Category: naming rights

Friday roundup: More shouting about Virginia arena traffic, plus rumors of A’s (temporary) death and Coyotes-to-Utah

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! (Happiness provided separately.) While I have you here, is it a good time to remind you that Field of Schemes is on Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, Post, and whatever Elon Musk is calling his thing these days? And that by following FoS in any or all of those places, you can get notifications of new posts as soon as they happen — and not only that, by reacting to posts on those sites, you can help get more attention for Field of Schemes, because that’s how social media likes work, it’s a popularity contest where your votes make the things you like more popular? No, that isn’t what you want to hear right now, you just to read the weekly news recap? Okay, ignore all that for now, you can always come back to it later.

 

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Friday roundup: Bears rumors! Titans vaportecture! Coyotes still about to announce something, sometime!

access_time personNeil deMause

Another week in the books! Will “in the books” soon become an anachronism, once there are no more physical books to keep? Or will “books” just become a term for long documents, and future English speakers will wonder why the phrase isn’t “in the spreadsheets”? Has this already happened and I didn’t notice? Gen Z readers, say your piece!

Moving on to the news:

  • Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren said, “What intrigues me about downtown is I strongly believe Chicago is the finest city in all of the world,” and now everybody thinks this means the Bears would prefer to build a stadium in downtown Chicago rather than it just being a savvy negotiator trying to create leverage for a stadium wherever he can get one paid for by somebody else.
  • Virginia’s billion-dollar-plus subsidy for a Washington Capitals and Wizards arena in Alexandria may now turn on Metro public transit funding, as Senate majority leader Scott Surovell says “making sure Metro is fully funded is a precondition before we have any kind of dialogue about the arena” while Gov. Glenn Youngkin retorted that he wants to see a Metro business plan first because “they’ve got overhead levels that far exceed any of their benchmarks.” Hey, you know what would help fill Metro’s $750 million budget deficit? Here’s a hint, it rhymes with “bot giving a billion dollars to the local sports team owner,” hth.
  • New Tennessee Titans vaportecture! This time the (imaginary) camera moves but the (pretend) people don’t, so we get a horrorscape of fans frozen in place with their arms flung skywards for all eternity! All except for the rock band that is playing forever to a perpetually frozen audience, and the video boards that show moving replays of a forever-static game, this is the most terrifying Black Mirror episode ever.
  • Former Utah Jazz majority owner (and current minority owner) Gail Miller is buying up land around the site of her proposed baseball stadium for her proposed MLB expansion team, hey at least Salt Lake City has more TV households than Las Vegas.
  • The public cost of the new Chattanooga Lookouts stadium has soared from $80 million to $139 million in the last 17 months, which will be fine so long as an extra $500 million worth of development appears from out of nowhere and pays new taxes that won’t cannibalize existing ones, this is fine.
  • “The Orlando Magic are making millions by selling naming rights to a building the team doesn’t even own,” yup, that’ll happen.
  • “[Arizona] Coyotes on ‘precipice’ of announcing location organization will focus on for new arena,” reports an Arizona Sports headline, then the story itself doesn’t have anyone at all saying the word “precipice” with regard to anything, wut.
  • Baseball stadiums built since the early 1990s have crazy-far upper deck seats, reports Travis Sawchik for The Score, will that change with the latest wave of new buildings? Populous architect Zach Allee says there’s a tradeoff that’s “kind of like a balloon” where “if I say I want to be closer to the field horizontally, it ends up pushing the seats up higher,” which isn’t really how geometry or balloons work, and then Sawchik touts the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium for moving the last row of its upper deck 33 feet closer than the last row in its old stadium, but actually they did this by just removing the last 8,000 seats, this is actually a terrible article, I’m sorry I linked to it.

I’m traveling next week, posts may appear at sporadic and/or unexpected times. Have a good long holiday weekend, or as our Toronto readers know it, Monday.

