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:
- Now that Rays owner Stu Sternberg has said he doesn’t actually want the St. Petersburg stadium that he wanted, everybody would like him to sell the team now, please, with even St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch saying, “I have no interest in working with this ownership group.” Rays co-president Matt Silverman replied: “The team’s not for sale.” Meanwhile, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said of possibly building a stadium in her city that “we will dust off our proposal and present it to the Rays and hopefully start some conversations,” which probably isn’t quite the bidding war that Sternberg would like, especially since the last time we heard from Castor on this issue, she was reminding the Rays owner that she had better things to spend money on. But maybe he’ll be impressed enough by her collection of Rays jerseys to pay for a stadium himself — anything is possible!
- If you didn’t have a parlay down on the old Arizona Coyotes owners suing to get their $3.5 million arena security deposit back on the grounds that the NHL forcing them to move the team was a natural disaster like a hurricane, you really should have, that was the obvious next step in this absurdist plotline.
- Shh-not-Sacramento Athletics owner John Fisher is looking to start excavation work at the site of his Las Vegas vaporstadium ahead of actually finalizing an agreement to build it, in the hopes that if some money falls out of the sky he’ll be able to get it ready in time for the 2028 season, if there is one. And if the Vegas tourist economy doesn’t turn out to be a bubble that’s ready to pop, which it just might be showing signs of.
- There’s a new advocacy group demanding that Hamilton County not spend public money on pro sports stadiums, so it can spend it on a new sports arena instead. The director of the nonprofit Hamilton County Growth Alliance won’t say who’s funding his campaign, but we can probably make an educated guess.
- Detroit is paying the owners of Detroit City F.C. $5.9 million to tear down the abandoned hospital they bought in order to build a new soccer stadium, because it “removes blight.” Note to self: Buy more eyesores and get the government to pay me to tear them down so I can build stuff that I want to build anyway.
- Manchester United owner Jim Ratcliffe may be proposing to build a stadium underneath an insane giant tent with his own money, as is the way mostly in Europe, but don’t sleep on how he’s demanding billions of dollars of redevelopment spending by the British government to “revitalize” the area around it, as is the way in the U.S.
- Organization formed to promote moving Madison Square Garden to another site in order to rebuild Penn Station propose plan to move Madison Square Garden to another site in order to rebuild Penn Station, film at 11.
- If you still want to hear me rattle on about more stadium stuff, check out this week’s Blazing Musket Podcast, where I was interviewed about both BOS Nation F.C.‘s proposed soccer stadium and the general state of the sports subsidy world. Learn how the best defense against a bad billionaire is a good billionaire, or at least another bad billionaire who hates the first one!