indiana with money from (feigns coughing fit until you go away): “Indiana does sports things like this very well. When you look at the Pacers, the Colts, the Speedway, we’re very good at figuring out a good financial plan that does not hurt the taxpayer.” Um, about that…
  • Will the Portland Trail Blazers move if the city and county decline to spend $600 million on upgrades to their arena? It’s an “urgent race against time” and “the clock continues to tick,” writes The Oregonian, citing a deadline of … huh, seems like they didn’t mention any deadline, must have run out of room. (Though there was room for “Are you ready for the Nashville or Kansas City Trail Blazers?” to cite two cities that are not particularly shopping around for NBA teams.)
  • Tampa sports radio host JP Peterson insists that spending upwards of $2 billion on a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium is warranted because it “will produce millions in tax revenue and bring major events, Super Bowls, National Championship games, World Baseball Classic, MLB All-Star games” — [citation needed], my man. Also, I can save you some time: Even if a new baseball stadium does bring in millions in tax revenue, from hosting, uh, football games, when it costs hundreds of millions a year in tax expenditures, maybe that’s … not good?
  • Speaking of the Rays, fresh Rays vaportecture! I’m sticking with my comment from yesterday: Glad to see the Rays acknowledge that even after a future stadium is built, fans still won’t buy jerseys with player names because they know they’ll be sold off as soon as they reach arbitration.
  • And if you want still more Rays commentary from me, I spoke with both WMNF radio and Tampa Bay 28 TV about the ongoing dispute this week; the former is much longer, the latter offers a view of what I have on my living room walls, pick your poison.
  • Just in time for the Super Bowl (what time does it start again?), here’s a Top 40 list of things the NFL demands from Super Bowl host cities. It’s impossible to pick just one favorite, but equally impossible to beat “three championship-level 18-hole golf courses and two top-quality bowling alleys, free of charge.”
  • Plans to build an Indy Eleven a soccer stadium for a new MLS team on Indianapolis’s former heliport are on hold because something about not rewarding a city that “continues to thumb its nose” at ICE; the FAA will soon be weighing in on the matter.
  • Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson has met with NBA commissioner Adam Silver, though not in the sense of actually meeting meeting like in person, and “offered to be helpful in bringing back the Sonics” as an NBA expansion team. Seattle already has a practically brand new arena, though by the time the NBA is ready to expand it could be pushing 10 years old, is that too soon to ask for upgrades?
  • San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones says Spurs owner Michael Dell donating $6 billion to Donald Trump’s “Trump accounts” savings plan “really pissed me off” because “if you can give $6 billion for these accounts, you could have paid for your own arena.” But then Dell wouldn’t have those billions he saved by getting taxpayers to build his arena! Sounds like somebody doesn’t understand what the whole point of being a billionaire is. (Hint: It’s getting billions of dollars, not spending it.)
  • And finally on the Rays front, Frank Nockels of Land O’ Lakes, Florida asks: “If we pay for half of the Rays’ new stadium, can we get free tickets?” Ian Betteridge has some bad news, Frank.
Share this post:

Friday roundup: Chiefs stadium deal still not finalized, Royals even less so

access_time personNeil deMause

Pressed for time here on a bunch of projects (I’ll be able to reveal more about one next Thursday or Friday), so let’s take a brief spin through the rest of this week’s news:

  • Wyandotte County will hold a public hearing sometime in the next three weeks to help decide whether to put some amount of city and county sales taxes into a Kansas City Chiefs stadium that would be built somewhere in the county. Meanwhile. legislators from both parties are criticizing the deal as “tax giveaways for billionaires.” The Chiefs deal isn’t falling apart or anything, but it does still have a lot of t’s to cross and i’s to dot before Clark Hunt can cash his $4 billion check.
  • Clay County officials said three weeks ago that they were no longer talking with Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman about building him a new stadium, and now the county commission has announced that the deadline has passed for putting a stadium measure on the April ballot. Royals stadium sites are truly falling like dominoes (I don’t think that’s actually how that metaphor works, but sure, close enough).
  • It’s been almost four years since the Los Angeles Angels‘ sweetheart stadium land deal was torpedoed by an FBI fraud and bribery investigation into then-Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu, which means it’s about time for city officials to start bringing up the prospect of a new stadium land deal. Councilmember Natalie Meeks, who proposed the agenda item, seems open to ideas — selling the parking lots around the stadium for quick cash, leasing it out for development for slow cash, turning it into open space — and any proposal will also have to deal with the state’s Surplus Land Act, which requires that any sale of public land prioritize affordable housing. City officials say they haven’t talked with Angels owner Arte Moreno about any of this, which will probably be necessary, only hopefully this time with fewer federal investigations.
  • ICE is going to be present at the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, and Batman will not stand for it.
  • The owner of a dead mall in Phoenix wants to get one of those “theme park districts” to divert tax money to a new domed women’s soccer stadium. Tasmania says hold my beer.