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Friday roundup: NYCFC deal gets even worse; Royals and Titans plans, World Cup stay as awful as ever

access_time personNeil deMause

Every single damn time: I start thinking that things have calmed down and it’ll just be the same few sports subsidy deals for a while, and then suddenly someone drops a new one or two out of nowhere. The NYC F.C. and Kansas City Royals stadium demands weren’t entirely unexpected, but they also weren’t expected just now for the sums of money that are being asked for, so they definitely qualify as a surprise to me.

I’ve already been on one Kansas City TV station this week, and I’ll be on their NPR station KCUR this morning from 9 to 9:30 am Central time. And I wrote about the NYC F.C. plan for Hell Gate, and will likely be doing so again, so clearly more people are paying attention as the ongoing stadium game moves to, or rather returns to, a couple more localities. (If you’re new to this site as a result: Hi! This all has been going on for a long time, and seems determined to continue until we’re all dead, try not to be too depressed, near-hopeless causes are worth fighting for, and laughing to keep from crying is a perfectly acceptable way of getting through the days.)

And with that, let’s get to other news that fell by the wayside this week, or that has come up since yesterday:

  • With that NYC F.C. public price tag still very much an unknown, I put in an email to University of Colorado economist Geoffrey Propheter, who formerly specialized in property tax expenditures for the New York City Independent Budget Office, to see if he had any ideas for estimating how much New York City would be giving up by granting a full property tax break for a $780 million soccer stadium. As it turned out, he very much did: His new book “Major League Sports and the Property Tax Costs and Implications of a Stealth Tax Expenditure” is due out next week, and it includes a methodology for estimating the forgone property tax on sports projects. In the case of NYC F.C., he estimated that a full tax exemption over 49 years would cost New York City somewhere between $132.5 million and $197 million. Add that to the share of city infrastructure costs that would be going to the stadium (almost certainly $100 million or more, if the total infrastructure tab comes to $200-300 million as City Hall has projected), the value of getting the use of city land for 49 years (still TBD), and subtract out the $30 million the city will take in in rent, and we have … somewhere between a $200 million loss for city taxpayers and something substantially more than that. We’ll hopefully know more once Adams presents an actual memorandum of understanding and/or lease proposal to the city council, unless this is part of Adams’ whole pretending-things-are-true-just-because-he-says-them thing, in which case we may have to dig a bit more to come up with final numbers.
  • Oh, and also NYC F.C. paid one of Adams’ top campaign aides $20,000 to lobby his former boss on the stadium deal, according to the New York Daily News. This is totally legal, somehow.
  • On Royals owner John Sherman’s $2 billion stadium ask, Craig Calcaterra has feels that are so well stated that I’ll just quote them here: “Less than 15 years ago Kansas City taxpayers spent $250 million for renovations to what was the already wonderful Kauffman Stadium and made it even more wonderful. Indeed, it remains wonderful. It’s one of the best parks in all of baseball by any conceivable measure. To suggest that it even needs another $250 million, let alone eight times that much, just to keep pace with other ballparks is to insult the intelligence of literally any person who has ever stepped foot in that or any other ballpark. As for the economic benefits, literally every shred of comprehensive research on the economic impact of sports teams and stadiums has established that they are not drivers of economic development. I realize that the actual facts on this score are routinely ignored as team owners, team boosters, and credulous members of the media parrot utterly unsupported claims that ‘New sTADiUM mEAN BiG puBlIc bEneFiT!!!’ but their parroting does not make it true. It is bullshit even if they want people to believe otherwise.”
  • Economist J.C. Bradbury adds: Yup, that’s about the size of it.
  • The World Cup starts Sunday in Qatar, and there are two ways to write about it: List all of the horrors of slave labor that helped build a fleet of new stadiums, or … not.
  • The news has been too busy for me to get around to the collapse of FTX and what it means for the Miami Heat‘s naming-rights deal with the now-bankrupt crypto company, which is a shame because it’s a true laugh-to-keep-from-crying masterpiece. (FTX signed a penalty clause to pay $16.5 million if it defaults on its naming rights payments, plus pay for removing its signage on the arena — but now it’s penniless and bankrupt and can’t be made to pay anything! Hilarious!) Let’s make up for that now by enjoying the fact that a Miami strip club is offering to buy the used naming rights, which is truly the ending we all deserve.
  • Speaking of bankrupt things, Chester, Pennsylvania is now one of them. Guess that revitalization-through-publicly-subsidized-soccer-stadium thing is continuing not to work out so well there.
  • Anaheim is planning to do an appraisal of the condition of the Los Angeles Angels‘ stadium, in anticipation of maybe enforcing a lease clause that could require team owner Arte Moreno to do a couple hundred million dollars worth of maintenance. “It’s important for the people of Anaheim and the council to know the condition of the stadium and [whether it is] being kept at a first-class professional baseball stadium,” said councilmember Jose Moreno, no doubt cackling deep inside at the idea of holding Moreno to the kind of state-of-the-art clause that teams usually use against cities.
  • Nashville Mayor John Cooper says it would cost as much to renovate the Tennessee Titans‘ stadium as to built a $2.1 billion new one; Nashville councilmember Bob Mendes called this “the biggest lie the mayor has told” and said ‘there’s no way on Earth that ‘first class’ stadium requires a three-story sports bar or a luxury songwriters lounge or a covered rooftop area with grass and trees on top of Nissan Stadium.” Mendes also released renderings of what the Titans owners are looking for in a renovated stadium — do they include gratuitous balloons, people watching anything but the game, and ghostly figures from another realm? Would you have it any other way?

