Category: Olympics

LA Olympic organizers, facing billions in potential taxpayer costs, trade arena naming rights for free tax prep

access_time personNeil deMause

Los Angeles, which won Olympic hosting rights after Boston withdrew its bid because it was too expensive, is continuing to prepare for the 2028 Summer Games, a little less than three years out from the planned opening ceremonies. This puts L.A.’s Olympic committee smack in the middle of fundraising season, and L.A. officials negotiated a concession from the International Olympic Committee that it hopes will help avoid the crushing fiscal losses of past Games: the ability to sell naming rights to Olympic venues, instead of having to give them non-corporate names as the IOC has previously required.

The latest news on that front is that the Clippers arena, which is set to host Olympic basketball, will continue to be named after Intuit in a deal worth, let’s see:

Terms of the deals were not disclosed.

No terms at all?

The arrangement with Intuit includes the company providing free tax preparation for some U.S. athletes and expanding its financial education program for the LA community.

That doesn’t sound great, though also naming rights that will last only about a month likely aren’t worth all that much, so maybe free tax prep is at least better than nothing.

All this matters for more than just the organizing committee because while L.A. is hoping for a repeat of the successful 1984 Summer Games, there’s a key difference this time around. In the run-up to the 1984 Olympics, then-mayor Tom Bradley led a push to successfully demand that the city not take responsibility for any costs overruns, forcing L.A. organizing committee head Peter Ueberroth to get creative to find a way to balance Olympic budgets. But this time around, then-mayor Eric Garcetti declared that attempting to get a similar agreement “would be a nonstarter for the IOC,” and instead settled for stuff like naming rights. This means that if the 2028 Olympics go over budget — and every Olympics since 1984 has done so, with costs often doubling or more — the city of L.A. will be on the hook for the first $270 million in losses, the state of California for the next $270 million, and the city again for anything over that.

How the Olympic budget is going so far is impossible to say, as the L.A. Olympic Committee’s periodic budget reports just indicate projected costs (currently $7.149 billion) and revenues (conveniently, also $7.149 billion) with no real breakdown of how those numbers are determined or where the money is coming from or going to. Olympic finances are famously handwavy during the preparations for the games — Olympic scholar Jules Boykoff has called them “Etch-a-Sketch economics” because the numbers change so much — and often even afterwards, thanks to measures like the organizers of the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics setting fire to their own financial records.

Whether L.A. can get significant money from naming rights sales, then, looks like it may well be important for deciding if California taxpayers take a bath on the 2028 Summer Games, along with such questions as “Will international tourists still come if the city is a Trumpian military zone?” and “Is it a great idea to devote city time and money to hosting a sports mega-event when a large swath of your city just burned to the ground?” Not questions that the Olympics organizers are being made to answer in public, though — surely it’ll be okay, this one will be different!

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Friday roundup: D.C.NFL stadium comes with nine-figure Metro cost, Mets owner likely to win casino on city parking lots

access_time personNeil deMause

I had a nice talk yesterday with Chris Francis of Straight Arrow News (owned by the union-busting Joe Ricketts, sigh) about ballooning hidden public costs of sports stadiums and arenas, and the resulting article is up this morning. Key quote: “I think the team owners and the officials who work with them have realized that it sounds worse to give a check, a taxpayer check, to the team for the stadium than to say, okay, we’re not going to give you that, but we will give you money for infrastructure. We will give you tax breaks. We will give you a break on land costs.” We were talking about the Denver Broncos at the time, but really it goes for all modern sports subsidy deals: All the real costs come in the fine print.