 

Share this post:

Could FIFA really move the 2026 World Cup out of the U.S.?

access_time personNeil deMause

Ever since the Donald Trump administration started ordering immigration officers to abduct people who don’t look like Donald Trump and the Supreme Court said “cool, cool,” questions have been raised about how it was going to work for the U.S. to co-host the men’s soccer World Cup this summer. With U.S. travel bans in place against several nations that made the tournament, on top of the risk fans from other countries would face of being grabbed by death squads and thrown into a waiting van, there was talk that maybe even FIFA would have second thoughts about the propriety of holding a major international sporting event in the U.S. — though also, you know, FIFA.

Now that the death squads are getting more deathy, though, the talk has suddenly grown louder:

A few caveats here: The “German soccer official” is the president of the German soccer club St. Pauli, which is famously activist and may not represent the rest of the nation’s soccer hierarchy. Blatter, formerly the face of FIFA, was ousted in disgrace in 2015 and has been vocal in criticizing the organization he once headed ever since. The UK bill to demand that the World Cup be moved out of the U.S. only has 26 sponsors out of 650 members of parliament, and in any case wouldn’t be binding on FIFA.

And yet! Headlines like “Calls for a Boycott of the World Cup Grow” were not what either the U.S. or FIFA anticipated when the 2026 World Cup was assigned to a combined bid from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and the possibility of tons of fans being either prevented from attending, too frightened to go to the U.S., or pissed off enough at Trump to stay home in protest has to have FIFA officials at least having second thoughts. And there’s a relatively easy fallback option: U.S. World Cup matches could be shifted to the other two host countries, though Canada and Mexico would have trouble selling tickets for quite as exorbitant prices as the U.S. would. Shifting games out of the U.S. has to still be considered unlikely, but it’s also the kind of thing where support for a boycott could snowball quickly, once enough Sepp Blatters start saying it out loud.

And why are we talking about this here at Field of Schemes? Only because getting to host major events like the World Cup is often held out as a carrot for public funding of new or renovated stadiums, and even if that’s wildly overblown to start with — how many World Cups or Olympics or even Super Bowls is one stadium likely to host in its expected 30-years-or-less lifetime? — the promised benefits start deflating if your prize event turns into an international embarrassment. Defenders of Olympics in particular counter reports showing that host cities almost always lose money hand over fist by arguing that you can’t put a price on the value of your city appearing on the world stage, but for every Barcelona Olympics that shows the world how awesome Catalonia is (albeit at the risk of then being besieged by too many tourists), there’s a Rio de Janeiro where most of the world ends up concluding “LOLBrazil.” The U.S. may yet escape being clowned internationally this summer — Fox Sports can be counted on not to mention it on air, certainly — but it’s yet another cautionary tale about the risks of putting too many eggs in the “this will bring tourism!” basket.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Lightning win $250m in tax money for 6-year lease extension, Missouri holds secret talks on Royals stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

We have a bunch of new followers here thanks largely to all the tumult over the Kansas City Chiefs stadium deal, so it’s worth another mention that Field of Schemes continues to exist after almost 28 years thanks to the kindness of its readers. If you have any money left after donating to help the families of government-kidnapped five-year-olds [UPDATE: Or all the other less adorable Minnesotans who can use help], you can chip in to support this site here — you’ll even get some amusing refrigerator magnets in appreciation, if we can still even be amused in 2026.