 

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Cleveland council wants disgraced electric company’s name pulled off Browns stadium, really should have thought of this sooner

access_time personNeil deMause

As expected, the Cleveland city council voted yesterday to approve a resolution removing FirstEnergy’s name from the Browns‘ stadium. By a 16-1 margin, the council approved a measure calling for the publicly owned stadium to be stripped of the name of the city’s electric utility following allegations that FirstEnergy bribed the then-speaker of the Ohio house in exchange for $1.3 billion in state subsidies.

Accordingly, the Browns’ stadium will now be known as … still FirstEnergy Stadium, because the city of Cleveland, despite owning the building, doesn’t own its naming rights:

BE IT RESOLVED BY THE COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF CLEVELAND:

Section 1. That this Council calls upon First Energy Corporation to relinquish its naming rights to the City’s publicly owned football stadium.

Yeah, that’ll go well. FirstEnergy’s response to the council resolution was less obstinate than entirely dismissive: “Through sponsorships like we have with the Browns, we look forward to continuing to enrich our communities for years to come.”

How exactly Cleveland ended up owning a stadium but not having any say over what it’s called — or, for that matter, any money from selling the name — points up a common misunderstanding about publicly owned sports facilities. It’s not unusual to see “And taxpayers will get to own the building!” as a benefit of a stadium deal, but really it’s not.

It’s best to think of a sports venue as two related but separate things: a building, and then all the money that is collected at that building. If you’re a sports team owner, you want only that second part, because money is, as should be self-evident, money. Ownership of a building, meanwhile, is generally mostly a headache: You have to pay property taxes on it, for starters, and you probably have to pay to maintain it, and if you want to move out (or threaten to move out) you can’t just walk away and leave taxpayers holding the bag. Sticking the public with a stadium while keeping all the revenues is like leasing a car for $0 — the team owner gets all the benefits, and none of the costs. (The Browns actually pay $250,000 a year in rent, but given that the stadium cost almost $300 million to build, that’s basically the same as $0.)

So why does Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, who incidentally has his own issues with accusations of financial shenanigans, get to keep 100% of stadium revenues, including $6 million a year from FirstEnergy for naming rights, even though he’s just a tenant? Because all the other kids are doing it, basically: When naming rights first became a thing in the 1990s, team owners demanded that they get the cash rather than the stadiums’ actual owners, and elected officials with no real expertise in negotiating sports leases generally went, Yeah, okay. At which point subsequent team owners in other cities seeking naming rights boodle could point to previous deals and shout Standard business procedure!!! and eventually no one bothered even questioning if teams should be able to sell the names of the homes they rent — though when one team tries to sell naming rights to another team’s stadium, that still raises some eyebrows.

