Category: College football

Why “the worst seat is closer to the field” is not necessarily a sign of a more intimate stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Northwestern University is building a new $850 million football stadium, which is a crazy amount for a college football stadium, but it’s being mostly paid for by the local billionaire who wants his alma mater to have a new stadium, so at least there’s that. The billionaire’s son, however, is touting the upcoming stadium opening by saying that in reducing the seating capacity from 47,000 to 35,000, he’s helping fans by eliminating bad seats:

“The death of the nosebleeds, “the most expensive seat to build, the hardest seat to sell and has the lowest satisfaction,” [Pat] Ryan [Jr.] told USA TODAY Sports….

“We didn’t just reduce the number of seats. We actually reduced the numbers,” Ryan said. “We did that so that we could put every seat on top of the action by not having to put another 20,000 seats behind. It meant that you don’t have to worry about blocking those other seats. So you can put everybody in.”

Not sure where that first quote starts and begins, might want to check into that, USA TODAY copy editors. But in any case, Ryan’s point is clear: By getting rid of the lousy seats — which cost just as much to build as good ones, but you can’t charge as much for them — Northwestern is doing fans a favor, because the worst seat in the house is now better!

Except that doesn’t really help actual fans any, at all. The 35,000th ticket buyer to a Northwestern game will still be sitting in the same place; they just won’t have any more rows of seats behind them. The 47,000th ticket buyer will indeed be spared their crappy view — because they’ll be at home watching on TV, since the 47,000th seat will no longer exist.

We’ve been over this before, every time a stadium is described as “intimate” because of its low seating capacity: Just because a sports venue has fewer seats doesn’t mean those seats are closer to the field. In fact, most modern stadiums have more levels of luxury seating wedged in, making the worst seats worse than they would be otherwise — check out what adding two new layers of suites is set to do to the upper deck at Barcelona’s Camp Nou, which before its reconstruction offered decent nosebleed tickets despite its massive 95,000-seat capacity. The last seat at the new Yankee Stadium is about the same distance from the field as the last seat at the old one, but that’s because it has about 12% fewer seats total — the 45,000th seat is still just as bad if not worse.

To be fair, Ryan has also talked about “building things up and cantilevering them over instead of going out,” so it’s possible his designers have also worked to bring the remaining upper-deck seats closer to the field by setting them atop the lower deck, which would be a refreshing change from most recent stadium design. (Though it doesn’t really look like it from the renderings.) When stadium builders start talking about “the worst seat in the house” being closer to the action, though, it’s important for readers — and journalists — to demand proof that the new design is actually better for fans, and not just better for the ticket office since they can let the 10,000 chintziest fans stay home and watch on TV.

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Friday roundup: Bears offer Illinois dimes on the dollar toward stadium, Browns considering $150k-a-seat PSLs

access_time personNeil deMause

Apologies for this week’s late roundup — I had to retrieve my now-repaired laptop from the shop and get settled back in before writing this. On the bright side (for you, the information-craving consumer of sports subsidy news, surely not for me, the lowly scribe of such reports), even more stuff happened while I was at the store, so you get to enjoy bonus material as a result!

  • The Chicago Bears owners responded to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s demand that before getting any state help with a new stadium, the team must pay off the state’s $350-500 million in remaining debt on Soldier Field: How about $25 million instead? The response from legislators has been mostly LOLBears: State Rep. Kam Buckner called the offer “inadequate” and “disrespectful,” while Pritzker deadpanned, “I’m not sure what it’s tied to, what they’re asking for in return for it. I think if they’re donating $25 million to support the people of Chicago or the people of Illinois, that’s always a good thing.”
  • Did the Cleveland Browns owners forget to mention that as part of their new stadium in Brook Park, they’re considering charging personal seat license fees of as much as $149,300? Must have slipped their mind, along with how much of those fees would apply to the Haslams’ share of stadium costs and how much to the public’s $600 million and up cost. (Pretty sure the answers are “all” and “none,” respectively, since that’s how it always works.)
  • Also on the Browns front, the Crain’s Cleveland Business editorial board writes that Mayor Justin Bibb’s proposed deal to get $80 million worth of payments in exchange for letting the team move to Brook Park “leaves a bit of a bitter taste” but may be the best Cleveland can get given that “team owners hold the leverage in an environment where cities are desperate to retain their teams.” Or, at least, they do when the state legislature hands out $600 million to the team to help it move from one part of the state to another. Fixed that for you!
  • The Seattle Sounders owners are seeking outside investors to buy a minority share of the team, with the proceeds possibly being used toward building a new soccer-only stadium, possibly at its Longacres training site in nearby Renton. That’s a lot of possiblys, for sure, but Sportico values the Sounders at $825 million and soccer-specific stadiums generally go for less than half that, so … possibly.
  • CT United F.C. will begin play in MLS NEXT Pro next year playing home games at venues scattered across Connecticut, while it waits for a new stadium to be built in Bridgeport — which is to say, while it waits for the state to decide to give it $127 million to build one. “On the merits of the actual math, the jobs, the housing, the economic impact and aligning with what the priorities have been stated for this administration, it aligns perfectly,” said CT United owner Andre Swanston, take his word for it, he’s just a disinterested hundred-millionaire.
  • “Will the College Football Playoff title game bring economic boost to the Tampa Bay area?” WTSP-TV actually looked at the results the last time it hosted the CFP championship in 2017, and nope: A promised $250-350 million economic impact turned out to be just $720,000 in added sales tax receipts, while hotel tax receipts actually went down. “If that were the case, why is every major city and community bidding on these major events?” asked Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan. Because you’re all idiots?
  • No, the “sky stadium” Saudi Arabia plans to build for the 2034 World Cup doesn’t look like this, it looks like this. The former is AI generated, the latter, honestly, is probably AI generated at well, but maybe AI generated on purpose by the people who actually plan to build it? With more than half of the internet now AI slop, it’s arguably bigger news when something isn’t a fake, no?
  • And finally, if you’ve worn out the entertainment value of the yule log, we now have the Athletics Las Vegas stadium construction camera. You’re welcome.
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Friday roundup: Stochastic parrot edition