Speaking of the fine print, let’s see what it holds this week:

  • When Washington, D.C. agreed to pay $1 billion in cash and $6 billion or so in future rent breaks to Commanders owner Josh Harris for a new stadium, did everyone forget to mention it would come with a major expansion of the Metro station near the stadium site and perhaps a new station nearby as well? That could cost “in the ballpark of hundreds of millions of dollars,” says councilmember Charles Allen, but “we cannot afford not to do it.” Remember when Allen was saying “D.C. has a responsibility to scrutinize the proposal & demand a better & fair deal” with a “billion-dollar industry”? Yeah, neither does he.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen is set to be awarded a casino license for the city-owned Citi Field parking lots he controls, after it turned out the state senator opposing it was the most disliked woman in Albany. There’s no public money involved, only public land, and that was effectively given away when then-mayor Mike Bloomberg gave Cohen a 99-year lease on the property as part of his stadium deal, but if you want to be annoyed at a multibillionaire sports team owner getting his way over community opposition, don’t let me stop you.
  • The main opposition group to next month’s referendum on giving the San Antonio Spurs around $150 million worth of future tax money toward a new arena is splitting its recommendations, urging a no vote on Prop B (which would provide the arena money) but remaining neutral on Prop A, which would devote tax money to redoing the area around the old arena to attract more rodeo events. COPS/Metro wants to see the county’s money from hotel and rental car taxes spent on “a range of community projects” guided by a citizen committee; it’s not entirely clear what happens to the arena plans if Prop A passes and Prop B does not, but that’s looking like a possibility.
  • The Cleveland Browns owners have started moving dirt at their new stadium site even before figuring out how it will all be paid for. All the kids are doing it!
  • The Athletics have filed for $523 million worth of construction permits in Las Vegas; getting those still won’t guarantee that the vaporarmadillo comes to pass, but it’s edging closer to decision time.
  • Heywood Sanders has elaborated on why the $2.6 billion plan to expand the Los Angeles Convention Center in advance of the 2028 Olympics is a terrible idea, saying in a Q&A with Torched’s Alissa Walker that other similar centers are seeing attendance drop even when they expand, and are having to offer discounted rates to lure a dwindling number of events. Key quote from Walker: “[Bangs head on desk].”
  • The organizers of the New York Marathon claim that it and other running events add almost a billion dollars a year to the city economy; it doesn’t look like they even bothered to hired a consultant to write a report justifying the number, but Crain’s New York Business published it anyway, this is fine.
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L.A. approves $2.6B convention center expansion, even as convention demand shrivels

access_time personHeywood Sanders

There are boondoggles, there are big boondoggles, and then there are public development disasters. Los Angeles has just embarked on a disaster.

Last week, the Los Angeles city council approved an expansion of the Los Angeles Convention Center with a price tag of $2.62 billion. The number itself is impressive. But what is even more impressive, or totally depressing, is how the city got to that figure.

Back in 2015, after a deal to combine a new football stadium with the convention center fizzled when Farmers Field ended up not being built, city tourism officials came up with a new scheme to expand and modernize the center with the aim of boosting the city’s competitive position. While acknowledging that other cities had built or expanded their centers on the “naïve assumption that, ‘if you build it, they will come,’” they asserted Los Angeles was “not a second-tier market or a desperate city trying to be more than it can realistically be.” The Convention, Sports and Leisure consulting firm promised that the center would see at least a 42% increase in convention attendees and hotel room nights after the expansion.

At that point, the cost estimate for the LACC expansion was $470 million. But year by year, as city staff tried to engineer a public-private partnership and design an updated and expanded venue, the price tag grew. By February 2020, the city council was warned that cost estimates had grown to $957 million. The figure from the city’s chief administrative officer in November 2023 came to $1.4 billion. What the city council accepted and supported last week was $2.62 billion — with every realistic likelihood of increasing more in the future.

So, what will the city get for $2.62 billion, which will be paid off via $193 million in annual debt service for the next 30 years? The chief administration officer says the project will create 2,153 new jobs each year after the expansion, the product of $150 million in new visitor spending each year. Local downtown interests and construction interests assert that it will be “transformative” for downtown, and by boosting the city’s convention center space will allow L.A. to compete for larger events against the likes of New York and Chicago.