If the Cleveland councilmembers who approved the Browns stadium deal back in 1996 had held onto the naming rights, not only could the city right now be getting $6 million a year, but it could conceivably have inserted some kind of morals clause to rescind the naming rights if the company with the name was, to pick a hypothetical example, caught up in a massive bribery scandal. Instead, the council has to settle for hoping that Haslam and/or FirstEnergy can be shamed into undoing the deal — in which case Haslam would just get to re-sell the name to some other company. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that FirstEnergy seems to be getting mostly bad publicity for it’s six mil a year; but then, naming rights paying off terribly for the companies that buy them is par for the course, and always has been, so yay, schadenfreude, I guess?

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Saturday roundup: Moreno demands Angels land sale approval now now now, and other bribery news

access_time personNeil deMause

Told ya! And now an abbreviated (though extended by one day) look at the week’s other news:

  • Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno has responded to a judge granting a 60-day stay to his discounted purchase of stadium land thanks to the deal being caught up in a corruption and bribery scandal involving the city being run by an unelected cabal by decreeing that the city must approve the sale by June 14, or else … well, Moreno, or really Moreno’s lawyer, didn’t specify what would happen if the deal is delayed beyond that date, but you don’t want to find out what it’ll be, you hear? The Los Angeles Times speculates that the Anaheim city council could move forward with the sale despite the stay on its agreement with the state over selling the land without meeting state affordable housing laws, which would almost certainly lead the state to sue, which isn’t going to get the sale resolved by June 14, but maybe Moreno wants that for some reason? Anyway, here, thanks to reader Moose, are some photos of Mayor Harry Sidhu throwing Easter eggs from the private helicopter he’s accused of illegally registering in Arizona to save money, I know that’s what you really want.
  • Speaking of bribery scandals, the Cleveland city council is considering a resolution to demand that the electric utility FirstEnergy have its name removed from the Browns stadium after it was accused of bribing a state official. Browns officials replied that FirstEnergy is “committed to upholding a culture of integrity and accountability” going forward and also the council resolution is non-binding, which is another way of saying “Sorry, we own the naming rights to this publicly owned and paid-for stadium because that’s just how these things are done, we get to decide whose name goes on it, what part of that didn’t you understand?”
  • Tennessee Titans CEO Burke Nihill says it would cost $1.8 billion to renovate the team’s current stadium because it’s in such “disrepair,” citing … well, he didn’t actually cite any study or report or anything, but just trust him, okay? Better to just build a new stadium that would cost — oh, look, Nihill says the price tag is now $2.2 billion, while the team’s share remains at $700 million, meaning the city and state would have to come up with $1.5 billion? That totally makes sense, after all, the old place is 23 years old, it’s pretty much a given that all buildings that old get torn down, right, isn’t that just how engineering works?
  • And speaking of inflation, the Kansas City Current women’s soccer team’s stadium price tag has gone up from $70 million to $117 million, and the team’s owners are asking state taxpayers to cover $6 million of it through tax breaks. Councilmember Eric Bunch says this is fine because it would be “using state tax dollars indirectly to support a project that’s going to benefit Kansas Citians,” which seems to be a novel use of “indirectly” and also “benefit,” though I guess the team owners are technically Kansas Citians in addition to being hedge fund goons, so it would benefit two Kansas Citians, anyway.
  • And speaking of stadiums having the shelf life of mayflies, Palm Beach County is spending $111 million to renovate the spring training home of the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals; Cards VP Mike Whittle, asked if the 25-year-old Jupiter stadium’s facilities are outdated, replied, “They are. They are,” which should be good enough for you.
  • And speaking of naming rights (which we were doing a few bullet points ago, do try to keep up), the Chicago Fire owners are in hot water for allegedly trying to sell the naming rights to the Soldier Field field when they don’t actually own them, which should make for a fun lawsuit.
  • A Kentucky sports business professor says if the Cincinnati Bengals keep winning, they’ll be able to demand more publicly funded stadium upgrades, which doesn’t really make more sense, but maybe he really means “if the Bengals start losing again, no one will write their elected representatives to demand that the team owners be offered whatever they want in order to keep the team in town, which does check out.
  • Some guy wants to build a USL soccer stadium in downtown Milwaukee, which would cost an unknown amount of money and require an unknown amount of public subsidies. But look, here’s a rendering of it! True, there are no fireworks or people pointing at the sky, but you can imagine those things, no?
  • This is already more bullet points than I meant to write, let me leave you with pictures of the possum that has made its home in the Oakland Coliseum press box. Honestly, given what the A’s owners left of a team for local sportswriters to watch on the field this year with their player fire sale, this maybe should be considered a feature and not a bug.
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The Staples Center has a new name that’s even dumber than “Staples Center”