access_time personNeil deMause

Guys! The AI industry needs our help! Nobody wants AI, and AI has lots of AI, so AI is paying AI to make more AI and sell it to AI and making it up in stock price, and that can’t end well! Let’s help out by asking poor li’l ChatGPT to write this week’s Friday roundup, I’ll check in and see how it does:

Friday roundup: Bears still begging, Thunder still building, and Jaguars still staircasing

[Not terrible, not great. Really the headline should reference the top items, and also what the hell is “staircasing” supposed to mean?]

It’s Friday, which means it’s time once again to spin the roulette wheel of public cash and see which stadium and arena schemes landed on taxpayers this week:

[“Spin the roulette wheel of public cash” is a terrible turn of phrase. Also, to complete the metaphor, the wheel should be “landing on” various schemes, not the schemes landing on taxpayers.]

  • San Diego’s Midway Rising plan to replace Pechanga Arena with a new 16,000-seat venue and a pile of housing and retail is inching toward a December 5 planning commission deadline, with the city still wrangling over traffic impacts, affordable housing quotas, and who gets the upside from the $3.9 billion redevelopment. Because nothing says “revitalization” like betting on a 1970s arena site to turn into a housing solution via sports subsidies.

[I haven’t written much lately about Midway Rising, which would replace the former home of the San Diego Clippers, among others, with one of those mixed-use district that are all the rage now, including a new arena. The whole project would cost $3.9 billion, and if ChatGPT knew that it could look back at old articles to understand this week’s, it would have found Voice of San Diego’s explainer about how the project would get an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District, which is basically a TIF that would kick back property taxes around the site to the developers. How much in taxes? Voice of San Diego didn’t say, and ChatGPT didn’t email property tax economist Geoff Propheter to ask, and Geoff hasn’t gotten to my email yet, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The last line, meanwhile, is a decent attempt at FoS-style snark, but points off for it not meaning anything.]

  • Oklahoma City’s new $900 million Thunder arena is still on track for a 2028 opening, after voters okayed a 1% sales tax to fund most of it. The latest renderings feature lots of glass and “urban integration,” which probably means the public will be paying for a very expensive window. Construction could start in 2026, with the city touting it as a 21st-century civic monument and critics calling it a half-billion-dollar bribe to keep the team happy through 2050.

[Oh come on, you link to fresh vaportecture and don’t even run the images, let alone clown on the woman in the short-shorts who is about to jog right into a stair railing? Also, how is it a half-billion-dollar bribe when the public is spending $850 million? Zero stars!]

  • The Chicago Bears are back trying to convince Illinois taxpayers to help fund their new domed stadium in Arlington Heights, which team execs insist is the “only viable” site. They already own the land, but are still pushing for $855 million in public infrastructure money, because no NFL owner can resist a good subsidy play before kickoff. If they can pull this off, they say they’ll even be nice enough to bid for a Super Bowl in 2031.

[This is not news. Or rather, it was news last week, which is when we covered it.]

  • Penn State’s $700 million Beaver Stadium renovation keeps creeping forward, promising better luxury seating and a closer-to-the-field fan experience, though the main takeaway seems to be that even college football programs are now acting like pro franchises when it comes to stadium arms races. There’s also an Adidas sponsorship wrinkle, just to make sure the project stays as corporate as possible.

[College football programs have been acting like pro franchises for a long time, but they’re outside the scope of this site because life is short. If all it cost to cover college stadiums was consuming every last drop of water on the planet, I guess I might consider it.]

  • The Albany Firebirds’ Arena Football League announced an expansion team in Saginaw, Michigan — the Michigan Arsenal — which will play at the Dow Events Center. It’s minor-league stuff, but still one more example of how arena football owners keep testing the limits of how many taxpayer-subsidized arenas are lying around waiting for someone to fill a few dates on the calendar.

[The — what? First off, the arena football league is now called Arena Football One, and the Firebirds are just one of its nine teams. The Arsenal will indeed play in Saginaw, in a stadium built in 1972. I don’t see anything to complain about here, or even to care about, unless you are an arena football fan in central Michigan, in which case today’s your lucky day, I guess?]

  • Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium is getting a new 4,400-seat indoor concert venue next door, courtesy of Panthers owner David Tepper’s entertainment arm. The new hall will slot nicely into his plan to turn every patch of Uptown into “TepperWorld,” assuming the city doesn’t mind another dose of infrastructure subsidies wrapped in the language of “music tourism.”

[Nobody is calling it “TepperWorld.” And most of the $650 million in public money Tepper got for his stadium development wouldn’t be for “infrastructure subsidies.” And “music tourism” is an actual term (people traveling to go see music, I’m doing it myself soon), though not one that’s particularly in play in Charlotte.]

And that’s the week in stadium boondoggles: one new dome, one giant glass box, one mega-housing-sports mashup, and a staircase in Jacksonville that somehow counts as “progress.” Same time next Friday — unless one of these cities goes broke before then.

[Giant glass box? Staircase? Either ChatGPT is drunk or I am.]

Okay, let’s shrug off the italics and see what other actual news the robots chose to ignore:

  • The Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency has reassigned the Cleveland Browns‘ proposed road upgrade plan back to committee, with one county commissioner saying, “So many questions out there in my mind that I don’t know how we move forward at this point.” But Jimmy Haslam is hungry for his $70 million in road money nowwwww.
  • North Kansas City Mayor Jesse Smith said in a press statement yesterday that he’s engaged in “substantial” talks with the Kansas City Royals owners over a new stadium and remains “committed to transparency throughout this process” but also that talks will be confidential for now, which is a lot of mixed messages, frankly. North Kansas City has a population of 4,467, so it’s probably a fair bet that most of the talks are around how to get the county and state to foot the bill for this thing, even more than they already are.
  • The New England Revolution‘s attempts to build a stadium in Everett already drew complaints from Boston officials that they’d need to be consulted on traffic and other impacts, and now four other cities — Malden, Medford, Chelsea and Revere — want in on those talks too. This is maybe going to be a while.
  • Port St. Lucie is spending $27.5 million on a minor league soccer stadium, and WPTV asked two local barbers how it would it affect the economy.
  • Not to be left out, Denver7 examined how a new Broncos stadium would affect the local economy by talking to a coffee company owner and a personal trainer.

And that’s the week in stadium boondoggles: Some stochastic parrots, hallucinated staircases, and terrible journalism. The future, in other words! Same time next Friday — unless the robots have taken over and are talking to themselves by then, and we can go spend all our time on music tourism until the economy collapses.

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Friday roundup: Rays to play 2025 in Tampa, and other things to make people mad

access_time personNeil deMause

The verdict is in for where the Tampa Bay Rays will play the 2025 season while waiting for their roof to be (probably) repaired, and the answer is: Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, spring-training home of the New York Yankees and rest-of-the-time home of the Tampa Tarpons. I’m going to go ahead and call this a fine enough decision: The stadium holds 11,000 people, not too far off of the Rays’ average 2024 attendance of 16,515; as a spring training site, it has major-league amenities; and it’s still in the Tampa Bay region, so Rays fans won’t have to drive across the state or the country to get to games. Plus, there are multiple fields on the site, so there’s no worry about schedule conflicts, since the Tarpons can just play on one of the back fields while the Rays take over the main one.

Of course, it’s also not in Pinellas County, which is already ticking off Pinellas County commissioners who already held up a vote on approving bonds for a new Rays stadium last month amid concern that the team might play elsewhere for a season or three. Commissioner Chris Latvala, who voted against the stadium deal in July, called the decision “unfortunate,” saying, “there’s going to be over $1 billion public funds dedicated from Pinellas residents to the Tampa Bay Rays, and the thank you that the Rays gave them was to play the games across the bridge in Hillsborough County.” Commissioner Rene Flowers, meanwhile, who voted for the deal in July, told the Tampa Bay Times she’s now not sure if she’ll change her vote, saying, “I’m waiting to see how it looks for us financially” — spoilers, Rene, it still looks just as bad as it did then.

And then there’s this tidbit:

The Yankees will receive about $15 million in revenue for hosting the Rays, a person familiar with the arrangement told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because that detail was not announced. The money won’t come from Tampa Bay but from other sources, such as insurance.

Um, Associated Press, you drunk posting? First off, “Tampa Bay” is not a government entity, it’s a collection of disparate municipalities and counties, so who isn’t the money coming from, exactly? And “such as insurance” is both awfully vague and puzzlingly specific, as the only insurance policy that’s been discussed is that held by the city of St. Petersburg, which is already committed to paying for a chunk of the estimated $55 million cost of repairing the Tropicana Field roof.

Still many questions, in other words. Anyone else want to chime in?

“I’ll be excited to set a record for rain delays in a season,” Rays reliever and union player rep Pete Fairbanks said.

And as for the week’s other news:

  • Orlando’s stadium formerly known as the Citrus Bowl is set to get $400 million in county-funded renovations, something that Orlando mayor-for-life Buddy Dyer first proposed last year and which the county gave preliminary approval to back in January. The money would come from the “tourist development tax” — the same pool of hotel-tax money that Pinellas County is currently debating whether to hand over to the Rays — which according to the authorizing legislation can be used for building stadiums, or building auditoriums, or funding aquariums or museums or zoos or beaches or advertising tourism or a whole lot of other things, so long as the purpose is to get more tourists coming to your county. It’s actually somewhat difficult to argue that renovating a stadium that hosts a handful of college football games each year in order to make it “fully symmetrical” is what’s needed in order to encourage tourists to go to freaking Orlando, but this is what the county commission is being asked to vote on in the next couple of weeks, with a straight face.
  • A report by consultant Econsult Solutions Inc. commissioned by the city of Cleveland claims that the Browns leaving downtown would cost the city $30 million in annual economic activity and $11 million in annual tax revenue, which on the face of it doesn’t make any sense since Cleveland doesn’t have any taxes that are at 36.7%. A quick look at the report itself doesn’t reveal any more methodological details, except that Econsult apparently calculated its estimate that Cleveland would lose 29% of Browns-related spending by dividing the population of the city by the population of Cuyahoga County, LOLconsultants.
  • Personal seat license prices at the new Tennessee Titans stadium are in some cases going up from $750 per seat to $10,000 a seat, and season ticket holders are not pleased. But at least the PSL money will help pay off the public’s $1.2 billion share of the construction — oh, what’s that, the seat license money is entirely going to pay off team owner Amy Adams Strunk’s share of the costs? The Hog Mollies didn’t mention that part!
  • The city of Oakland’s sale of its half of the Oakland Coliseum site to private developers is on hold, apparently because Alameda County is dragging its feet on the transfer of its half of the site which it had previously sold to A’s owner John Fisher. No, that doesn’t make sense to me either, it looks to involve a lawsuit in progress charging that the sale violates the state’s Surplus Land Act requiring that public land first be offered up for development as affordable housing — similar objections were raised about the Los Angeles Angels deal, you may remember, but that fell apart before it was ever resolved, so who knows what’ll happen here.
  • One long-rumored stadium site the Kansas City Royals definitely won’t be moving to is the old K.C. Star building, because it’s being converted into an “AI innovation facility.” A local wine bar owner called this “not the most exciting thing for the neighborhood” but at least a plan that wouldn’t require displacing local businesses, which is probably about right.
  • Diamond Sports Group, aka Bally Sports aka FanDuel Sports, has emerged from bankruptcy reorganization, with lots of consequences for the MLB, NBA, and NHL teams it formerly provided cable broadcasts of. ESPN has a rundown, but the main takeaway is that a bunch of teams are going to getting less TV money than they expected, which will effect everything from their player budgets to the relative importance of market size in terms of team profitability, while fans will get some new options including the ability to do pay-per-view of single games for a mere (?) $7 a pop. More on this as more dominoes fall, maybe, or check Marc Normandin’s Marvin Miller’s Mustache newsletter later this morning, if I know him he’ll be weighing in on this.
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Orlando mayor wants to spend $650m+ on Magic arena and Citrus Bowl, forgets to give a reason

access_time personNeil deMause

Unless I’ve been derelict in my duties as a category tagger, the last mention of the Orlando Magic around these parts came in 2017, when a Florida state rep proposed outlawing the construction or renovation of sports facilities on public land. (His bill went nowhere, obviously.) That six-year lull ends now:

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer outlined a plan Tuesday to use tourist-tax revenue to pay for an upgrade of Camping World Stadium, improvements to Amway Center and an addition to the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts.

Not counting interest, the bill would be over $700 million — including $400 million for the stadium and $256 million for Amway — and require the city to issue bonds that it would pay off with future revenue from the tourist development tax.

Amway Center is where the Magic play; Camping World Stadium is where the Citrus Bowl is played, and used to be known (wait for it) as the Citrus Bowl; the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts is a performing arts center, but would also be getting only pennies on the dollar here, so let’s never speak of it again. Buddy Dyer has been mayor of Orlando for long enough that he was there to shoot down attempts for the city to get a cut of stadium revenues in exchange for helping pay for the Orlando City S.C. soccer stadium that eventually opened in 2017. $700 million is a stack of twenties 5.5 miles high.

Some questions and answers:

Wut

That is not technically a question.

$700 million? Seriously?

You probably should direct that to Buddy Dyer, but yes, apparently he is serious.

How old are the buildings, anyway?

The Amway Center opened in 2010, replacing the Amway Arena, which opened in 1989. (Three guesses what company the DeVos family, which owns the Magic, gets its money from.) Camping World Stadium was built way back in 1936, but has been renovated multiple times since, most recently just two years ago.

Whose pocket would this money come out of?

The tourist taxes are collected by Orange County, not the city of Orlando, which may explain some of Dyer’s enthusiasm for the idea.

What if there are cost overruns?

Dyer said, “The city will take on the obligation of constructing [both projects] and any cost overruns for that, which we think is a substantial risk in any type of construction project right now as prices keep going up.”

He said that like it’s a good thing?

This seems to have been part of a reassurance to the county that if they take care of the first $700 million, Dyer will cover whatever’s left with city money. But, yes, he used the fact that construction price inflation is rampant as an argument for the city taking on cost overruns, that is a thing that happened.

What could Orlando and Orange County possibly get in return that would be worth more than $700 million?

“We believe these are community buildings that benefit the entire region,” said Dyer, which doesn’t answer at all how renovating them would make them benefit the region by an additional $700 million. The Magic’s lease goes until 2035, and there’s been no talk of an extension, so it’s not clear if Orlando-area taxpayers would get anything from them in return for their money. (The Citrus Bowl, needless to say, isn’t threatening to move out of the Citrus Bowl.)

Am I, an imaginary FAQ interrogator, the only one actually asking that question?

Some county commissioners asked Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings earlier in the month if the DeVoses would extend their lease in exchange for arena renovations; it’s not clear if they got an answer.

What else could the money be used for?

Theoretically, anything. In practice, the tourist tax is earmarked for promoting tourism, which lhas argely meant giving money to tourist attractions. Earlier this month the county commission voted to spend $560 million on expanding the county’s convention center, something they also failed to explain how it would pay off in increased tourist activity.

What happens now?

We all laugh and point! As to whether the Orange County commission meeting does the same, we’ll have to wait until its next meeting, which appears to be a week from Tuesday — can’t hardly wait!

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Friday roundup: Arlington Heights officials love Bears (sorta), A’s TIF woes, NFL could forgive Snyder if he brings them a new Commanders stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Apologies for the slow posting week — it was busy for me in other ways, so the site was a little quieter than I’d intended. But let’s make up for that now, since the stadium grifting industry doesn’t stop just because I have to step away from the computer:

  • Arlington Heights village trustees met on Monday to discuss the Chicago Bears‘ handwavy stadium proposal, and loved the stadium part but less so the handwavy blank white “mixed use district” part: “I am all in on getting this done for this redevelopment agreement, but I can’t buy into this site plan,” said trustee Jim Tinaglia. “I can’t buy into what it means and how detrimental I think it will be for our businesses downtown.” Trustee John Scaletta likewise said, “We want to keep our downtown and what we don’t want to do is create downtown part two.” Reading tea leaves furiously, that certainly sounds like downtown business (and/or real estate?) interests aren’t happy about a Bears development siphoning off consumer dollars from their neck of the woods, which is maybe a legitimate concern especially in a world where nobody needs the office space we have already, but also maybe shouldn’t be quite as big a concern as the government “funding and assistance needed to support the feasibility of the remainder of the development” that the team owners say they’ll be seeking. Those local electeds, always horse trading for pennies while leaving dollars on the table.
  • Here’s a whole San Francisco Chronicle article about the proposed Oakland A’s stadium’s $1-billion-plus public infrastructure costs and how TIF districts that use tax proceeds from new development to pay off the development almost never work. (It calls them “infrastructure financing districts,” or IFDs, which is Californian for tax increment financing, or TIFs, but same difference.) This is nothing new — check out Good Jobs First’s TIF FAQ for more details — and the Chronicle’s objection that if the promised development never happens, local taxpayers are left holding the bag is just one of the many pitfalls of TIFs: There’s also the issue of cannibalizing development from elsewhere in your city, of subsidizing projects that might have been built even with smaller or no subsidies, and so on. The lure of TIFs is to pretend that taxes from a new project are free money because they really “belong” to the developer who’s paying them — hello, Casino Night Fallacy! — but when one taxpayer gets taxes kicked back, that means everyone else in your city has to cover that taxpayer’s share of city services. (GJF calls this the “ravenous increment” problem; Oscar Madison calls it “That can’t be right. See, I’d be out all this money.”) We’ll see if this article ends up influencing either the debates of Oakland city officials over the A’s project or future news coverage — I’m not holding my breath — but it’s nice to see someone investigating this instead of just reporting on Dave Kaval’s tweets from Las Vegas or whatever Rob Manfred was paid to say this week, anyway.
  • A giant ESPN report on Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder says that as his fellow NFL owners slowly turn on him he’s “lost” the support of his #1 ally, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, but also that “his fellow owners would forgive Snyder for the team’s financial woes and the toxic culture scandal if Snyder could build a new stadium.” Of course, Snyder still may not be able to convince anyone to give him money for a stadium due to that toxic culture scandal, etc., but that even a single NFL owner is saying “bring home a new stadium and all will be forgiven” is telling, to say the least.
  • Hey, remember when the Phoenix Rising F.C. USL team said it was going to build a new stadium on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa reservation complete with robot dogs and giant soccer balls, then announced it had broken ground on said stadium, probably without either thing, with no financial details? Phoenix Rising FC Stadium opened in 2021, and has decent attendance, but that isn’t stopping team management from sending a letter to season ticket holders saying, “We don’t have an update on the team’s location at this time, but as soon as we can communicate where we’re playing in 2023, we will let you know.” So Salt River built them a stadium, or at least let them build a stadium on their land, and didn’t make them sign a lease? Very much here that doesn’t make sense at the moment, but if I can find some reporting with more details, or at least more robots, I’ll report back here.
  • A coalition of 50 Buffalo community groups called the Play Fair CBA Coalition are asking for the Buffalo Bills owners to spend $500 million on community benefits in exchange for their $1 billion state and county stadium subsidy. Erie County officials probably aren’t going to play that level of hardball, but they are demanding “a lot more” than the “standard plus” CBA that the team owners offered, according to longtime NFL consultant/unofficial spin doctor Marc Ganis … okay, that could just be spin doctoring, but the final agreement between the Bills and the county is being held up for unexplained reasons, and where there’s delay there’s hope, at least.
  • The Philadelphia Phillies may want to spend $300 million on a new spring training complex in Clearwater, or at least have somebody spend $300 million on it (local officials got a presentation on the plan from team execs, but according to the Tampa Bay Times couldn’t say “when the Phillies will present their plan publicly, how much the team would pay or how much money the city, county and state would be asked to contribute”), all so players can have “batting cages with floor scales that track a player’s weight distribution through an entire swing”? Good, good, that definitely sounds like it would cost $300 million and be worth taxpayer dollars, no notes!
  • This site doesn’t usually delve too much into college sports because who has the time, but Jackson, Mississippi considering building a new football stadium for Jackson State College and justifying it as maybe convincing the team’s coach to stay at the school, and that coach is Deion Sanders? That is news gold, baby, even if it doesn’t have any robot dogs in it. (Yet.)
  • Speaking of things that could be a whole site of their own, New York state and the federal government are teaming up to give Micron, a $50 billion company owned by multibillionaire Sanjay Mehrotra, $9 billion in cash plus a 49-year property tax break to build a new computer chip plant near Syracuse. (Boondoggle newsletter author Pat Garafolo notes that even if Micron comes through with its promised 9,000 jobs, that’s “just the state’s subsidy payment comes in at a massive cost of more than $600,000 per job created. That’s …. a lot.”) We already knew that up-for-reelection Gov. Kathy Hochul was all about throwing crazy money at chip plants — I guess she figures it’ll win her the votes of all the people who think they might land one of those 9,000 jobs, or at least some campaign money from the chip industry — but $9 billion for just one is … a lot. Meanwhile, other states are spending $13.8 billion in public money on electric vehicle factories, which Good Jobs First notes is “unnecessary, because decades of federal and state investments and policies are driving a robust EV market surge. They amount to states taking credit for good news that is already unfolding.” The best way to get rich on the public dime without being a defense contractor may still be to be a sports team owner, but owning some kind of tech-y company with vague job promises isn’t too shabby either.
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Thursday roundup: NBA mulls expansion to raise quick cash, 60-year-old community-owned team sold to local rich dude, Crew may seek more tax breaks somehow

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy pre-Christmas, everybody! (That’s the name for today, right? I really should Google that.) Here’s the stray news for the short holiday week:

  • NBA commissioner Adam Silver has called expansion the league’s “manifest destiny” and said that “it’s caused us to maybe dust off some of the analyses on the economic and competitive impacts of expansion” (what “it”? shh, don’t ask questions, the important man is talking) but “not to the point that expansion is on the front burner.” The implication is after losing like $1.5 billion in revenue, some quick cash from expansion fees sounds real good about now, but Silver’s not going to be the one to say that out loud, not when it might make him look desperate, not when it’s expansion cities and prospective owners that should be begging him to expand, that’s just how this is supposed to work, you know.
  • The Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, since 1958 run by a community-owned non-profit, have been sold to a local rich guy because, um, something about Covid. Also the non-profit’s chair, Tom Lehr, said “100% of the profits from the sale of the team to Third Base Ventures will be invested back into the team,” according to the Appleton Post-Crescent, which, what? This guy gets to buy the team, and also use the money he paid for it on the team as well? What is even happening.
  • The Columbus Crew‘s old stadium, which is set to become the team’s training ground plus public soccer fields, still belongs to the team while the land under it belongs to the state, and the team has to make $210,000 in payments in lieu of property taxes each year under a 2007 court settlement, but they’re working on a long-term lease now and a term sheet proposed by the team mentions “Ownership of existing MAPFRE Stadium to be discussed and examined in connection with real estate tax and other considerations,” and all this is a red flag but no one’s quite sure of what exactly. Maybe something that should have been considered before giving the Crew $98 million toward a new stadium? Ennnnh, that seems like a lot of work.
  • This year’s Rose Bowl is going to be played in Texas because that California has one of the nation’s worst coronavirus surges (Texas isn’t far behind, but Texas’s governor doesn’t care), and also this year’s Pro Bowl is going to be played on Madden, which warms my heart that our glorious future may finally arrive soon. If you’re wondering if the Pro Bowl had to be moved because its home stadium in Honolulu is on the verge of being condemned, nope, it was going to be in Las Vegas this year anyway, but, you know, Covid. Also, Honolulu’s outgoing mayor Kirk Caldwell warns that the city’s indoor arena is even older than the stadium and even though it’s getting a $43.6 million upgrade, “at some point you run out of life” and okay, yes, Caldwell’s plan for a $700 million replacement arena was already rejected and also he’s only mayor for another week, sorry, I don’t know why we’re actually talking about him.
  • There’s now an online petition against “any taxpayer funding being used to finance, construct, acquire, renovate, equip, enlarge, or operate a new baseball stadium within the City of Knoxville or Knox County.” Allow the debates over what counts as “taxpayer funding” to commence now!
  • If you want to work at F.C. Cincinnati‘s new stadium, they’re hiring! What about all the people who worked at the team’s old stadium, which actually averaged more fans per game than the new one will hold? Sorry, no room in the article for that!
  • The owners of the New York Yankees have agreed to provide ten $5,000 grants to local businesses suffering amid the pandemic — wait, seriously, $50,000? That’s roughly how much the Yankees pay Gerrit Cole for each batter he faces. “We are extremely appreciative of this support from the Yankees,” local bar owner Joe Bastone said, according to a statement issued by the Yankees, which ended up getting a bunch of media coverage out of it, all of it positive. Until now.
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Friday roundup: County might buy Richmond a minor-league ballpark, ticket prices soar at new Crew stadium, plus more athletes giving each other the ‘Rona

access_time personNeil deMause

It was a big news week, what with the Anchorage mayor who resigned after being slandered as a pedophile by the anti-masking news anchor he’d been sexting with before she was arrested and fired for beating up her boss/fiance, and the new book about the libertarian town in New Hampshire that was ravaged by bears, and probably something about the election, I dunno, who can remember? So you are forgiven if you missed some of this week’s stadium and arena news, much of which focused on fans breathing all over each other inside them, but not all, not by a longshot:

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Everything sports leagues are getting wrong about letting fans into games, ranked

access_time personNeil deMause

Another week, another pile of news about sports leagues grappling frantically with what to do about a world where, on the one hand, billions of dollars of revenue are at stake, and on the other, if you let people gather too close to each other for too long, lots of people could die. Let’s start with the NBA, which just completed its successful playoff bubble for the 2019-20 season and is currently trying to figure out how to play next season starting in maybe January:

  •  “Roughly 40 percent of the NBA’s annual $8 billion revenue is tied to arena-related spending on tickets, concessions, parking and merchandise,” notes the Washington Post. Since the NBA salary cap is tied to revenue, this means the league and players will either need to reach an agreement on adjusting that formula for the upcoming season, or seeing draconian cuts in how much each team is allowed to spend.
  • The just-completed playoff bubble worked well, but asking players to spend months more away from their families is likely a non-starter — especially, says the Post, “because the NFL and MLB are operating without bubbles.”
  • NBA commissioner Adam Silver has pointed to “rapid testing” as a necessary advancement before fans can be allowed back in arenas. “If it becomes possible to administer coronavirus tests and get instant results, such a process could be added to the check-in procedure at NBA arenas and facilitate fan attendance,” writes the Post. “‘There are a lot of pharmaceutical companies focused on that,’ Silver said. ‘There’s a huge marketplace for that.'”

Okay, a couple of things here. First off (no, I’m not really going to be ranking these, headline poetic license, sorry), it’s more than slightly worrisome that the MLB and NFL non-bubbles are being used as precedent for the NBA’s plans, since those two have each led to significant outbreaks on several teams. At least these have mostly so far been nipped in the bud by fast quarantines; so if the NBA doesn’t mind scheduling a bunch of makeup doubleheaders, it might work, depending on your definition of “work.”

As for rapid testing: Yes, it is a big problem that testing takes so long right now, as most people are really only able to find out whether they were sick several days ago, which isn’t nearly as helpful from a prevention-of-disease-spread standpoint as finding out if you’re sick right now. But if Adam Silver genuinely thinks you can just scan everybody at the turnstiles and turn away anyone who’s positive and thus create a safe bubble, he needs to read up on how this virus works — for starters, you can be infectious for 48 hours or more before you start testing positive, so while rapid testing could screen out some disease spreaders, it’s hardly a panacea.

The NBA still looks like a bastion of public health concern, though, compared to college football, where the approach is neatly summed up by Lauren Theisen’s Defector article “A Willingness To Risk A Superspreader Event Is Now A Competitive Advantage“:

  • Texas A&M not only admitted 24,709 fans for Saturday’s game against Florida — just under 25% of the 102,733 capacity at Kyle Field; the state of Texas actually allows 50% capacity, though no one’s tried it yet — but it packed fans pretty close together in sections near the field, for maximum intimidation factor, but also minimum social distancing.
  • In response, Florida head coach Dan Mullen now wants his stadium at full 90,000 capacity, “to give us that home-field advantage that Texas A&M had.” The state of Florida has no official limits on fan attendance currently, and Theisen warns that this “could become a dangerous arms race over the next several weeks of the season.”
  • In the largely unregulated world of the NCAA, this is likely to be decided unilaterally by individual schools, just as they’re now deciding whether to cancel games based less on whether they’ve had positive coronavirus tests than on whether they’ve been forced to admit they’ve had them.

And then there’s baseball, which let 10,000 fans (more or less — on TV it looked like less, anyway) into Arlington’s new stadium for last night’s first game of the NLCS between the Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers, raking in their first ticket sales of the year. (Though not for outrageous prices by postseason standards, if StubHub is any guide, with some seats available for under $50.) The roof was open and usable seats were distanced, though they appeared not to be staggered by row — it was tough to tell given how the Fox broadcast avoided any crowd shots. And one 9th-inning homer was followed by an image of two bros hugging each other while unmasked, which may help explain why Fox mostly eschewed crowd shots.

How dangerous is all this? We simply don’t know yet. We do know that outdoors is safer than indoors, but also masked is safer than unmasked and distanced is safer than not distanced; whether piling 90,000 college football haphazardly masked college football fans on top of each other outdoors would spread more virus than distributing a few thousand masked-and-rapid-tested NBA fans around an indoor arena is something that we can only know for sure after someone tries it and sees whether it leads to bodies piling up in hospital corridors. There is some promise in reports that universal masking can result in infections that are less deadly, thanks to reduced viral load — basically, less virus at one time may give the immune system a fighting chance. But even then those less-sick people could still go home and spread virus all over a relative who then gets really sick, so it’s still more silver lining than actual solution.

