Category: European soccer

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?
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Friday roundup: Ohio senate leader says damn the analysts’ warnings, full speed ahead on Browns’ $1.2B subsidy

access_time personNeil deMause

Nothing like a week that starts out with a plan for a $1.147 billion stadium subsidy deal and ends with it somewhere well north of $2 billion. But the Washington Commanders horror show wasn’t the only news of the week, so let’s dive in and see what else has been going down:

  • How are Ohio state legislative leaders taking the news that two different state budget analysts have said that the numbers on a proposed $1.2 billion Cleveland Browns stadium subsidy look terrible? “When the Browns put forward those numbers, they’re not putting forward numbers that they grabbed out of a hat. They’ve hired professionals on their side, too,” retorted state senate president Rob McColley. Professional economists on one side, professional clowns on the other, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle! McColley added that senators are “going to make sure that those numbers add up” and will include a “fail-safe” to ensure the state gets its money back, can’t wait to see how that goes.
  • Meanwhile, Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne has asked the state legislature for $350 million to renovate the Browns’ current stadium instead, calling it a “better, and less expensive option,” which is both true and a perfect example of the anchoring cognitive bias. Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb has already offered $240 million in city money toward renovations; this now makes three different official plans for giving upwards of half a billion dollars to Browns owner Jimmy Haslam and none for not giving him any.
  • Here’s a handy chart of where D.C. councilmembers stand on the proposed Commanders stadium deal, with the current tally being four yes, four no, three undecided, and one did not answer. There’s also a special election to fill the Ward 8 seat left vacant by the expulsion of councilmember Trayon White for bribery charges, which is expected to be won by none other than Trayon White, but that’s not till July 15 and the stadium deal has to be voted on by then (quelle coincidence!) so it won’t count, meaning Commanders owner Josh Harris and Mayor Muriel Bowser need to collect three more yes votes from the four remaining swing votes; staffers in those offices might want to take their phones off the hook for the next 11 weeks, because the full-court press lobbying campaign is doubtless going to be brutal.
  • Concessionaire Aramark is reportedly in “talks” with (Your City Name Here) Athletics owner John Fisher about investing $100 million in a Las Vegas stadium project and another $100 million in the team, if by invest you mean pre-paying concession fees that Fisher would get anyway.
  • New soccer stadiums may sound like a great idea to boost team revenues and revitalize cities, writes Aaron Timms in the Guardian, but they often don’t work out that way, leaving fans unhappy at sterile new buildings and teams struggling to repay construction costs. Unless you’re in the U.S., where it’s cities that are on the hook for much of the costs and struggling to repay them: “Stadium-led revitalization is the myth that will survive the apocalypse. New stadiums, as a vast body of academic literature shows, bring few of the economic benefits that developers, team owners, and local politicians promise. Whatever stimulus they offer to economic activity in their immediate vicinity is invariably offset by a corresponding depression in spending and investment in other areas of the same city.”
  • The people who want to bring an MLB team to Orlando say they have close to $1.5 billion lined up to buy a team, which sounds impressive until you realize MLB wants $2 billion for expansion franchises and somebody would have to build a new stadium in Orlando too, but “Orlando rich people happy to pay $1.5 billion toward a team and stadium worth double that” didn’t look as good atop the press release.
  • How’s the economic boom in Green Bay from hosting the NFL draft going? “Sales were down maybe 50%,” Cold Stone Creamery Green Bay owner Amin Elhalw said. “Gradually the closer we got to the draft, the sales were decreasing, the percentage.” Local businesses blamed draft traffic and road closures for keeping away regular customers, funny how that happens.
  • The developer of the Ybor City site in Tampa where Rays owner Stu Sternberg was at one point considering building a stadium (until it turned out nobody wanted to pay to build it for him) now says there’s no room for one, “unless the Rays can build a very tiny stadium.” Turns out building apartments and shopping pencils out better, funny how that happens.
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Friday roundup: Rays, Coyotes, A’s fiascos keep on fiascoing

access_time personNeil deMause

All kinds of news of the week to cover this morning, and I already lost a couple of hours getting up early to yell at my senator’s window about this fiasco. Let’s start with the Tampa Bay Rays‘ own fiasco, and then work backwards:

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Friday roundup: It was the best of summers for team owners demanding stadiums, it was the worst of summers for the rest of us

access_time personNeil deMause

The calendar on my screen says it’s September, which means we made it through another summer. (Not technically until the equinox on September 23, I guess, but if Labor Day weekend doesn’t mark the end of summer, I don’t want to be a part of your arbitrary seasonal delineation scheme.) And quite a summer it was, kicking off with Oakland A’s owner John Fisher fighting for (and getting) $600 million in public money for a new stadium in Las Vegas, then proceeding with Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman ramping up talk about a new $2 billion stadium project either in downtown K.C. or in the next county over, the mayor of Oklahoma City saying the Thunder need a new arena because their 22-year-old one “will keep getting older,” the San Antonio Spurs owners exploring a new arena to replace the one that they just had renovated for them a few years back, many anonymous people claiming that the Milwaukee Brewers will move somewhere without $400 million in publicly funded upgrades to their 22-year-old stadium, and of course the great New York City cricket stadium fiasco, which just gets more fiascoey by the day.  Plus the Chicago Bears are still shopping themselves around to every possible Chicago suburb, the Arizona Coyotes owners are doing the same with every town in the Phoenix area, and the mayor of San Francisco wants to build a soccer stadium without even knowing for what soccer team for some reason.

There are a bunch of possible reasons why we’re seeing this flurry of new sports subsidy demands: lots of stadiums built in the ’90s getting to a point where team owners aren’t embarrassed to ask for new ones, flush state budgets and the promise of federal infrastructure spending getting owners salivating, a rush particularly in MLB to secure new stadium deals before expansion maybe takes some cities off the potential move threat table. Or, you know, this is just the sort of hellscape we’re doomed to live in after our government decided to give all the money to the rich people and then let them spend it on buying elections. Either way, this site’s work clearly isn’t going to be done for a while yet, so I better get started on some fresh tchotchkes to keep you all interested in helping to support it.

And if you prefer news items to tchotchkes, we got you covered there too:

  • Lease extension talks between the state of Maryland and Baltimore Orioles owner John Angelos might still be going nowhere fast, but Gov. Wes Moore (pictured here wearing an Orioles uniform and here doing it again, because that’s how he rolls) says he’s confident of “being able to not just get the lease done, but also making sure that getting the lease done includes all the other lenses that I think are going to be important in this long-term deal.” “Lenses” here apparently means a plan to redevelop the area around Camden Yards, which Moore painted as a win-win for the city and state, and surely not just a giveaway of $300 million in state money plus public land to Angelos so that he can profit from the redevelopment, heaven forfend.
  • Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno is still trying to get the city of Anaheim to pay him $5 million for costs associated with “processing the illegal cash sale of Angel Stadium,” as the Voice of OC puts it. That’s pretty ballsy, but keep in mind this is a guy who’s also trying to get out of paying MLB luxury tax by cutting all the players he just traded for in July and hoping someone else signs them, not to mention tried to push through an illegal stadium land purchase to begin with, so ballsy is pretty much par for his course.
  • Two New York City council committees have voted to give Madison Square Garden just a five-year extension on its operating permit, half the length of its previous permit and infinitely smaller than the perpetual permit that the owner of the Knicks and Rangers was seeking. While this could raise hopes of seeing the city’s Padlock Unit chain up the arena gates, more likely it’s just the council kicking the can down the road again; especially since, as the New York Times notes in classic Timesian we’re-not-saying-we’re-just-saying style, “the Dolan family has shown itself adept at bending the will of the government to advance its own interests, particularly when the various branches of government are not on the same page.”
  • The kerfuffle over the Philadelphia 76ers owners’ terrible “community info sessions” on their new Chinatown arena plans continues, with the first public Zoom meeting held in Mandarin criticized as “garbled” and lacking proper translation; no word yet on how this Tuesday’s meeting in Cantonese went.
  • The Charlotte Observer sent questionnaires to city council candidates asking how much the city should be contributing to upgrades on the Carolina Panthers‘ stadium, and if “any answer would be premature” is the kind of response you were hoping for, then you will be very pleased by the efficacy of candidate questionnaires. (To be fair, it is kind of dumb to ask about how much should be spent without taking into consideration things like whether the team owners would pay additional rent, say; to also be fair to the Observer, it really does sound like the candidates mostly used this argument as an excuse to duck the question entirely.)
  • Construction has finally begun on Inter Miami‘s cursed new permanent stadium! Or at least “earthwork and site work” has begun, according to a team press release, jeez, Miami Herald, you couldn’t even be bothered to drive over and confirm it? The stadium is now scheduled to open sometime in 2025, but we’ve been hearing similar predictions for, good lord, has it been five years already? At this rate Lionel Messi’s kids are more likely to play at a new Inter Miami stadium than he is.
  • If you thought what Congress needed was a Historic Stadium Caucus to work on ways to upgrade older college football stadiums, including possibly with federal infrastructure money, U.S. Rep. Garret Graves has some great news for you.
  • The promised housing construction that was supposed to be built as part of the Brooklyn Nets arena is set to miss a May 2025 deadline, and New York state is considering greasing the skids by restoring a tax break that expired last year, because of course it is.
  • There might be worse ways to frame a story about how the owners of the San Antonio Missions are trying to get city money for a new minor-league baseball stadium and city officials haven’t been returning their phone calls until the next day than “Missions can’t get to first base on downtown baseball stadium,” but between the what’s the holdup with approving subsidies? and the terrible baseball play on words, it’s hard to imagine one.
  • The company that owns the Boston Red Sox is buying the company that owns the TV rights to Pittsburgh Pirates games, which Marc Normandin points out means that going forward it’ll be easier for the Red Sox to outspend the Pirates if the Pirates make more TV money. Normandin calls this “just a weird sentence to type”; me, I’m reminded of syndicate ball, which was a fun time.
  • What do “Spring training season brought $418M to state’s economy in 2023” and “Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour has a huge economic impact” have in common? If you guessed “They’re both as big a load of BS as that time people insisted LeBron James leaving the Cavs destroyed Cleveland’s economy,” you’re a winner!
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Friday roundup: Dolan vows price hikes if he loses MSG tax break, Palm Desert arena builder says city wants “handout,” and other sports owners doing the craziest things

access_time personNeil deMause

There’s a construction crew with jackhammers outside my window digging up the exact same patch of sidewalk they spent most of last year digging up, so if you think you’re getting a clever Friday roundup intro this week, you’ve got another think coming.

