Happy Friday! Unless you’re a New York Mets fan or a Puerto Rico fan, that is, or a fan of not destroying the climate more than we already have, or of knowing how words in Spanish are pronounced, in which case sorry, hope next week will go better! (SPOILER: It won’t. Maybe for you, but not for someone, possibly everyone. I mean, have you been paying attention at all to [waves hands at generally everything]?)
We got news! Or at least news-adjacent:
- Pretty much everyone in Philadelphia’s Chinatown hates the idea of having a 76ers arena built on their doorstep, in part for fears it would help jumpstart gentrification. (Generally not, but also maybe yes in this case.) A 76ers development spokesperson replied that it was “disappointing” to see such local opposition when the team is proposing “one of the largest community benefits agreements in the history of our city and country,” which, yup, that’s totally how community benefits agreements are supposed to work, with the developer disparaging community members if they don’t want to accept your first proposal. Or how it too often ends up working, anyway.
- It has nothing to do with stadium and arena funding per se, but the cold war between Madison Square Garden owner James Dolan and the state of New York over Dolan using facial recognition tech to ban lawyers working for firms suing him from attending events and then the state moving to revoke MSG’s liquor license got even more entertaining with the news that Dolan hired a private eye to tail a Liquor Authority investigator. If this spills over into the state legislature actually moving to pull MSG’s tax exemption after 41 years, that would be more important/hilarious, but Gov. Kathy Hochul doesn’t want to do it because, she says, she knows “how important the Garden is,” so that’s probably not happening, at least not until Dolan hires someone to stake out Hochul’s house.
- And in other MSG news, while I really really hate reporting on news that sources to the New York Post, since it’s not really a legitimate news source, this story about the soon-to-open $2.2 billion MSG Sphere in Las Vegas being an inevitable money-loser because it massively overestimated both how much it can rake in from concerts and how much it can get in naming-rights fees is too deliciously schadenfreude-y not to at least take a peek at. (And could be true! The Post isn’t always wrong, just usually.)
- The Chicago Bears may soon get public funding for a new stadium while Chicago taxpayers are still paying off the old one. This isn’t technically bad, for reasons we’ve covered here before, but it’s also not great. Anyway, you can mostly skim through that article, as the best part comes at the very end, when Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury delivers the kicker: “Expecting a stadium to generate a revenue windfall for the community is like expecting Charlie Brown to kick the football. It’s not going to happen.”
- “Has the NHL had it with the Coyotes?” asks (checks exactly what hockey fan site this is) HockeyFeed. As evidence that the league’s backing for the team and its perpetual efforts to either gain a new arena in Arizona or sell any tickets is — avert your eyes, spelling fans — “starting to waiver,” the site cites an “NHL insider” (read: Canadian sportswriter) as saying on a podcast that “I’ve had a couple of GMs who tell me their owners are not happy about it.” Good enough for Betteridge work!
- I sincerely doubt that West Virginia University economist Brad Humphreys actually phrased his public testimony about a potential new Cleveland Browns stadium as “If it is a dome stadium, it will be over a billion dollars,” but in an article that also writes “Humphreys is West Virginia University professor and renowned stadium finance expert,” attention to details like whether it’s “dome stadium” or “domed stadium” is probably too much to ask for.
- Did the Veterans Stadium turf kill Tug McGraw? We’ll probably never know, but you might want to keep your kids off artificial turf fields — or away from other things like, you know, water — just in case.
- Were you hoping to go into the weekend with a handy list of European soccer stadiums that could be underwater thanks to sea level rise by 2050? Got you covered.