In a sane or at least less profit-driven world, we’d all be waiting for the results of studies like the one in Germany where they simulated virus spread at an actual indoor concert with masked and distanced fans. But that’ll take a while to get the results from, and college football has to be played now, dammit. Instead, we’re likely to get a patchwork of policies, which could be a disaster or could be totally fine, and we won’t know which until after the fact. Just keep in mind that even if it does turn out totally fine, that doesn’t mean it was a good gamble — just because the surgery worked doesn’t mean it was worth the risk. That’s probably an especially hard lesson for sports fans to learn, since sports analysis is so prone to “pinch-hitting with your worst hitter was a genius move, because he ended up hitting a home run!” reactions, but it’s an important one if you want to successfully win games or ward off a virus, more than once in a blue moon.

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Friday roundup: Everything old is new again

access_time personNeil deMause

What a week! In addition to the new site design and new magnets and new sports subsidy demands rising and falling almost before you could even register them, this week featured the long-awaited debut of Defector, the independent sports (but not only sports) site launched by the former staff of Deadspin. Read it for free, subscribe if you want to post comments and, you know, help support journalism for our uncertain future. I am a charter subscriber, needless to say, and am currently trying to decide which color t-shirt to buy.

On the down side, the entire West Coast has been set aflame by the deadly mix of climate change and gender-reveal parties and looks like a post-apocalyptic movie. The year 2020 comes at you fast. Let’s get to some more news:

  • The owners of the New York Islanders are angling to downsize the Nassau Coliseum so that it doesn’t compete with their new Belmont Park arena for sports and the largest concerts, which is problematic in that they don’t actually hold the lease on the Coliseum, and already ironic in that the Coliseum was already just downsized once so as not to compete with the Islanders’ previous new arena in Brooklyn. Maybe this whole arena glut problem is something New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo might have considered before giving the Belmont project a whole bunch of land price breaks and a new train station? Meh, probably not necessary, we’re all friends here.
  • Hey look, we’re already calling the Los Angeles Angels stadium purchase a $320 million deal even though it’s really only $150 million plus a whole lot of “thanks for some building affordable housing and parks,” that was fast, Spectrum News 1.
  • Some rare actual good news from the pandemic: Somebody in Arlington was smart enough to include a clause in the Texas Rangers‘ lease on their new stadium that requires the team owners to triple their rent payments if parking and ticket tax revenue fell short of projections, which obviously they’re doing what with nobody buying tickets or parking this year. Sure, it’s still only another $4 million, which won’t go far toward paying off the city’s roughly half a billion dollars in stadium costs, but it’s better than a kick in the head. (Also, what on earth is going on in that photo of the Rangers’ stadium that D Magazine used as its illustration?)
  • The Inglewood city council approved the sale of 22 acres of public land to Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer for $66 million, which I don’t even know how to determine whether it’s a fair deal or not anymore, but given the city mayor’s idea of appropriate oversight, I’m not super-optimistic.
  • University of Texas-Austin will have about 18,000 fans in attendance for its season-opening college football game tomorrow, but rest assured that it will be keeping everyone safe by … requiring student season ticket holders to test negative for Covid before being allowed into the game, but not requiring the same of anyone else? (Also fun: They’re supposed to all go get tested today, and get their results back tomorrow, which is not how Covid testing works right now at all.) Clearly the desire to look where the light is better is strong.
  • The Las Vegas Sun has a loooooong article about the process by which the Raiders got their new stadium in Las Vegas that pretty much comes down to “Mark Davis was the sincerest pumpkin patch of all,” but by all means go ahead and read it if you like sentences like “The first major obstacle was how to get both projects done in what most in the resort corridor would feel was a reasonable [tax increase]. That took time to overcome.”
  • Marc Normandin took a great look back at that time the owner of the San Diego Padres tried to gift the team to the city of San Diego for free and MLB said no. It’s subscriber-only, so I’ll quote my favorite section: “There is a reason Mark Cuban will never own an MLB franchise, and that reason is that he’s the kind of owner who might shake things up in a way that forces other owners to have to spend money they don’t want to. On clubhouse comforts, on minor-league players Cuban might try to increase the pay and better the living conditions of in order to produce happier, healthier future MLB players: there is no guarantee Cuban would do those things, necessarily, but his actions and spending helped shape the way the current NBA locker rooms look, so the possibility exists, and that possibility is too big of a risk for MLB’s current 30 owners to take. So, instead, they aim for safe options, like a minority owner in Cleveland becoming the majority owner in Kansas City, as he’s already proven he understands the game and how to play it.”
  • First Dave Dombrowski and Dave Stewart, now Justin Timberlake — if building 1990s star power is the way to get an MLB franchise, Nashville is a shoo-in. Though as Normandin notes, they’d probably be better off finding a minority owner from Cleveland.

Okay, I have to go pick up my computer from its trip to the computer mechanic so I can go back to typing these updates on a keyboard I can actually see the letters on. (Yet another thing that happened this week.) Try to have a good weekend, and see you all on Monday.

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