  • New York Knicks and Rangers owner James Dolan has warned that if whoever gets elected as New York’s new mayor this year repeals his teams’ $50-million-a-year property tax exemption for Madison Square Garden — something that isn’t actually in the mayor’s power, since it’s a state tax break, but anyway — he may have to raise ticket prices in response. This implies that Dolan is currently charging less for tickets than the market will bear out of gratitude for having some tax-break money rattling around in his pockets, which doesn’t sound like how a billionaire failson operates; the alternatives would either be that Dolan is bluffing, or that he’s so dumb that he would raise ticket prices to the point where it would lose him money out of misguided spite, either of which seems very James Dolan.
  • Officials in Palm Desert, California, say that before approving Tim Leiweke’s proposed minor-league hockey arena, they want to know who’ll pay for an estimated $5 million a year in added police and fire costs; Leiweke fired back that Palm Desert “just wants a handout and we’re not going to do that,” earning himself a dictionary entry next to this entry.
  • Major league stadium subsidy demands may have slowed somewhat during the pandemic, but minor-league schemes are making up for lost time, especially in baseball following MLB’s takeover and planned shrinkage move. Look, here’s Ryan Moore, the GM of the Myrtle Beach Pelicans, declaring that without $15 million in upgrade money, his team’s stadium “won’t last another 20 years as it stands.” When was it built? 1999. Moore didn’t specify whether the building was on borrowed time because it was mistakenly built out of papier-mâché or because if it’s not renovated, he would personally blow it up.
  • Of course, here’s a Columbus Dispatch article that calls the Columbus Crew stadium built in 1999 “historic,” so maybe time is just compressed right now, probably due to time dilation from a passing black hole.
  • The Clark County Commission has approved former UNLV basketball player Jackie Robinson’s plans to build a $3 billion sports arena complex on the Las Vegas Strip, despite Vegas already having more arenas than it can shake a stick at. Now all Robinson needs is $3 billion, and he’s all set!
  • I’m still waiting for an oral history of the collapse of the European Super League, but until then we’ll have to settle for the New York Times’ blow-by-blow, which features among other things Juventus president Andrea Agnelli repeatedly promising the head of UEFA that he was about to issue a statement condemning any breakaway attempt, then shutting off his phone, which is absolutely the image we should all take away from this fiasco.
  • New Charlotte F.C. stadium renovation renderings! Unfortunately, they’re pretty dull, though there’s some fairly odd mise en scène going on. Like, what’s up with this woman waiting at a stadium bar by contorting her limbs into as pretzely a shape as she can manage?
    And then there’s this father and child, or possibly kidnapper and attempted victim?
    Either way, the city of Charlotte is clearly getting a whole lot of new places for bros to buy beer for its $25 million in funding for this project, so that’s definitely money well spent.
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Lessons from the short, terrible life of the European Super League

access_time personNeil deMause

I had been planning to write up something today on the plans to remake European soccer into a Super League that followed traditional American sports lines — a handful of wealthy team owners share most of the money, everyone else can go pound sand — but then the whole project crashed and burned dramatically yesterday, just two days after it was announced. Still, there are a few useful takeaways before we head to the sentencing phase:

  • Sports owners love a monopoly: Defector’s Billy Haisley aptly summed up the Super League idea as being “like if the Knicks, the Lakers, the Celtics, the 76ers, the Bulls, and the Clippers found it intolerable that they were not guaranteed deep runs in the playoffs every season because other, less historically important teams have done better on the court, and so they were breaking away from the NBA playoffs to form a new postseason, called the Super Finals.” The idea here was twofold: Not just to guarantee the more famous teams a spot in the playoffs (in this case the Champions League, which isn’t exactly a playoff but is as close as European soccer gets), but also to guarantee them the TV money that goes with it, without having to share with two-bit teams from Turkey or Slovenia or what have you just because they played well. As has been noted time and again, the main difference between European soccer and American sports is that in the U.S. team owners form a cartel whereas in Europe anyone can win their way into the top leagues — assuming they can afford to pay for the best players, which most still can’t — and certain European owners looked longingly at the American model.
  • This was largely driven by American owners: The chair of the abortive Super League was to be Real Madrid‘s Florentino Pérez — ironically, not even the team’s owner but the elected president of a fan-owned club — but the vice-chairs were to be Liverpool‘s John Henry, Arsenal‘s Stan Kroenke, and Manchester United‘s Joel and Avram Glazer, better known in the U.S. as owners of the Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Rams, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, respectively. These are billionaires who cut their teeth on the American monopoly model of sports, and they were presumably itching for the guaranteed-cut-of-profits-even-if-you-trade-your-best-player they were familiar with from back in the States.
  • There’s a stadium angle, naturally: While stadiums didn’t play a direct role in the Super League fiasco, it was no doubt on some team execs’ minds: Tottenham Hotspur just spent £1 billion on a new building, Real Madrid is spending €570 million on a renovation of its stadium, and F.C. Barcelona keeps putting off plans for a €600 million redo of its own home. All of the teams were putting up their own money to pay off construction costs, because that’s typically how it works in Europe, and planned to repay it out of increased revenues. But as the Covid crisis made clear, this only works if you’re sure the revenues are going to flow, and while you can’t control the arrival of the next pandemic, if you can at least assure that you’ll get a cut of big TV money even if your team is lousy for a year or three, that’s the next best thing.
  • Owners will say the craziest things when windfall profits are on the line: U.S. sports owners grubbing for stadiums have nothing on Real Madrid’s Pérez, who declared on the basis of seemingly zero evidence that “young people are no longer interested in football” because of “a lot of poor-quality games” before getting dunked on by actual young people; or the unnamed Super League exec who declared haters to be mere “legacy fans” who can’t get with the times. Spinners gonna spin, and that’s one thing that team owners across the world are good at, or think they are, anyway.
  • You can screw some of the people most of the time, but you can’t screw all of the people all of the time: For an eyeblink, the Super League seemed like it might have a shot, if only because the teams involved genuinely did have star power — even if Liverpool might lose out on a Champions League spot to West Ham United this year, it still has way more international fans and thus more attractiveness to TV networks, something JPMorgan Chase no doubt had in mind when offering to bankroll the Super League. But to really plot a shakedown of this size, you need friends in high places, and the Super League teams notably failed to run their plan by either fans or political leaders, leading to even such normally stalwart supporters of private profit as U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson declaring their opposition to the plan. (It also led to massive fan protests outside stadiums, but that storm would have been easier to weather if the Super League owners had had literally anyone else on their side.) The biggest criticism of the Super League plotters wasn’t even that they were planning a greedy money grab, but that they failed to read the room before doing so: Doing an end run around political leaders and dissing your own fans as half decrepit and the rest with short attention spans is not the best way to garner support for your plan, even if you are a billionaire used to getting your own way.