And speaking of trying to wring amusement from horror, here is your weekly dose of stadium and arena bullet points:

  • Hillsborough County approved $250 million in arena renovations for the Tampa Bay Lightning in exchange for a six-year lease extension, which at $41.7 million per year would be one of the priciest per-year lease extensions in sports history.  Lightning owner Jeffrey Vinik could still request state sales tax money on top of this as well — if he does in exchange for no more years of lease extension, that would be a per-year cost of infinity, which would be an unbreakable record.
  • Officials from Kansas City, Missouri and Jackson County traveled to meet with Gov. Mike Kehoe on Wednesday about the Royals stadium situation, and no you can’t know what they talked about, that’s for Royals owner John Sherman to find out and you not to find out until it’s all been hashed out. Both Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and Interim Jackson County Executive Phil LeVota said they hope to strike a stadium deal with Sherman by the end of spring training; while we’re hoping things, let’s hope that this threesome focuses on getting a good deal, and not just a deal that is resolved quickly.
  • An Indiana senate committee cast a vote on Wednesday that “establishes the necessary funding to pay for the construction of a new Chicago Bears stadium,” according to WGN, but actually just creates a stadium authority, as we discussed last week. Also the full Indiana state senate still has to vote on it, and then the state house has to, before even this can become law, but don’t let that stop reporters from calling this a “bidding war.”
  • Dallas Mavericks execs have narrowed their arena site search to two locations, one an undisclosed one downtown and one at an abandoned mall site that, uh, is already getting redeveloped? Only having two prospective sites, both in the same city, wouldn’t bode super well for Mavs owners Patrick and Sivan Dumont’s leverage in demanding taxpayer money to build the thing, but they still have land in Irving they could consider using as a threat, as one does.
  • The Buffalo Sabres owners have hired a lobbyist to seek state funding of a $400 million renovation of their arena, good thing New York state has plenty of money for that.
  • The Sphere people want to build another Sphere, this time smaller and in the D.C. suburbs, using a tax increment financing district to siphon off property taxes to pay to build it. That’s okay, though, because Prince George’s County Executive Aisha Braveboy and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore say a Sphere would generate $1 billion in economic impact [citation needed], so everything should be fine [citation needed].
Share this post:

Friday roundup: Rays target stadium site, Bears seek Indiana stadium authority, Chiefs pursue local tax money

access_time personNeil deMause

Sorry for the late post today — I think all the images of people getting shot in the face and pulled screaming from their cars are starting to interfere with my sleep schedule. No matter what else is going on, though, the stadium and arena shakedowns continue, so let’s get to the news that we didn’t already cover this week:

  • Tampa Bay Rays owner and Gov. Ron DeSantis pal Patrick Zalupski is reportedly in advanced talks to buy the state-owned Hillsborough College’s Dale Mabry Campus in Tampa for the site of a new stadium and surrounding development. (The college’s 20,000 students would possibly get a new campus elsewhere as part of a “land swap” for something or other.) How the money for any of this would work is as yet a mystery — the Hillsborough board of trustees will meet on Tuesday to discuss the plan, at which point we’ll learn a bit more, maybe.
  • The Indiana state senate is considering a bill to create a stadium authority in Northwest Indiana to lure the Chicago Bears, which would have precisely the same effect as me opening a bank account to use to buy a yacht: nothing at all, until somebody puts some money in it. (The bill language would give the authority bonding capacity, but no set revenue streams to pay off any bonds.) Bears officials nonetheless called it a “significant milestone” in their talks of getting a stadium in Indiana, guess you gotta celebrate your achievements where you can find them, especially if you want to maintain your leverage.
  • There’s been talk before that Kansas’s $4 billion subsidy offer to the Kansas City Chiefs for a new stadium in Kansas City, Kansas (their current stadium is in Kansas City, Missouri) could involve kicking in future city and county sales tax revenues as well as state sales taxes, and now it’s an official ask: Both Wyandotte County, where Kansas City, Kansas is located, and the city of Olathe, where the Chiefs’ new training facility would be built, are being asked to chip in their share of any rise in sales tax receipts to help pay the Chiefs’ construction bill. (I don’t think this changes the overall public price tag, just displaces some of the money the state might otherwise struggle to come up with.) Why the local governments would want to commit their own tax revenue to pay for something the state otherwise plans to build with its own funds, who knows, but Olathe councilmembers did call the training camp a “wonderful transformational project for us” and “a very exciting announcement,” so maybe the hope is local lawmakers will be so excited they’ll contribute to the project’s GoFundMe.
  • Unite Here Local 49 has estimated that those billboards the city of Sacramento is erecting and giving the revenue from to the Sacramento Republic F.C. owners could end up costing the city $115 million over 34 years — which would be worth less in present value, but also it looks like the union didn’t account for future inflation in billboard rates, so maybe not less in present value? Maybe we’ll find out in the year 2060, if man is still alive.
  • There are new renderings of the planned Washington Commanders stadium on the old RFK Stadium site, and they look kind of like a plus-sized version of the Saddledome, surrounded by a whole lot of garages and buildings strategically shown so all you can see are their green roofs. (No fireworks or entourage at all, Josh Harris isn’t blowing any of that $6.6 billion on the clip art budget.) One thing they don’t show: Any of the homes in the nearby neighborhood, or the grocery stores and other small businesses that residents say they would like to see built there, but aren’t hopeful anyone will be able to afford to once the stadium opens.
  • The Houston Texans just hired a chief revenue officer who last worked on the Buffalo Bills stadium project, guess we’re going to start hearing again about Texans owner Cal McNair’s desires for a new or upgraded stadium.
  • $50 million in public bonds for a cricket stadium? In Oswego? It’s all supposed to be covered by stadium revenue, but I can’t find confirmation in the (checks notes) Fox River Valley press. Anyway, I’m done, have a good holiday weekend, see you back here on Tuesday, if woman can survive.
Share this post:

NJ bill would give Devils $300m for arena renovations, amid $1.5B state budget shortfall

access_time personNeil deMause

Over the last couple of years, billionaire private equity goon Josh Harris has been among the most active sports owners at winning public approval for new venue projects, first getting Philadelphia’s okay for a downtown arena for the 76ers and leveraging that into a new joint arena plan with the Flyers owners, then landing the most lucrative sports subsidy of all time, worth at least $6.6 billion in cash, land, and tax breaks for a new Washington Commanders stadium. But what of Harris’s third team, the New Jersey Devils? Turns out it’s time for the third shoe to drop:

A bill that would expand the state’s corporate tax incentive programs by billions and extend new tax subsidies to Newark’s Prudential Center was advanced by Assembly lawmakers Monday over the objections of critics.

The measure, which won 10-2 approval from the Assembly’s economic development committee, would pour an additional $2.5 billion into the state’s marquee tax incentive programs and extend up to $300 million in state subsidies for renovations at the Newark arena.

The bill in question was introduced on Friday by state assemblymember Eliana Pintor Marin, whose district includes most of Newark, including the Prudential Center. Pintor Marin said that the Devils’ arena, which is owned by the Newark Housing Authority and operated by the team, “needs to have major renovations” so that the Devils “can continue to play” and also “compete and bring in different spectators and bring in different shows.” Pintor Marin did not explain why these were New Jersey taxpayers’ problems to solve, or why the Devils can’t continue to play in a 19-year-old arena.

Notably, the Devils just extended their lease in 2013 — in exchange for, among other things, revenue from city-built parking garages — until 2038, which you might think would have forestalled any renovation subsidy demands for at least the next few years. But nope, the subsidies are moving forward now, for unexplained reasons. To get around state laws prohibiting special giveaways to particular companies, Pintor Marin even wrote language saying “Prudential Center” without saying “Prudential Center,” limiting the bill’s recipients to building with capacities of “at least 15,000 [that] have operated for at least 15 years in a city with an international airport in a non-coastal county with at least 550,000 residents and a density of not less than 3,000 people per square mile.” (If this wasn’t sufficient, the next item on the list was presumably going to be “and ending in X.”)

The bill also includes one of the more hilarious provisions ever for a sports subsidy, requiring that “the gross economic benefit of the sports and entertainment facility to the State over the duration of the commitment period is at least 150 percent of the overall public assistance provided to the sports and entertainment project”— an effectively meaningless provision, given that “gross economic benefit” just means money changing hands in your locality, not any actual tax receipts that can be used to refill the state budget. Dena Mottola Jaborska, executive director of New Jersey Citizen Action, warned that New Jersey is already facing a “very brutal budget” with a $1.5 billion projected deficit in the current fiscal year, and “you are talking about taxpayer dollars going towards these wealthy corporations, 3 billion dollars’ worth, at a time when we’re going to have a hard time balancing our budget heading into next year.”