access_time personNeil deMause

I generally try to avoid reporting on which corporate monikers are being slathered on the side of sports venues, because nobody is paying me to drop their names into my posts. (If anyone is interested in paying to place ads in Field of Schemes posts: We don’t allow that kind of shenanigans, please stop emailing me, already!) But the sale of the name of the Los Angeles arena that has been known for 22 years as the Staples Center to a cryptocurrency company whose name rhymes with, um, schmypto-schmot-schmom, is notable for a few reasons:

  • The company, which makes a cryptocurrency buying and selling app and is incorporated in Malta and headquartered in Singapore, is paying $700 million over 20 years for the naming rights to the Lakers and Kings arena, which is a hell of a lot of money for a used arena name. (Do you really think anyone in L.A. is going to call it anything other than the Staples Center?) This is apparently a record price, beating out the $800 million Canadian (about $650 million U.S.) that a big bank paid to rename the Toronto Maple Leafs arena in 2017.
  • History shows that the success of naming-rights deals for the buying companies’ fortunes are, uh, not so good. Talk of a “naming rights curse” goes back nearly two decades, to when naming-rights sponsors Enron, PSINet, Trans World Airlines, and National Car Rental all went bankrupt in quick succession. While I am no expert in cryptocurrency beyond having read the greatest article in the history of articles, it’s worth noting that even one crypto publication called the L.A. naming rights deal “the corporate equivalent of buying a Lamborghini: functionally almost useless, but a huge signal to the world that you’re winning, exactly because you’ve got so much money to set on fire.” The buyer in this case, it noted, is only the fourth-largest crypto exchange out there and has “relatively thin brand recognition,” but that’s certainly something that lighting money on fire should remedy, at least so long as the company can remain in business while shelling out $35 million a year on a big-ass arena ad.

So aside from this maybe being a sign that maybe you shouldn’t buy stock in this one crypto company, does the naming-rights deal have much significance for the future, or present, of sports venue financing? If nothing else, it’s an indication that there are still people out there with too much money and the notion that using it to slap their name on a big building that shows up on TV a lot is the best use of marketing dollars, the history of Enron and its ilk be damned. So maybe you’ll see a few more deals where team owners use naming-rights money to fund buildings without needing to tap the public purse — the L.A. arena, don’t forget, was mostly financed privately, notwithstanding a $70 million loan from the city of L.A. — though in most cases they’ll no doubt still want the public cash so they can pocket as much naming-rights money as possible for themselves. It’s certainly a good argument for pushing back against stadium funding demands, though: Hey, why doncha ask some crypto bros for a few hundred million before you come hitting up taxpayers? is an excellent thing to practice shouting at your next city council hearing.

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Friday roundup: How to tell a dump of a stadium from a marvel, and why “stupid infrastructure” should become a term of art

access_time personNeil deMause

I have nothing introductory to say this week other than that I’m wondering if you kind FoS supporters would give me $2 million in 24 hours if I made more robots out of lacrosse masks. So on to the news:

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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: Panthers owner donated to Charlotte officials during stadium lobbying, St. Louis MLS didn’t need $30m in state money after all, and what time the Super Bowl economic impact rationalizations start

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday, and try not to think about how much you’re contributing to climate change by reading this on whatever electronic device you’re using. Though at least reading this in text doesn’t require a giant server farm like watching a video about stadiums would — “Streaming one hour of Netflix a week requires more electricity, annually, than the yearly output of two new refrigerators” is one of the more alarming sentences I’ve read ever — so maybe it counts as harm reduction? I almost linked to an amusing video clip to deliver my punchline, wouldn’t that have been ironic!