tl;dr: Buncha rich dudes tried to get richer, found that even under late capitalism plutocrats can’t just walk into a bank and stuff bundles of cash in their pockets, they have to make some kind of effort to appeal to or at least buy off the democratic process. As glass-half-full news goes, I’ll take it, especially on a day for celebrating partial victories over systemic problems.

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Friday roundup: NFL to shop for overseas host cities, plus the attack of the no-good, terrible stadium names

access_time personNeil deMause

How’s everyone doing out there? Did you, like me, spend much of yesterday watching baseball games and wondering why MLB bothers to have mask rules if half the fans are keeping their masks off at any given time, and then wondering if this is really the right thing to be concerned about rather than all the people who are leaving the game and going to indoor sports bars, and then wondering if disregard for mask rules is a reasonable proxy for being careless about going to bars as well? I hope not, because that is very much my job, and the mission of this site remains Thinking Too Hard About Things So You Don’t Have To.

Which is one nice thing about Fridays: No thinking too hard, because all the leftover news gets boiled down to a single bite-size bullet point, ideally with a quip at the end. It’s like pre-wrapped meals of stadium facts, and here’s this week’s assortment:

  • The NFL is adding a 17th game to its season, mostly so it can charge TV networks more for the extra game but also to create more games that can be played outside the U.S. to help increase the league’s international visibility, and the operators of Montreal’s Olympic Stadium and Vancouver’s B.C. Place have both said they’ll throw their hats in the rings. You can read my thoughts about Olympic Stadium here; suffice to say that it’s simultaneously perfectly serviceable and not at all what sports owners consider state-of-the-art at selling people things other than a seat to sit in. It’ll be very interesting to see whether the NFL makes its international game hosting decisions based on which markets it most wants to break into or which cities offer the snazziest stadiums. (Or which cities offer straight-up cash, that’s always a popular NFL move.)
  • Indy Eleven USL team owner Ersal Ozdemir got his approval from the Indiana state legislature this week to take more time on how to spend his $112 million in state stadium cash, and team officials replied that they will now take their own sweet to to “finalize the site” “in the coming months.” Given that Ozdemir at first asked for the cash so he could get promoted to MLS and then later decided, know what, maybe he’ll stay put in the USL and avoid all those expansion fees but still get the snazzy new digs, there is a non-zero chance that he decides to ask to use the money to build condos or a space laser or something.
  • The Henderson Silver Knights have sold naming rights to their publicly funded and owned under-construction arena (I know it doesn’t make any sense, this is just how naming rights are allowed to work in most of the U.S. with few exceptions) to the payday loan company Dollar Loan Center, which means the arena will now be called … also the Dollar Loan Center? Shouldn’t it at least be the Dollar Loan Center Arena? This seems like very confusing branding, among other things, though I guess it’ll at least be amusing when people use Google Maps to try to find places to get high-interest advances on their paychecks and end up at the Silver Knights ticket window.
  • Also in the terrible names department, we have the Miami Marlins cutting a deal with a mortgage loan company that starts with a lower-case letter, which is going to wreak havoc among sports department copy editors across the land. (Just kidding: All the sports departments have already fired all their copy editors, pUNCtuATE and spel tHiNgZ however U want!!1!)
  • Here’s some video of the under-construction Phoenix Rising F.C. soccer stadium, which when it was announced last December would be ready for 2021 I predicted would be “off-the-rack bleachers that can be installed quickly,” and which indeed looks exactly like that. No robot dog showrooms or giant soccer balls are visible, sadly, but the USL season doesn’t start for another three weeks, so there’s still time to find some off-the-rack robot dogs.
  • And finally, across the pond, Everton F.C. finally had its stadium plan approved by the Liverpool City Council, meaning the £500 million project can move ahead. The city is loaning a little over half that money to Everton’s billionaire owner Farhad Moshiri, but Moshiri is then supposed to repay it in actual cash with interest, so the only real concerns are why Liverpool needs to act as banker for a rich guy, and whether it’s a good idea to build an oceanfront stadium when the oceans are already starting to rise. Those other countries have such quaint problems compared to America’s!
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Friday roundup: Climate-doomed sports cities, a $500m video-game arena, and tax breaks to allay pirate fears

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday, everyone! If you’ve been thinking, Gee, what with vaccines rolling out and the end of the pandemic maybe finally imaginable, I could really use some other global catastrophe to experience existential panic about, Defector and I have you covered with an article about which U.S. sports cities are most likely the first to be made uninhabitable by climate change. No spoilers here, but suffice to say that if you’ve been holding out the last 64 years for the return of the Rochester Royals to the NBA, this might be your lucky century.

And in the newsier news:

  • Pittsburgh Penguins owners Ron Burkle and Mario Lemieux were among the slew of developers and landholders who successfully lobbied the Trump administration last year to redraw Census maps to expand Opportunity Zones, earning who the hell knows how much money in tax breaks as a result. This may sound like a blatant cash grab that isn’t available to normal people who don’t have lobbyists on payroll, but just wait until you hear about the St. Croix hemp farmer who says that without tax breaks he would have trouble finding investors in the U.S. Virgin Islands because “people have ideas of pirates and all this sort of thing,” and then think about how little he probably paid for his land there after telling the seller, “I dunno, man, it’s probably infested with pirates,” and then you’ll know for sure.
  • The owner of two separate Toronto esports teams (one an Overwatch team and one a Call of Duty team, if you think I’m going to dignify them with boldface team names you’re nuts) has announced plans for a 7,000-seat venue to host them, at a cost of $500 million. Wut? I mean, it will also be able to host concerts (its designer called it neither “a sports arena nor an opera house” but “a new typology that straddles the two,” which he got “new” right, anyway), but still, half a billion dollars for a 7,000-seat theater with lots of big screens? Also, the developers already announced this last July, just without the $500 million price tag, so good job, guys, if you leaked the large number now just to get attention, as it’s working. No word yet on whether they’d want public money or tax breaks or anything for this, but you have to think they’d be crazy to spend all their own money on this.
  • Add the Pensacola Blue Wahoos to the list of minor-league baseball teams trying to use the downsizing of the minors to shake down cities for stadium improvements. Sure, it’s only $2 million, but it’s also only to secure a ten-year lease extension, which means they can demand more money in 2031 … if Florida is still above sea level by then. (Oop, damn, the spoiler thing again, sorry.)
  • The Oakland A’s owners may have won their lawsuit to fast-track any environmental challenges to their proposed Howard Terminal stadium (which, by the way, is in an area likely to be among the first to be inundated by sea level rise — oops, I said no spoilers), but lawsuits can be appealed! There, I just saved you $52 a year on an Athletic subscription.
  • I’ve been only marginally following Everton F.C.‘s plans for a new £500 million stadium on the Liverpool waterfront — holding 52,000 people, eat that, Overwatch barons — but there are some mostly dull new renderings out. Also the team’s owners are claiming that moving from one part of town to another will add £1 billion to the local economy, which just goes to show that even when all they’re asking for is a city loan that they’ll repay with interest, sports team owners can’t stop going to the “money will rain like manna from heaven” page in the stadium playbook.
  • The Columbus Crew have fresh renderings out of their new stadium, and do they include people throwing their hands in the air and gesturing wildly to things they want to buy at a bar to show how excited they are to be at a soccer match and ignoring the game so they can sit indoors with a bunch of other uniformly young and attractive people? You bet they do!
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Today in “Is It Stupid?”: Fans to return to English sporting events