Though the Devils subsidy bill was put forward outside of the state budget process, it still needs to go through the Assembly Appropriations Committee before going to a floor vote, as well as passing through the state senate. The 2026 legislative session begins January 13; I’ll report back here if New Jersey residents will have any opportunities for public comment.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: The year that stadium subsidies went completely nuts

access_time personNeil deMause

One year ago today, this site ran an item headlined “Was the Carolina Panthers’ $650m renovation deal really the worst of 2024? An investimagation,” in response to the Center for Economic Accountability declaring Charlotte the winner of that dubious distinction. The conclusion: The Panthers deal was bad, but there were plenty of other contenders, like St. Petersburg’s attempt (eventually rejected) to give over $1 billion to the owners of the Tampa Bay Rays, the Washington Capitals and Wizards owner landing $515 million from D.C., plus non-sports megadeals for everything from an Eli Lilly drug plant in Indiana to expansion of film and TV production tax credits.

All that seems like a million years ago. The year 2025 will be remembered for lots of things, but one is that it was the year where stadium subsidies blew way past the billion-dollar mark, with Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris landing a stadium-plus deal worth at least $6.6 billion in cash, land, and tax breaks, then Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt following that up with a preliminary agreement for around $4 billion in goodies for a stadium development in Kansas. Otherwise notable events of the past year like the state of Ohio gifting Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam $600 million (or more) to move from one part of the state to another and even San Antonio providing $1.3 billion for a new San Antonio Spurs arena project — easily an NBA record — feel like chump change by comparison.

And that’s the bigger concern here: While in a sane world, elected officials would sit down and figure out how much the presence of a sports team is worth compared to having money for public services, or at least how much they need to offer to outbid other prospective host cities, if any, in this timeline it’s more about what the next guy down the road has established as the going rate. It’s impossible to say, for example, how the Chicago Bears owners’ perpetual game of footsie with both Chicago and every suburb within driving distance will turn out, or if Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman will replicate the Chiefs’ tax windfall — but when owners can point to previous deals and argue that giving 99 years of free rent or all future sales tax increases from a 300-square-mile area is just the cost of doing business, it makes it easier for state, county, and city officials to say “sure, I guess, do we at least get a luxury box?”

And on that note, let’s wrap up the final news from 2025, and the early returns from 2026:

  • Kansas state senate president Ty Masterson said the “worst case scenario” for a Chiefs stadium is “nobody buys the bonds, the bonds don’t get sold, the project doesn’t happen,” but it seems far more likely that if nobody is interested in buying the bonds, the state would make its sales tax increment district even bigger than 300 square miles, which seems like it would be considerably worse. Or the state could have to sell bonds at an interest rate of as high as 8.5% to lure bond buyers, which would definitely be worse. Let only your imagination be your limit, Ty!
  • Count newly elected Kansas City, Kansas mayor Christal Watson, who is also CEO of Wyandotte County (counties got CEOs?), among those eager to look the Chiefs stadium deal in the mouth: “If the numbers aren’t there for us to maintain the services that are needed for the community, then we’ve got to reevaluate and renegotiate,” said Watson this week. It ain’t over until it’s over!
  • Meanwhile, Kansas speaker of the house Dan Hawkins says with the clock turning over to 2026, “time’s up” for the Royals to use STAR bonds that were approved last year. Though technically the legislature can still change its mind and approve new bonds until the end of June — if it can find some bits of eastern Kansas that aren’t already part of the Chiefs stadium tax district — this seems like a good opportunity for Missouri officials to recognize that they’re the only bidder for the Royals and drive a hard bargain, though vowing to do an end run around voters doesn’t seem like a great start.
  • The Minnesota Timberwolves owners are still dreaming of a new arena that will feature augmented reality, and Wild owner Craig Leipold wants to make sure he’s in line for arena upgrades too, because “in order to survive in the NHL” you “need to be in a really good building,” and his building is a whole 25 years old and the team is only turning $68 million a year in profits, this is clearly St. Paul’s problem to fix.
  • San Antonio mayor Gina Ortiz Jones says she’s not done trying to renegotiate that Spurs deal, on the grounds that “non-binding means non-binding.” She likely needs a majority of the city council to back her up there — San Antonio has a weak-mayor form of government — but props to her for knowing how to read a dictionary.
  • The New England Revolution owners reached an agreement this week to pay Boston $48 million over 15 years to compensate for traffic and transit problems caused by a planned new stadium in Everett, as well as $90 million over 20 years in parks and transit upgrades in Everett. With team owners the Kraft family covering the $500 million stadium construction cost, I’m tempted to say this is actually a pretty fair deal and a sign that at least some local politicians can still drive a hard bargain, though it’s equally like that this is mostly a sign that nobody in the U.S. cares as much about MLS as about the other football.
  • Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts is set to be torn down and replaced next year, which will come as a sad note to anyone who read Foul Ball, Jim Bouton’s book on how he helped temporarily save the old ballpark 20 years ago.
  • There’s another interview with me up about the Chiefs deal, which you can listen to here — there doesn’t appear to be a way to link to particular timestamps in a YouTube short, but enjoy the whole thing anyway, it may be the last thing on the platform that’s not AI-generated!
Share this post:

Friday roundup: Chiefs stadium to cost all Kansans tax money, Royals up next

access_time personNeil deMause

I have to figure hardly anyone is reading this here on Christmas weekend, but for those of you who are, here’s an abbreviated news roundup, much of it about the proposed Kansas City Chiefs stadium deal, because almost everything is this week:

  • The STAR bonds that Kansas plans to use to finance $1.8 billion worth of a Chiefs stadium (and close to $1 billion in other development by the team) confuse a lot of people, and headlines like the Kansas City Star’s “Much of Wyandotte, Johnson counties will pay for Chiefs stadium with sales tax” aren’t helping. No, people inside the “stadium district,” which could end up covering much of those two counties, won’t be paying extra taxes for the stadium; rather, an amount equal to all future sales and liquor tax receipts above what the district is getting now will be removed from the state’s general fund and used to pay Clark Hunt’s stadium bills. (State officials seem to believe that all this will be free money because the only reason tax revenues will rise in the area will be the eight home games a year the Chiefs will play, which is insane on several levels — more on that after the holiday.) That means the cost will fall just as much on Kansans in Topeka and Wichita and points west as it will on those in and around Kansas City, since the state will have to find a way to pay its future bills without a couple hundred million dollars a year in tax revenues it would have otherwise gotten. So really it’s “Everyone anywhere in Kansas will pay for Chiefs stadium,” hth.
  • Elected officials in Missouri, meanwhile, have learned their lesson from the huge giveaway across the border: Time to try to throw billions of dollars at the Royals owners or risk being left without any billionaires to give tax money to. KC, MO Mayor Quinton Lucas noted on Tuesday that voters look to be opposed to this sort of thing, so “we’ve talked about a pathway that allows us to do it through public body approval rather than perhaps having to go to the ballot box,” take that, voters who insist on having opinions the mayor doesn’t like!
  • Construction of the Athletics‘ planned Las Vegas stadium is ongoing — for now, at least — but the casino complex that’s supposed to surround it may not happen for a while if ever: Leaseholder Bally’s has yet to announce a financing plan for its part of the project, and may yet seek another investor to take over the development. That could be a problem for A’s owner John Fisher, who was counting on Bally’s building a parking lot and other infrastructure that the ballpark would use, meaning he’d need to find a way to pay for it on his own, even while figuring out how to pay for the bulk of his $2 billion stadium on his own.
  • Greater Greater Washington has a good long rundown on how this year’s Commanders stadium deal became so bad that it still outpaces even the extremely bad Chiefs stadium deal, dipping briefly into a discussion of Swiss semioticians before returning to its main point: “The moderate flank of our government behaved as recklessly and irresponsibly with the District’s finances as their progressive colleagues are so often accused of, but, because it’s sports, masquerading as economic development, they won’t be attacked by business advocates, the press, or public opinion for putting their pet causes first.” Well, possibly by public opinion, but mayors know how to get around that.
  • Finally, I did a bunch of interviews this week about the Chiefs stadium deal, and you can find one of them here — another from December 24 should be showing up here, but it looks like it’s been delayed by the Christmas rush, check back later.
Share this post:

Friday roundup: Chiefs to ramp up Kansas saber-rattling, Bears’ Indiana move threat gets cool reception in Illinois

access_time personNeil deMause

Are people still flipping out about Chicago Bears management acknowledging that Indiana is next door to Illinois and they could try to build a stadium there if they wanted? Yep. Does that mostly come down to “fans in Indiana would be happy with a shorter drive and those in Chicago would be unhappy with a longer one”? Yep.

We’ll get back to the Bears in a sec, but first the latest in a more advanced cross-state NFL team location battle:

  • A Kansas legislator says the state’s Legislative Coordinating Council, a joint committee of leaders of the state house and senate, is set to meet on Monday to discuss a proposed agreement between the state and the Chiefs on a new stadium, though the state commerce department cautions that “no final agreement has been reached.” The Missouri Independent says the committee could start the process of approving state-backed STAR bonds at its Monday meeting, though the state already approved those in concept last year, and it doesn’t seem possible to actually sell specific bonds without a specific agreement in place, so not clear on what could actually get decided on Monday. Mostly, this seems to be a way for the legislature to declare that Chiefs owner Clark Hunt has met the required end-of-2025 deadline to be eligible for the bonds — as has Royals owner John Sherman, apparently, despite no concrete stadium plans at all, given that committee chair Ty Masterson’s office said he believes the Royals have met the deadline by being “fully committed” to Kansas. Some sort of announcement of a Chiefs deal on Monday seems likely, but it’s also likely that a lot of details will still need to be worked out, so let’s hold off on the “Chiefs are moving to Kansas” headlines for the — never mind, too late.
  • Back in Illinois, state officials are taking talk of a Bears stadium in Indiana in stride, with State Rep. Kam Buckner (district includes Soldier Field, is opposed to stadium subsidies) calling the team’s move threat “very predictable” and saying “in negotiations, what you do is you create leverage by saying you have more options,” while State Rep. Mary Beth Canty (has sponsored a bill to allow for stadium subsidies in Arlington Heights) asked that the Bears “engage with the General Assembly in good faith, without threats.” State Sen. Bill Cunningham, meanwhile, called giving the Bears a property tax break (but not necessarily all the infrastructure money team execs are asking for) “a good starting point” because it would only be local, not state, tax money, but said “we have more important things to tackle first.” It certainly sounds like the Bears owners can get something out of Illinois, even it not everything they’re demanding; dropping an Indiana move threat may help them get on the legislative agenda, which may be all they want, but there’s still a whole lot of haggling to go.
  • Cleveland’s Gateway sports authority is facing an estimated $150 million in imminent repair costs for the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, plus another $261 million over the next decade, and has no money on hand to pay for these costs and no plans for how to raise it. Not great! The city and county cover capital repairs while the teams cover maintenance, so there’s still the possibility of haggling over which is which. The government taking on all capital repairs during the teams’ 2004 lease renegotiations still seems like a terrible idea, and Gateway just defaulting on this and daring the teams to break their leases (which expire in 2034 and 2036 anyway) early seems like a reasonable consideration compared to throwing $400 million in good money after bad, but nobody’s talking about that just yet.
  • The Dodger Stadium gondola project refuses to die, year after year after year. “NBC Los Angeles reports that during the meeting, project supporters waved signs reading ‘Build the gondola’ while opponents held signs saying ‘Stop the gondola’,” can’t we come to some sort of compromise?
  • Inter Miami‘s new stadium is finally set to open next spring, but the promised accompanying public park space won’t be ready yet, seen that one before.
  • And then there’s Germany, where when a pro women’s soccer team needs a bigger stadium, the team owners buy the one that a recently relegated men’s team is no longer using plays in. It was built way back in 1992, can you imagine how outdated the Getränkehalters must be?
Share this post:

Stadium questions the media shouldn’t even bother asking

access_time personNeil deMause

If you’ve been reading this site for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which states, to save you from having to click through, that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” It’s not 100% accurate — sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes even definitely maybe. But most of the time it’s a sign that a reporter spent a bunch of time on investigating a question, realized the answer was boringly obvious, and their editors decided to post the query as the headline instead, hoping to at least get clickthrus from readers curious to find out the details. (Which is pretty much how most headlines are designed to work these days anyway.)