And now, the news:

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Friday roundup: Phoenix to maybe get soccer stadium/robot factory, Raiders roof is delayed, Def Leppard and Hamilton face off over who’s old and smelly

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! I have no meta-commentary to add this week, but hopefully when you have Def Leppard getting into a flamewar with Canadian elected officials over arena smells, you need no prelude:

  • The Salt River Pima-Maricopa reservation, long rumored as the possible site of a Phoenix Rising F.C. soccer stadium, has released an image of a proposed “$4 billion sports, technology and entertainment district” that indeed seems to show a soccer stadium, though honestly it looks a little small just from the rendering. There’s also an amazing image of people testing out robots and what looks like robot dogs, which surely will be the growth industry of the rest of the century, because I bet robot dogs don’t have an enormous carbon footprint or anything.
  • The Las Vegas Raiders are now projecting $478 million in personal seat license sales for their new stadium, up from an initial projection of $250 million. (All this money will go to defray Raiders owner Mark Davis’s costs, not the state of Nevada’s, because why would revenues from a publicly funded stadium go to the public? That’s crazy talk!) Unfortunately, the stadium might not be ready on time thanks to its roof behind months behind schedule, which could cause damage to the already-built parts of the stadium if it rains, but all those Raiders fans in Vegas (or people in Vegas anticipating selling their seats to out-of-towners who’ve come to see their home teams on road trips) will surely be patient after shelling out as much as $75,000 for PSLs.
  • Charlotte is still up for giving Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper $110 million to renovate his NFL stadium to make it more amenable to hosting an MLS franchise, but may want Tepper to agree to a lease extension first. Given that the last time Charlotte gave the Panthers money for stadium upgrades it was $87.5 million for a six-year extension, the city could maybe keep the team in town through 2027 this way. At this point, it might have been cheaper for the city just to buy the Panthers outright, thus guaranteeing the team stays in town while not only avoiding all these continual renovation fees but also getting to collect all that NFL revenue for itself. (Ha ha ha, just kidding, the NFL outlawed that years ago, no doubt partly to avoid anyone from trying exactly this scenario.)
  • The Atlanta Braves‘ stadium got a new name thanks to a bank merger, and the bank got lots of free publicity when news outlets wrote about the new name, but hell if I’m going to participate in that, so google it if you really must know.
  • A Virginia state delegate wants to reboot Virginia Beach’s failed arena plans by setting up a state-run authority to attempt to build a new arena somewhere in the Hampton Roads region, which includes both Virginia Beach and Norfolk. “The hardest part is the financing mechanism behind it,” said Norfolk interim economic development director Jared Chalk, which, yeah, no kidding.
  • Denver is helping build a new rodeo arena, and as a Denverite subhead notes, “The city says it won’t reveal how much taxpayers could be on the hook for because that would be bad for taxpayers.”
  • Kalamazoo is maybe building a $110 million arena to host concerts and something called “rocket football,” which I’m not even going to google because it would almost certainly be a disappointment compared to what I’m imagining.
  • Anaheim is considering rebating $180 million (maybe, I’m going by what one councilmember said) in future tax revenues to hotel developers so that Los Angeles Angels and Anaheim Ducks players will stay in them? Don’t the Angels and Ducks players own houses locally? What is even happening?
  • And finally, what you’ve all been waiting for: A video from last summer has surfaced showing Def Leppard lead singer Joe Elliott complaining that Hamilton, Ontario’s arena is “old” and “stinks like a 10,000 asses stink,” to which Hamilton councillor Jason Farr replied that Def Leppard is “also old and stinks.” Clearly one of them needs to be torn down and entirely replaced! It worked for Foreigner!
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