access_time personNeil deMause

U.K. prime minster Boris Johnson has announced the end of England’s month-long second Covid lockdown, with the country set to switch to a three-tier system that will allow some fans to attend live sporting events for the first time since spring. And while there are many questions about how it all will work — who will get to buy tickets at reduced-capacity events, how much will they cost, can they be discouraged from hugging each other when a goal is scored? — let’s focus today on one question: Is this very very stupid?

The details of the sports fan plan:

  • In “tier 1” areas where virus levels are relatively moderate, outdoor sports venues can allow in a maximum of 4,000 fans or 50% of capacity, whichever is less. Indoor venues will face an attendance limit of 1,000 fans or 50% of capacity, whichever is lower.
  • In “tier 2” areas with high virus levels, the same attendance caps apply, but the outdoor maximum is 2,000 or 50%, whichever is lower.
  • In “tier 3” (very high alert) areas, no fans are allowed at all.

Is this stupid? For many sports venues, not at all: 4,000 fans at Arsenal‘s Emirates Stadium, for example, is under 7% of capacity, and so should leave plenty of room for fans to spread out. (London is actually likely to be a tier 2 zone, so Arsenal would be limited to 2,000 fans at first.) Given both the experience of U.S. stadiums and what we know about the spread of the virus outdoors, that seems relatively safe, especially if everyone is wearing masks (which hasn’t been announced as a requirement yet, but is likely) and is kept from from spending significant time gathering in indoor areas like concessions concourses or restrooms (which also hasn’t been spelled out yet).

For other stadiums, the flat cap looks very different. A.F.C. Bournemouth, for example, plays in the second-tier Championship level in an 11,000-seat stadium; since Bournemouth is in the low-virus south of England, they’re likely to be allowed the full 4,000 fans per game, which is getting close to half capacity. That’s maybe okay in a low-virus area, but does it really make any sense to make it the equivalent of 2,000 fans rattling around Emirates in a higher-virus zone?

Allowing 1,000 fans/50% capacity for indoor sports, meanwhile, seems patently insane: Most of the British Basketball League, for example, plays in arenas with capacities of under 2,000, so they’ll be able to pack in fans in every other seat. That’s not very much distancing, and six-foot distancing is essentially useless indoors anyway, meaning Surrey Scorchers fans will be at a massively higher risk than Arsenal or Chelsea or Tottenham fans — if anything, it seems like it would make much more sense, epidemiologically, to ban fans entirely at indoor sporting events and allow somewhat more at outdoor ones.

But epidemiological sense surely isn’t the guiding factor here; rather, this feels more like an attempt to level the playing field, so that every sports team can bumble through some sort of reopening, at least once every region has worked its way out of Tier 3 status. That’s par for the course for sports leagues right now — just look at college basketball in the U.S., which is determined to restart play (without fans, but with lots of players traveling to and from high-virus areas and then breathing on each other during games indoors) even though college football has barely managed to limp along with partial seasons. But it’s not the kind of guidance one would hope for from a national government, even one with a pretty lousy track record in this area. Verdict: Pretty stupid.

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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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