The argument, set out by CSL in 2015, that more space means more convention business had been repeated by the CAO’s office in the years since. The 2023 report forecast that the hotel room nights generated each year by the center would grow from 288,045 to 490,758 — a 70% increase. Even now, the city continues to use those figures, as well as even more expansive estimates of increased tax revenue.

Yet the convention market has changed significantly in the last decade. When CSL delivered its forecast in 2015, Chicago’s McCormick Place had 937,600 convention and trade show attendees. Last year it saw 794,250. The total attendance of New York’s Javits Center in 2015 was 2.16 million. For 2024, its attendance came to 1.37 million. The Las Vegas Convention Center saw 1.3 million convention and trade show attendees in 2015. The comparable figure for 2024 was 1.1 million.

The 2015 white paper that made the case for the L.A. expansion cited examples of “large conventions that would choose Los Angeles if the LACC had adequate levels of properly designed and placed space offerings and program solutions.” The list included the annual meetings of the American Heart Association and the American Academy of Ophthalmology. That year, the AHA meeting in Orlando had 17,978 attendees. Last year, its attendance totaled 12,900. The 2015 ophthalmology meeting in Las Vegas had 28,355 attendees. The attendance for the 2024 meeting in Chicago was 16,543.

Even as Los Angeles commits to spending hundreds of millions of dollars in annual debt service — public dollars that could be used to employ police, firefighters, and other public servants — the likelihood of any significant increase in the city’s convention business is effectively nil. As L.A. has debated its convention center expansion, other cities have continued to add to heir own spaces, justified by the same arguments: downtown transformation, competitive demands, and optimistic consultant studies. And Los Angeles, which for years has had to offer its convention center space almost for free — token $1,000 rentals for space which should rent for $500,000, $710,000, or $1.1 million — will inevitably have to continue to give it away well into the future.

Built south of downtown in an area with effectively no nearby hotels or amenities, the L.A. center never offered the kind of environment typically sought by meeting planners and convention attendees. But it did offer a spacious home for the local auto show, other local public shows, and a large number of film shoots for major movies. Still, those did not bring out-of-town attendees to the city and do anything for the area’s economy. The answer was supposed to be the development of a great big hotel next door, together with restaurants and other attractions. Phil Anschutz’s AEG opened a 1,001-room JW Marriott/Ritz Carlton hotel together with the L.A. Live entertainment complex in 2007, using abundant public subsidies. Even that didn’t significantly reduce the deficit in nearby hotel rooms, or increase the center’s convention business.

In 1999, the LACC’s strongest year after a 1993 expansion, the center produced about 375,000 hotel room nights for the city. Things slid after that, as competing expansions in Las Vegas, San Diego, and other cities competed with L.A.  The center managed about 290,500 room nights in 2012, by offering free rent deals to event organizers. But the figure fell again, to about 245,000 in 2019.

In the end, L.A.’s $470 million convention center expansion has turned into a $2.6 billion one, in an overbuilt and declining market where Los Angeles and all of its competitors increasingly have to give their space away for next to nothing. Sounds like a great deal!

[Ed. Note: While L.A.’s convention center expansion began as a pairing with a never-built NFL stadium, it’s now being driven in part by a deadline to get the building ready for hosting events during the 2028 Olympics — even as L.A. has touted this as a “no-build” Games. Alissa Walker’s Torched newsletter has all the details.]