Which brings us to these two recent, I’m going to call them “news stories,” though one is an item accompanying an All Things Considered radio item and the other is a repost of a Substack post:

Downtown Minneapolis is struggling. Would a new Wolves and Lynx arena help?

Pretty easy to guess no here, given that the Timberwolves and Lynx already play in a downtown Minneapolis arena, even if it’s one where, as one fan told Minnesota Public Radio, has “restrooms [that] look like they’ve been there for 20 years.” (Presumably whenever her own restrooms get too old, she moves to a new house?) And in fact, the author of the piece knows the answer, because there’s Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury down in the later grafs saying the answer is no, and it “isn’t some rogue opinion I have. It’s something that’s shared by the entire disciplin. If you ask doctors, ‘Is smoking bad?’ They’ll universally say yes. If you ask economists, ‘Are stadiums bad public investments?’ They’ll universally say yes.”

The article then pivots to talking about how much expensive arenas are to build these days (true), and how the “aging Target Center is mostly upper deck seats” which makes tickets more affordable (possibly slightly true, but probably not so much). It’s not clear why any of this story exists, though the accompanying radio piece does feature T-Wolves co-owner Alex Rodriguez (yes, that one) describing a new arena as “an anchor to the community,” so presumably this was pitched as an investigation of that claim — though if so, sticking in one quote from an economist halfway down saying this question has been asked and answered and then running a headline making it seem like an open question … that’s a choice, certainly.

Then there’s whatever you call this, which ran last week in the Rochester Beacon as a reprint of local reporter Gary Craig’s Substack column:

Is the new Bills stadium really such a bad deal for taxpayers?

Going to go with yes here, because (waves hands generally at everything that has been written about it on this website and elsewhere). But sure, let’s hear how spending $750 million in state money and $250 million in county money to move the Buffalo Bills across the street could be a good deal for taxpayers:

Tucked away in New York’s 2021 analysis of costs for a new Buffalo Bills stadium is this tidbit: “Personal income tax, primarily related to Bills team payroll, is the largest single fiscal revenue source, generating approximately $19.5 million per year for the State of New York.”

That number was likely low then, and with the increasing salary cap in the NFL, is certainly low now. Experts with whom I’ve spoken estimate the annual income tax revenue likely will be upwards of $30 million from the Bills and visiting teams…

These income taxes are numbers not often talked about in the debate over public financial support for a new stadium.

Uhhh, is this for Substack’s new posting-while-smoking-crack vertical? The benefit of getting income taxes from player payrolls is talked about all the damn time by team owners and pro-stadium-subsidy politicians — in fact, here’s then-Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker doing so about a new Milwaukee Bucks arena 10 years ago. The problem is threefold:

  1. Math: Even $30 million a year in new income tax revenue isn’t enough to cover $1 billion in public spending — it’d be worth a little less than half of that in present value. So even by Craig’s own logic, the answer to his question is yes, it’s a bad deal for taxpayers.
  2. New vs. existing revenue: The Bills already play in Buffalo, so this is income tax money that the state and county will be getting regardless of what stadium they play in. It would only become a windfall if you assume the Bills would have moved without a $1 billion stadium subsidy, which LOL.
  3. The but-for: Even if the Bills did move, the money Bills fans currently spend on tickets would likely be spent on something else within Erie County and certainly New York state, and would go to pay other salaries that would generate income taxes. It wouldn’t be a 1:1 replacement, no — a portion of the Bills salaries are paid by TV rights money, and that would indeed depart — but some of the tax revenue would remain, making the $1 billion taxpayer expense look even worse.

“I’m still trying to do a deeper dive on the stadium financing,” concludes Craig, and maybe he should have finished his research before posting this, or at least before letting the Rochester Beacon reprint his off-the-cuff thoughts. Anyway, hope this helps, not sure honestly why I’m still trying to critique a journalism world that is invariably headed slopwards, I’ll have to do a deeper dive on that impulse someday.

Share this post: