Category: Misc

Friday roundup: Goodell meets with IL leaders on Bears, KC okays public vote it says won’t apply to Royals

access_time personNeil deMause

Slow news week, busy Friday roundup, as the saying goes. (I didn’t say it was an old saying.)

  • Roger Goodell and a Chicago Bears minority owner met this week with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and state legislative officials, and if you want to take that as a sign that the league and team want a better option than moving to Indiana, go for it. If you want to take it as a sign that they’re trying to create leverage on Indiana counties to approve all the requested tax subsidies, that works too. Could be both! It’s always important to have a backup plan.
  • The Kansas City council has scheduled an April ballot measure on whether future sports stadiums and arena funding will subsequently require ballot measures, prompting an immediate debate on what “future” and “subsequently” will mean for the Royals stadium plans. Missouri Workers Power says a yes vote would apply to a Royals project, Mayor Quinton Lucas says nuh-uh, this seems destined to be resolved by the robot lawyers.
  • Buffalo Bills execs say they’re listening to fan complaints about obstructed views and not being allowed to bring in water bottles to refill at their new taxpayer-funded stadium. “We anticipated it would be a bit of a learning process,” said Bills president of business operations Pete Guelli, who never could have expected fans would want to see the game or drink water, these kids today are so coddled.
  • Athletics owner John Fisher still hasn’t tapped the $380 million in state money he’s been promised for a Las Vegas stadium, after spending $700 million of his own money and money borrowed from Goldman Sachs and with $1.4 billion still to go. Why? Fisher hasn’t said, but it doesn’t really matter whose dollars get spent first, unless bond rates keep soaring and Nevada ends up having to finance the more expensive part of the stadium debt, that’d be bad.
  • MLB is looking at building a temporary stadium in a national park oh never mind they’re not now.
  • Sedgwick County, Kansas has run out of sales tax surcharge money to pay for upkeep of Wichita’s arena, leading local officials to try to find other money to avoid dipping into property tax revenues that would otherwise go to the general fund. (The county does collect some arena profits and naming rights money, but not enough to cover maintenance costs.) And since any money that the county spends on the arena is money that could have gone into the general fund, the current plan appears to be hitting up the city for the cash, on the grounds that the county “built the arena as a favor to Wichita,” sure, sure.
  • “Cities keep shelling out taxpayer money for sports stadiums, yet the economics almost never makes sense.” Accurate! Most of the Conversation essay by University of Tampa economic professors Abigail Hall and Aaron D. Wood will be familiar to regular readers of this site, but it’s worth bookmarking, if only for all the useful links to studies it contains on everything from how little positive economic impact sports venues have to how most sports spending is by local residents who would spend that money elsewhere nearby anyway.
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BREAKING: $700m Stars arena subsidy is endorsed by advocates, opposed by critics

access_time personNeil deMause

Is there any journalism trope more tiresome than bothsidesing? Ducking the hard task of investigating the facts by just throwing up your hands and saying “different people disagree” is so plainly egregious that even the dictionary calls it out as reprehensible, and yet it’s still a staple of our daily news coverage. Here it is again, in today’s Dallas Morning News story on attempts to get a Dallas Stars arena funded in Plano, Texas:

The debate underscores the competing views of the city’s identity — a suburban community or an entertainment destination — and who should pay for the difference. City officials see the project as a way to keep Plano vibrant. Some residents see it as a departure from the city’s character.

Proponents are in favor, opponents are opposed! Somebody paid $130,000 for journalism school to earn the privilege to write that.

To its credit, the Morning News story does include a modicum of actual reporting on the facts of the deal, though “a tax increment refinancing zone to contribute $700 million toward the project” is not the clearest explanation of taking all the property tax payments in and around the arena and kicking them back to Stars owner Tom Gaglardi to pay for construction, and “the November proposition wouldn’t set the amount of the taxes and city leaders can choose which to levy” is barely English, let alone fiscal analysis. But mostly it relies on advocates for and against the arena funding ballot measure to make the case for why this is a good deal or not, which is an abdication of what journalism is supposed to do: find out facts, and inform readers about them.

I don’t want to be too hard on the reporter here: She’s only two years out of college (she didn’t actually pay for an advanced J-school degree, good on her) and doubtless wasn’t the one who picked the assignment to go report on the smoke and not the fire. But the Morning News really should be doing better here: Over the last three months, its only stories about the proposed Stars arena have been about what neighbors said at community meetings, what neighbors said at a community open house, what stores are closing at the mall targeted for the arena construction, and what the team’s architect says about how great the arena will be. None of that comes close to informing voters on what they need to decide in November — is it worth handing over $700 million worth of future tax money to Gaglardi to fund his team’s new home? — but then, drawing conclusions about that might anger local business leaders and advertisers, best just to stick to recounting all the shouting and leaving it up to readers to decide who’s right, without the benefit of hearing what the numbers say.

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Friday roundup: Cleveland, Nashville keep throwing good stadium money after bad

access_time personNeil deMause

Running late today, let’s do a speed round:

  • Upkeep costs for the Cleveland Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena continue to climb, with one estimate placing them at $261 million, and the county-run Gateway Economic Development Corp. still doesn’t have money identified to pay for them. “We need to figure this out,” said Gateway board chair Virginia “GiGi” Benjamin; given that the Guardians’ and Cavs’ leases only run though 2036 and 2034 respectively, Gateway could always just not spend the money and dare the teams to break their leases a few years early, or at least ask the team owners to kick in a bit more if they don’t want Gateway to default, but still nobody seems to be considering that option, or at least pricing out whether it would be cheaper than spending $261 million.
  • The Tennessee Titans owners are seeking another $75 million for a pedestrian bridge to their new stadium on top of $1.26 billion to build the stadium itself, part of $700 million in public spending set aside for the stadium area, move over, Indiana, there may be a new grift-that-keeps-on-giving champion.
  • Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s lawsuit to get the city of Inglewood to repay him for about $400 million in roads, sidewalks, utilities, and other “public services” for his otherwise privately funded stadium has ended in a judge confirming that the agreement for Inglewood to cover those costs was nullified in a previous court ruling, so sucks to be you, Stan Kroenke. Expect an appeal, and for the two sides to try to settle out of court for a smaller amount.
  • NBA commissioner Adam Silver said it is his “hope and belief that the Trail Blazers can be successful in Portland, Oregon” but that they “need a state-of-the-art arena” but that he’s talked to Blazers owner Tom Dundon and wants to “lower the temperature bit in these negotiations,” all of which are very Adam Silver things to say. It seems like Silver would like for Dundon to find a way to accept a very large taxpayer check while also ensuring that the check is as large as possible, which is why the owners pay him the big bucks.
  • The Kansas City Star says the key difference between K.C. giving Royals owner $600 million toward a new stadium and giving Current owners Angie and Chris Long $185 million toward an expanded stadium is that the Longs are the ones selling the bonds instead of the city, which will “protect the city in the case of shortfalls.” Except that the Longs will get to repay their bonds with city sales tax revenues, so if there’s no shortfall in those, city residents are still on the hook for $185 million. Maybe all of Kansas City journalists need remedial economics lessons?
  • The Washington Commanders parking garages are no longer set to be translucent, now they will just be set in a featureless void or way far in the distance instead.
  • Longshot recidivist Chicago mayoral candidate Willie Wilson (not that one) says he would resolve the Bears stadium battle by paying to build a dome atop Soldier Field and sell the Bears owners land for a new practice facility and give the team (and nearby homeowners) property tax breaks, at a cost of nobody has asked him, the media are just reprinting his campaign glurge, this is fine.
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No, the 2028 Olympics won’t be a $20B boon to the SoCal economy

access_time personNeil deMause

Speaking of bad math, an economic analysis of the impact of the 2028 Olympics on Los Angeles, conducted by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. on behalf of the city’s Olympic organizing committee, concludes that the 2028 Summer Games could result in between $20.5 billion and $40.6 billion of “increased output” in Southern California:

“This study shows the tremendous opportunity we have to support jobs, open doors for local businesses, and drive investments that strengthen communities across Los Angeles,” Reynold Hoover, chief executive of LA28, said in a statement.

That’s a lot of billions, even if “increased output” just means counting up all the Olympic-related spending, meaning LA28 is partly taking credit for how much money it’s pouring into preparing for the 2028 Games. The actual report, though, indicates that this was hardly an exhaustive study: The high end figure was generated by plugging Olympic spending numbers into IMPLAN, a software package that pretty much just takes whatever figures you give it and adds a multiplier. The low end is from a calculator by the International Academy of Sport Science and Technology (which goes by its French acronym, AISTS) that supposedly “counts only money genuinely new to the region — spending injected from outside.” That’s better, but not only does it still count building temporary venues that will then be torn down as an economic plus, it also still doesn’t account for displacement of spending from locals who flee town and non-Olympic tourists who steer clear as a result, which has been a major problem in past Games.

A far better analysis would look at how actual economic indicators have gone during past Olympics, and the L.A. Times hints at one place to start:

An economic forecast by a think tank before the 2024 Games projected the Paris Olympics would generate up to $12.8 billion in net economic benefits. But government auditors concluded in 2025 that the Olympics injected a more modest $2.3 billion into the economy, an almost negligible increase in the nation’s gross domestic product.

A study of the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics and 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics found similar results: While “hotel prices rose precipitously,” authors Philip K. Porter and Deborah Fletcher wrote, there was no evidence of increased consumer spending during the events compared to other years. And Porter and Fletcher specifically called out “the misapplication of regional input-output (I-O) models to one-time-only events like the Olympic Games that draw huge audiences to a region for a short period of time,” calling the lure of IMPLAN- and AISTS-type models “a recipe for mistakes: one part profit, one part easy economic forecast, and one part naiveté yields a host of economic impact studies that are wholly inaccurate and misleading.”

This is pretty much garbage-in, garbage-out, in other words. Combine that with the issue that the private nonprofit LA28 refuses to tell anyone what it’s actually spending on or bringing in from the Olympics, and it’s still very likely that L.A.-area taxpayers will end up losing billions of dollars on the 2028 Games when all is said and done. We won’t know until it’s all over; and even then, that’s assuming that LA28 doesn’t take the preemptive step of burning its financial records to ensure no one can see them, as happened in Nagano in 1998.

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Friday roundup: Nobody in media or politics can math or word right edition

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a while since I’ve thanked everyone who makes this site possible through their generous donations, so: Thanks, everyone, who makes this site possible through your generous donations! I hope you are all still enjoying this journey through the world of sports venue shenanigans, if “enjoy” is the right word for it. Sometimes it feels more like a group therapy sessions for survivors of sports fandom (our own or other people’s or both), but there’s value in that too, right?

I’m going to take the fact that you’ve read this far as a “yes.” Let’s get on with the rest of the week’s news roundup:

  • The Kansas City council approved spending $185 million on expansion of the Current‘s (checks calendar) two-year-old stadium yesterday, something that KMBC described as “$185 million in public financing,” which is absolutely wrong: This would be private debt, but repaid by the city, so private financing but public funding — these things matter. Fox4KC, meanwhile, reported that “the project will be funded by revenue generated by the stadium and surrounding development,” which is also wrong: It will be funded by sales taxes on spending in and around the stadium, most of which probably won’t be new to K.C. at all. This is no way to educate the electorate about stadium economics in advance of a public vote on a Royals stadium next spring, when it will very possibly be too late to matter anyway.
  • Los Angeles County has issued an economic impact report on hosting the 2028 Olympics, far too late to be used to determine how much to spend on the event, but oh well. My eye was immediately caught by the prediction that “the 2028 Games could boost tourist spending by $1 billion above and beyond a typical summer,” a curious conclusion given that actual studies of past Olympics, including Atlanta 1996, Salt Lake City 2002, and London 2012, have found that spending overall doesn’t rise during an Olympics, in large part because locals flee town during the Games. From what I can tell from the county report — turning my laptop sideways to read it because the county doesn’t know how to rotate PDFs properly — consultants HR&A didn’t actually conduct an in-depth spending study, just plugging Olympic visitor numbers into the off-the-shelf IMPLAN software package, because “garbage in, garbage out” is how HR&A rolls.
  • NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly says the league is talking to three different potential Atlanta expansion team ownership groups — because what did that fictitious Einstein guy know, anyway — plus also Austin and maybe Phoenix “with the right location” or maybe expansion “might not happen” at all, Bill Daly clearly got an A in playing hard to get at deputy commissioner school.
  • The Brook Park city council has declared the area around the new Cleveland Browns stadium blighted, which Mayor Edward Orcutt says “gives us the opportunity to be able to maintain this site in the future,” another way of saying “lets us keep spending money on the stadium ad infinitum,” somebody clearly got an A in doubletalk at mayor school.
  • Throw another $60 million on the fire for San Antonio taxpayer spending on a new Spurs arena, this time to acquire land for the project. This brings the public cost total to, you know what, I don’t feel up to mathing today, let’s just call it an even squillion dollars.
  • Residents of Chicago’s Bridgeport’s neighborhood this week protested a proposed Amtrak maintenance facility that could be built there as part of a land swap for a new White Sox stadium, with local alderman Nicole Lee saying, “f the Sox move and we’re left with a 24/7 rail maintenance yard and an empty stadium, we’re done for here.” Team execs, meanwhile, are distancing themselves from minority owner Justin Ishbia’s stadium plan, issuing a statement saying only, “If the site proves viable, it would be added to the locations up for consideration for a new ballpark, along with The 78 and other options.”
  • Judging from my inbox, a lot of you are really excited to see the latest renderings of a new Philadelphia 76ers and Flyers arena, so here, go to town. I’m mostly interested in whether they include fireworks (nope) and how they handle the question of which players’ jerseys fans will be wearing when the place finally opens in 2030 (one part guys currently on the team, one part guys like Charles Barkley, hey remember when he was a Sixer?).
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Friday roundup: Tampa council approves plan to give $2B in public money to Rays stadium, says it’s not really public money

access_time personNeil deMause

The Tampa city council spent all day meeting yesterday about the Tampa Bay Rays stadium deal, but honestly they could have saved time and just voted first thing in the morning. Public speakers were split in their opinions — public speakers are always split — and as for councilmembers themselves, there was little actual discussion for most of the day, with elected officials mostly talking past each other, knowing that everyone’s vote was already decided going in. The only reason you drop a half-finished bill on legislators’ desks less than a week before the vote is to avoid robust public debate, waiting till you know you have a slim majority then calling a snap vote while you know you have a W. The final vote was 4-3 in favor, same as had been since councilmember Bill Carlson used the leverage of his being a swing vote to win effectively no concessions whatsoever while patting himself on the back for doing so.

(WUSF claimed that the swing vote was councilmember Naya Young, but she’d already voted yes to the deal the first time it came up for a vote, leaving open the question of whether the NPR station doesn’t know what a swing vote is or just can’t remember as far back as March. The Tampa Bay Times, meanwhile, parroted Carlson’s line that Rays owner Patrick Zalupski will “cover” $100 million that previously would have come from city property taxes, even though Zalupski’s loan will still be repaid with city property taxes. This has not been a banner week for Tampa area journalism.)

The closest the council came to open debate was at the tail end of the meeting, whcn councilmembers took turns giving statements. I didn’t listen to all of it, but did hear councilmember Luis Viera claim that two-thirds of the stadium is being privately paid for because it’s “revenues from the project” — notwithstanding that it’s tax revenues that anyone other than Zalupski would be paying to the city treasury if they built such a project, but that instead will be kicked back to pay for the stadium costs; if that’s your criterion, everyone should get to write their yearly IRS checks to themselves, on that grounds that it’s tax money that “wouldn’t exist” without them. Councilmember Lynn Hurtak countered that the deal — what we know of it so far, given the many documents that remain unresolved — would put Tampa taxpayers on the hook for an unknown amount of future upgrade costs and called on councilmembers to “show we’re the smart city”; Carlson and council chair Alan Clendenin (yep, this guy) then mansplained at her to read the stadium funding agreement, something she’d already made plainly clear she had done, in detail.