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Friday roundup: Spurs, Bengals owners to seek even more public money, Olympics could cost LA $1.5B for security

access_time personNeil deMause

Congratulations, we once again made it to the end of another programming week, as well as the end (presumably) of the “Will Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris get to pocket billions of dollars of cash and tax and land subsidies?” saga. (Answer: He sure will.) Which cities’ sports funding debates could be the next to absorb the eyes of a nation, or at least the eyes on this website? Let’s run down some contenders from this week:

  • We’ve already covered the ongoing San Antonio Spurs arena debates here this week, but that earlier report on the city council’s Wednesday hearing missed the tidbit that right now the plan is for San Antonio to provide $500 million, Bexar County to provide $311 million (really only enough to pay for about half that in up-front costs, since the money would arrive over 30 years), and team owner Peter Holt to provide $500 million, which is less than the potential $1.5 billion arena cost. Spurs chief legal counsel Bobby Perez said (in the San Antonio Report’s paraphrasing) that’s “something the Spurs would have to figure out,” but that the team would pay for any overruns above the final public price tag, whatever it ends up being, which is maybe not as reassuring as he meant it to be. Perez also said that the team would not consider sharing any arena revenue to help pay the public’s share of costs because Holt will be using it to pay off his own share of costs, the public will just have to make it up in volume or something.
  • The Cincinnati Bengals owners finally signed their new lease with Hamilton County that will include at least $700 million in public subsidies, everybody relax. Though the Bengals and the county said they’re still planning on asking for even more money from the state, exact dollar figure TBD, so maybe don’t relax just yet.
  • Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Mike Sielski wrote that if Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeff Lurie wants a new stadium, he should pay for it himself, and got a flood of agreement back from readers, including that it’s a bad time to ask for public money “with hospitals closing, SEPTA broke, and schools struggling” and that “many people think that Camden Yards created the Inner Harbor, but the Inner Harbor was booming long before the Orioles left Memorial Stadium. And now the Inner Harbor has collapsed.” Good thing for Lurie that it’s almost certain none of these people will get to vote on any stadium plan, because that’s not how cities east of the Mississippi roll.
  • The owners of Boston Legacy F.C. (née BOS Nation F.C.) faced an August 1 deadline to figure out how they will pay for their share of stadium costs on top of the city’s $100-millionish, but they blew that deadline so now they get a new one of September 15. Meanwhile, mayoral candidate Josh Kraft is accusing Boston Mayor Michelle Wu of not being transparent about the total cost of the women’s soccer project, at the same time as Josh’s dad Robert is fighting with Wu about his plan to build a new men’s soccer stadium for his New England Revolution in neighboring Everett, which Wu has warned could subject Boston to increased traffic, this is the most convoluted HBO Max series plotline ever.
  • When the Los Angeles Olympic host committee promised that the 2028 Games would come at “zero cost” to the city, apparently it didn’t include security costs, which could amount to maybe $1.5 billion. There’s now growing talk of getting L.A. to pull out of the 2028 games altogether, especially now that Donald Trump has threatened to send in the military during the event; that doesn’t sound very likely, but the Unite Here hotel workers’ union has proposed a ballot measure that would require many Olympic venues to get voter approval to be used for the Games, which looks to be mostly a tactic to head off attempts to overturn the $30/hour “Olympic wage” passed by the city council in May — I take it back, maybe this is the most convoluted HBO Max plotline ever.
  • ESPN is about to own part of the NFL’s media package and the NFL is about to own part of ESPN, don’t see any potential problems there. I do greatly look forward to every football highlight on SportsCenter being accompanied by a disclaimer that “the National Football League is a part owner of ESPN,” surely a company with such a great ethical record as ESPN wouldn’t skip over that.
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Friday roundup: Bucs want “major renovation,” won’t say yet who’d pay for it

access_time personNeil deMause

Today’s main event will be the liveblog of day two of the sports economics conference at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, which tons of presentations on stadiums and stadium-adjacent topics, but first here’s the regular Friday weekly news r0undup, written entirely on Thursday! If anyone’s roof blew off this morning, it’ll just have to wait till Monday.

  • Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Joel Glazer wants a “major renovation” of his stadium once the Bucs’ lease expires in 2028, funded by, uh: “We’re going through a phase right now where we’re assessing the stadium and what might be needed. And I know [Hillsborough County and the Tampa Sports Authority are] assessing the stadium and what might be needed, and once both of us are done with our assessments, then we come together and go talk about it, work through things.” Asked last summer about Bucs stadium funding, Tampa city spokesperson Adam Smith said team execs “haven’t approached the city about anything like that” and “we don’t expect them to”; either that was code for “paying for this is the county’s problem” or Smith really believes in the power of positive thinking.
  • Unlike the [Sacramento] Athletics, the Tampa Bay Rays have managed to sell out their 10,000-seat minor-league stadium in their opening series, even at prices running more than $100 for every seat that comes with an actual seat. Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano blames this on the Rays needing to make up for “a potential loss of revenue from ticket sales, concessions, luxury boxes and the associated costs of relocating for a year,” not the desire to capitalize on artificial ticket scarcity. It’ll be interesting to see if those high prices hold up once the Florida summer heat hits — for what it’s worth, there are still plenty of seats available for next week’s series against the Angels.
  • Speaking of the Rays, the clock officially ran out on their St. Petersburg stadium deal on Tuesday, and now owner Stu Sternberg is free to shop around for another city that wants to give him a billion dollars. Anyone? You in the back? You were just stretching your arms? I see.
  • Cincinnati Bengals VP Katie Blackburn was asked what’s up with the team’s lease that’s set to expire in 2026, and replied, “We could, I guess, go wherever we wanted after this year if we didn’t pick the up option up. So, you know, we’ll see.” NFL move-threat stan Mike Florio of NBC Sports called this “a powerful, loaded comment“; one might also argue that it’s exactly the kind of vague non-threat threat that you issue when you don’t actually want anyone noting that no cities have newer stadiums ready to offer. Potato, potahto!
  • The Jacksonville Jaguars need a place to play for two years while the city of Jacksonville is paying for stadium upgrades, so they’re asking Orlando to play them to play there, cool, cool.
  • A Massachusetts judge ruled that the demolition and reconstruction of White Stadium for the Boston Legacy F.C. can move forward, though opponents say they’ll continue to fight against it. (Boston Legacy, btw, is the new name for the much-derided BOS Nation F.C. women’s soccer team, presumably meant to honor the easiest way to get into Northeastern.)
  • Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren says the team is now focused on building a stadium in Arlington Heights, except for the portion of its focus that is on the Chicago lakefront. More news as actual news comes in, not just attempts at leverage plays.
  • Los Angeles elected officials are finally starting to get steamed about how the 2028 Olympics are being planned in a city that is recovering from disastrous fires, though so far it seems to be mostly about where the sailing competition will be held. If history is any guide, the real outrage won’t come until the Games actually begin.
  • Wondering how the affordable housing promises attached to the Brooklyn Nets arena are going? Does “Empire State Development (ESD), the gubernatorially controlled authority that oversees/shepherds the project, says it might enforce the $2,000 a month penalties for each unbuilt apartment, though that process may be fraught” answer that question? If you’re wondering why ESD only “might” enforce the penalty clause that was designed to make sure developers actually build what they promised, ESD VP Arden Sokolow says that if the state fined them, “you wouldn’t be getting any housing there,” whereas this way … oh, would you look at the time, we’ll have to cut off questions there!
  • Former Anaheim mayor and illegal helicopter registrant Harry Sidhu was sentenced to jail time for deleting emails to hide them from an FBI investigation into soliciting bribes related to a proposed Los Angeles Angels stadium deal — if you had “two months in federal prison plus a $55,000 fine” in the betting pool, you’re a winner!
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Friday roundup: Olympics remain world’s greatest money suck, TB Times self-extorts for Bucs stadium, Rays $1B deal nears final approval

access_time personNeil deMause

This has been a long, busy week for a lot of reasons, so let me just thank those of you who re-upped your FoS memberships (your swag will be in the mail shortly!) and get straight to the news, of which there is a ton, because the stadium game doesn’t stop just because it’s summer or there’s other stuff vying for our attention:

  • The Paris Olympics start tonight, and how’s that going? You say France is spending $3-5 billion on the Games in exchange for “uncertain” benefits, tourists are staying away because they don’t want to deal with all the Olympic disruptions and local museums and such are set to lose a ton of money, and Paris is forcibly relocating homeless people to make the city seem more attractive? Good, good, that’s what the Olympics are traditionally all about.
  • The Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners aren’t asking for a new stadium, but that won’t stop the Tampa Bay Times from noting that the stadium is “aging” (aren’t we all, every day) and wondering if the Glazer family will want renovations or a whole new one. “Even after repeated requests from the [Tampa] Sports Authority for information, the Buccaneers have still not provided us with any renovation plans,” Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan told the paper, while Tampa spokesperson Adam Smith said the Bucs “haven’t approached the city about anything like that” and “we don’t expect them to.” But the Bucs’ lease runs out in 2028, and all the other kids are getting new and renovated stadiums, so Times sports reporter Rick Stroud still spends 2700 words speculating on what a new or renovated stadium could look like and how it would be paid for, it’s always a time saver when your marks take the initiative to extort themselves.
  • Also in Tampa Bay, two Pinellas County commissioners are asking questions about the Rays stadium deal in advance of a Tuesday final vote, questions like “How much will this actually cost taxpayers?” (more than $1 billion, by best estimates) and “Will the public have to put in even more money to make sure affordable housing is built?” Unfortunately, it only takes four of seven commissioners to pass the deal, so there’s no guarantee the dissenters will get answers to their questions before Tuesday, though county officials said they’d ask.
  • Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf and the owners of the Blackhawks are planning a $7 billion mixed-use project around the United Center, no details provided on whether this would involve public money or tax breaks or anything, they didn’t mention it in their press release so it probably isn’t important.
  • The Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office did a study of the economic impact of the Philadelphia Phillies and Pittsburgh Pirates stadiums, both of which were built with public money, but unfortunately even though it spelled out that it was calculating spending by both “fans whose main reason for travel is a Phillies game and casual fans who attend games because they happen to be visiting the region,” the final numbers just added up all spending in and around the stadiums and assumed it wouldn’t happen without them, very disappointing.
  • Not telling the Nevada Independent how to do its job, but if you’re going to roll with the headline “How Bally’s buyout might affect resort plans for A’s Vegas stadium site,” you might maybe want to include something about how it will affect that, you know?
  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher is laying off half the team’s non-baseball staff so he can make Sacramento River Cats employees do two jobs at once, this has been your weekly John Fisher Sucks post.
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Friday roundup: St. Pete okays $1B+ Rays stadium subsidy, A’s Vegas $ remains a mystery, Bears’ $2B ask still a no-go

access_time personNeil deMause

Was it only two weeks ago that I skipped the Friday roundup entirely on the grounds that nothing was happening? What Berenstain Bears universe was that? The stadium and arena news firehose is back on in full force, so let’s get to it:

  • The St. Petersburg city council indeed voted 5-3 to grant final approval to a $1.3 billion Tampa Bay Rays stadium that will come with between $1 billion and $1.4 billion in public subsidies, bringing almost to an end (the county commission still has to vote on July 30) one of the longest-running stadium battles in sports. “We are St. Pete!” shouted city chief equity officer Carl Lavender following the vote, either overcome with emotion or just reading the wallpaper. Rays owner Stu Sternberg declared, “I think, how it was put today, it was just the right time in the right place, and most importantly, the right people,” which is another way of saying that if a sports owner takes enough swings enough times, even a 15-year stadium losing streak can end up with them holding a ten-figure check from the public.
  • After the development agreement between the Oakland A’s and the Las Vegas Stadium Authority released yesterday revealed nothing specific about the team’s stadium funding plans, team board member Sandy Dean gave the authority more nonspecifics, saying owner John Fisher is in “good shape” raising money but providing no details of where it could come from other than that it would use $300 million in debt and $850 million in private equity and that “it would be a positive to have outside investors,” something A’s execs are “going to talk with folks about” in “the coming months.” (Who’s going to invest $850 million in a team that has an estimated value of $1.2 billion, plays in the smallest market in MLB, and starts out with $300 million in debt? Reply hazy, ask again later.) Dean also said that Fisher would only use $350 million of the $380 million in public funding approved last year, because reasons.
  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred did reveal this week that the artificial turf at the A’s broiling Sacramento stadium will be cooled by “a hydration element,” and if anyone knows what that means — sprinklers? underground cooling pipes? misters attached to the light poles? — please let me know in comments.
  • Also Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times asked a bunch of MLB players who grew up in Las Vegas what they thought of the A’s moving there, and replies included “it’s a terrible idea” (Paul Sewald), “I don’t see it in Vegas” (Bryce Harper), “as soon as they get a good team, they start trading guys before they get too expensive” (Tyler Anderson), and “the whole thing, I fear, is going to be an abject disaster” (Sewald again). On the other hand, Tommy Pham said, “They said the same thing about the Golden Knights: Would this be a hockey town? … Everybody wears Golden Knights stuff in Vegas now.” Opinions differ!
  • Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker met with Chicago Bears officials this week to discuss their $2 billion state funding request for a new stadium, and Pritzker still hates it, with his press spokesperson saying afterwards “the governor’s position has not changed” from May, when he called the plan “a nonstarter.” Maybe Bears execs need to threaten to move to Indiana, that usually seems to work.
  • Jackson County probably isn’t going to hold another vote on Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium funding this year, but it could next year. Gov. Mike Parson will be out of office then, and the people running to replace him won’t be known until the results of an August 6 primary, so this could still go a lot of ways.
  • Paris cultural sites are preparing for next week’s start of the 2024 Summer Olympics by anticipating massive dropoffs in customers. In London during the 2012 games, visits to museums, movie theaters, zoos, and the like “dropped by a staggering 30 percent” as non-sports tourists steered the hell clear of the city, and Paris is expecting the same. “We’re the big losers of the Olympic Games,” said independent theater chain operator Pierre-Édouard Vasseur — though maybe he’ll rethink that once athletes start collapsing and dying from the heat.
  • NBA Commissioner Adam Silver says his league would consider expanding to Las Vegas once its new TV deal is finalized and arena developers have contacted the league for specs on building NBA-ready venues. Las Vegas, at last count, has as least three arenas that could host NBA games, but sure, building a fourth arena just for the NBA to host the fourth big-league sports team in the nation’s 40th-largest TV market makes total sense.
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Friday roundup: “Unbelievable” Utah Olympics projections, Cavs crony capitalism, and stadium vapordistricts

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday, I’ve been testing negative for two days, time to see what we all missed this week while we were busy making other plans:

  • “Second Winter Olympics could spark $6.6B in economic output for Utah, new report finds” reported a headline at KSL-TV, and “could” and “output” are doing an awful lot of work there. (Number of actual economists consulted for the KSL story: zero.) “These numbers are just so unbelievable,” said Salt Lake City Olympic committee COO Brett Hopkins, and yep, can’t argue with that!
  • The guy who negotiated massive tax kickbacks for Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert for the city is getting hired by Gilbert as the team’s CFO, this is fine.
  • The owners of Racing Louisville and Louisville City FC promised to build a new development around their new soccer stadium after it opened in 2019 with the help of city funding, but haven’t actually done so. “There’s good soccer going on, and I was for soccer,” city councilmember Robin Engel said at a hearing last month. “You know, we throw these TIFs around anymore these days like it’s chump change.”
  • Boston Magazine has a good oral history of how the 1999 All-Star Game hosted at Fenway Park helped save the ballpark from a planned demolition and replacement by a fake replica, though it kind of elides the main point, which is “Save Fenway Park activists put up a huge stink and then the new guy who bought the Red Sox decided he liked Fenway anyway. Also Save Fenway isn’t “defunct” as the article says, but the group’s Erika Tarlin does get a decent amount of screen time.
  • Whoever ends up the new mayor of Arlington Heights this fall, it’ll likely be someone who supports building a Chicago Bears stadium there, keep that in mind the next time you ask why people don’t just vote elected officials out of office when they back stadium deals.
  • If you always wanted a restroom sign from Pawtucket’s soon-to-be-demolished McCoy Stadium, now’s your chance.
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Friday roundup: Titans media hijinks, Guardians put off renovation, IOC decides winter is no longer coming

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a long and hectic week, so let’s let the chatbot take over writing the intro for this week’s roundup:

Write an introduction for a roundup of the week’s sports stadium news

Welcome to our weekly sports stadium news roundup. This week, we’ve gathered the biggest stories from around the world of sports stadiums, from new developments and construction projects to updates on some of your favorite teams’ home fields. Keep reading to stay up to date on all the latest happenings in the world of sports stadiums.

Mm, that’s not very good. Try again?

Write an introduction for a roundup of the week’s sports stadium news

Welcome to this week’s roundup of sports stadium news. From groundbreaking ceremonies to naming rights deals, we’ve got all the latest developments in the world of sports venues. Keep reading to stay up-to-date on the latest news and happenings in the world of sports stadiums.

Worse! Let’s try a slight reword of the prompt:

Write an introduction for everything that’s wrong with this week’s sports stadium news

Welcome to our weekly roundup of sports stadium news, where we take a critical look at the latest developments and trends in the industry. This week, we’ve uncovered a number of troubling issues and challenges facing sports stadiums, from safety concerns to financial struggles and more. Let’s dive into the details and explore what’s wrong with this week’s sports stadium news.

One last attempt:

Write an introduction for how this week’s stadium news shows that we are diving ever deeper into an undemocratic rich-get-richer hellscape from which there is no return.

Welcome to our weekly roundup of sports stadium news, where we explore the latest developments in the industry and how they reflect the state of our society. This week’s news is a disturbing reminder of the ever-widening divide between the rich and the rest of us, as we see more and more examples of undemocratic and unfair practices in the world of sports stadiums. Join us as we delve into the depths of this rich-get-richer hellscape and see how far we have fallen.

Amateurs borrow, bots steal. Let’s get on with the news:

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McCourt’s Dodgers gondola plan still undead, “working on” ways to pay $125m+ cost

access_time personNeil deMause

Despite having extremely sad renderings and being derided as a “combination transit-slash-sightseeing ride” that can’t actually get many people anywhere at all promptly, the Dodger Stadium gondola plan proposed by ex-Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt continues to shamble forward. There’s a new environmental impact report, a new public comment period, and a new price tag:

When the project was first announced, total costs were estimated to be $125 million. However, [McCourt’s company] LA ART said those have risen and it is working on a financing plan that will be submitted to Metro in the coming months.

Well, that’s certainly ominous. The Los Angeles Dodgers and Aerial Rapid Transit Technologies LLC (aka LA ART) had previously said it would pay the entire $125 million cost — this somehow despite rides to games being free with a Dodgers ticket, and nobody really having any reason to take a non-free gondola ride when there isn’t a game on — but if they’re submitting a financing plan to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (aka Metro), one can’t help but worry there will be some kind of public subsidy involved now, especially as McCourt’s initial financing plan was “put in some seed money and hope some other investors will fund the rest for some reason.” (The only news outlet reporting the price hike is the fan blog Dodger Blue, so more details are not at all forthcoming.)

All in all, it still seems unlikely that the Dodger gondola will happen, given the financing unknowns and growing opposition in the Chinatown neighborhood it would pass through. But these things do have a way of taking on a momentum of their own: LA ART said it wants to get the gondola built in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics — despite, as Dodger Blue notes, no Olympic events being planned for Dodger Stadium — and nothing bulldozes opposition and fast-tracks financing plans like “We gotta get this done for the Olympics.”

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