There’s still a Hillsborough County Commission vote today, and while anything can happen, the council was universally seen as the higher hurdle here. For now, Tampa elected officials just voted to approve at least $180 million in future city property tax money plus $400 million or so in future city property tax breaks plus unknown amounts of future property tax kickbacks for additional upgrades, plus $1.5 billion or more in county and state subsidies, all to build a stadium for a billionaire team owner with no other offers on the table from other cities, after hardly any debate and before all the documents have been finalized. If there’s any upside, it’s that the interminable Rays stadium saga appears to be nearing an end, at least for the next couple of decades until the team’s lease at the new place gets close to running out; the cost is only the most expensive taxpayer stadium subsidy in MLB history.

Will other cities be the smart city? Let’s see how stadium and arena matters are going elsewhere:

  • Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas’s explanation for spending an extra $7 million a year on bond payments for a Royals stadium is that it’s not just to get around a public vote, it’s also that the more expensive bonds would be easier for the city to default on. With a sales pitch like that, the city may end up having to offer an even higher interest rate than 5.725% to get anyone to buy their stadium bonds.
  • The Beacon News, meanwhile, says that even though Royals owner John Sherman will only be putting up $55 million for a community benefits agreement against $600 million in city funding, that’s fair because tithing one-tenth of your income to private charity is a Christian tradition. That’s not even true, but it wouldn’t make any more sense if it were, just let it go, it’s been a bad week for journalism all around.
  • NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said he has talked to some Illinois legislators about getting a Chicago Bears stadium done in that state. “We want to make sure that Arlington Heights and Illinois have an opportunity, as well as Indiana, to put their best foot forward,” said Goodell, presumably because “The bidding is now open!” would sound too crass.
  • The Alpharetta City Council approved zoning changes that could lead to an NHL arena in Atlanta’s far northern suburbs, if Atlanta’s far northern suburbs got an NHL team, which nobody is predicting will actually happen.
  • There could be a bidding war for the Oakland Arena between arena management titans Legends Global and Oak View Group, though both parties appear to be offering roughly the same amount of money (roughly $100 million), instead competing on which company can provide better “long-term stewardship” for the venue.
  • Sports teams are really expensive when you’re bidding against billionaires, film at 11.
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Friday roundup: Plano residents to vote on $700m Stars arena subsidy, Bears still playing hard to get with IL and IN

access_time personNeil deMause

In case you missed it, sports economist/meme master J.C. Bradbury has a new book on sports subsidy deals due out soon: This One Will Be Different details the latest in stadium and arena deals and why they never pay off for the public, with a particular focus on the Atlanta Braves‘ extraction of money from Cobb County for a new stadium just 17 years after getting their last one, which he had a front row seat for. And for the run up to the publication date, Bradbury has been building out his sports economics website with all sorts of fresh goodies: FAQs on stadium economics and how stadiums are funded, links to academic studies and presentations, and even a series of YouTube shorts on the lessons of past deals and the prospects for future ones. Check it out, it’s entertaining and eye-opening rabbit holes all the way down!

But don’t go just yet, because first we have another week of stadium and arena news to get through:

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Free Money [subscribers-only]

access_time personNeil deMause

The standard stadium playbook was laid out by Joanna Cagan and myself back in Chapter 4 of Field of Schemes, “The Art of the Steal,” and hasn’t changed much since. The move threats, promises of illusory fiscal windfalls, warnings of obsolescence (whether physical or economic) and so on have…

To keep reading this Field of Schemes minibook minichapter, sign up as a FoS Supporter at the Regular level or above!

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Friday roundup: Blazers arena staredown escalates, haggling continues in Rays stadium standoff

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! There’s nothing in the latest batch of stadium and arena news that can quite compete with the European and North/Central American soccer federations vowing to start boycotting FIFA events as soon as this September if FIFA sells operating rights to the World Cup to Jared Kushner’s brother, but it was still a pretty eventful week:

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Friday roundup: Tampa council slams brakes on Rays stadium approvals, A’s find an investor (maybe sorta)

access_time personNeil deMause

Lots of other news this week while we were off on Portland Trail Blazers watch:

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