NWSL – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: Hamilton County hires guy who negotiated Rays deal for St. Pete to help with Bengals talks, this should go just great

January 31, 2025 Neil deMause

This has been a week, but it seems they all are these days. One glint of hope on the horizon: The second annual Sports Economics Conference has been scheduled for the University of Maryland, Baltimore County for April, which means I get to hang out with some of the smartest (and funniest) minds studying stadiums and other aspects of the sports business world, and you get more liveblogs like this.

Until then, the regular weekly news will have to suffice. Let’s open up the ol’ news bag and see what — oh dear oh dear, best to get started right away:

I have advocated before for local government to hire professional help in their negotiations with sports team owners over stadium construction and leases, so it’s potentially welcome news that Hamilton County, Ohio has hired David Abrams of Inner Circle Sports to help with its talks with Cincinnati Bengals execs — “potentially” because until now I had never heard of Abrams, or Inner Circle Sports, so it’s hard to say whether he’ll be bringing inside knowledge of how the opposite side of the table operates or just feed them the league line that pouring lots of public money into private projects is good, actually. I do see that Inner Circle was paid $1.25 million to work for St. Petersburg and Pinellas County on their stadium deal with the Tampa Bay Rays, and that couldn’t have turned out worse for the public despite the Rays owner having zero leverage, so maybe let’s hold our applause until we see the results here.
A Boston city council vote to block the demolition of White Stadium so it can undergo a $200 million rebuild, $100 million of which would be paid for by the city, mostly for the benefit of BOS Nation F.C., fell one vote short Wednesday when councilor Liz Breadon didn’t show up to the meeting, leaving the council deadlocked at 6-6. One of the “roughly three dozen” people who showed up to protest the stadium plan yesterday called the tie vote a “huge win,” which isn’t really how huge wins work; there’s still a lawsuit in progress that could block the plan, but it’s unclear if it will be heard in time to halt the demolition, which if it progresses would take off the table a cheaper rehab of the existing structure just for high school sports, as opponents are hoping for.
Speaking of the NWSL, Denver is getting a franchise! And a new stadium, maybe, the expansion team’s owners say they’re planning one, more details about things like cost and public cost later, don’t worry your pretty heads.
The first phase of renovation work on the Milwaukee Brewers‘ stadium that’s costing taxpayers close to $500 million has been approved, and it will include such things as a $10 million “public gathering space,” because there just aren’t enough places to publicly gather at a baseball game. There’s also plans for a future vote to spend $25 million on winterizing the stadium so concerts can be held there in the winter — something that would work a lot better if not for the fact that, as Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson points out, big stadium concert tours take place pretty much exclusively in the summer. See why I’m looking forward to this Baltimore conference? (Side note to newbies: Once you’ve read this site for long enough, you’ll recognize that for the sick burn that it is.)
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul watched the start of the Buffalo Bills‘ playoff loss at a Bills sports bar in Albany, because of course she did, and the Times is on it! “I am just going to bury my head in my hands for eight hours straight,” one fan said afterwards, presumably at the game result, but there are lots of other good ways to intepret that.
Season tickets to Salt Lake Bees games will jump from $9-18 to $17-47 when the team moves into its new stadium this year, thanks in large part to the team’s stadium capacity going from 15,400 to 8,000, and much of that being made up of luxury sections that can only be purchased on a season basis:

Truly, we are not far from that glorious future where sporting events will only have one seat, and it will be sold to the highest bidder.
I recently recorded an episode of the great Conversations With Sports Fans podcast, and if you want to hear me talk in great detail about being a New York Mets fan, as well as a sports fan in general in this current era, click that link back earlier in this sentence, you know the one.

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St. Pete to Rays: Actually, there’s no deadline for us to fix your stadium roof, read your damn lease

January 23, 2025 Neil deMause

If you’re wondering what’s going on with repairs to the Tropicana Field roof, Tampa Bay Rays execs are waiting on the city of St. Petersburg to tell them when work will begin. Team co-president Matt Silverman wrote to city officials on December 30 declaring that a “partial 2026 season in Tropicana Field would present massive logistical and revenue challenge” and “it is therefore critical that the rebuild start in earnest as soon as possible.” City manager Rob Gerdes has now responded, and it looks like Rays management didn’t read their fine print too clearly:

We look forward to cooperating to attempt to achieve the mutual goal of making Tropicana Field suitable for Major League Baseball games by opening day of the 2026 season. However … the Use Agreement requires the City of St. Petersburg to diligently pursue repairs to Tropicana Field, but it does not establish a deadline for completing those repairs.

It’s true! According to the “force majeure” clause in the Rays’ use agreement, the city only needs to begin repairs within three months of damage that has made the building unplayable, which it has done. There’s no set date for it to finish, though — and the only consequence is that for any amount of time the Rays are homeless, their lease gets extended by an equal amount of time, which is surely no skin off the nose of St. Petersburg.

It’s kind of hilarious that Rays owner Stu Sternberg is falling victim to sloppy wording of a stadium agreement, which is usually city lawyers’ signature move. (To be fair, Sternberg didn’t hire the lawyers who wrote up this use agreement, former Rays owner Vince Naimoli did; still, you’d think he and his execs would have at least read it.) With Sternberg and the city still at loggerheads over whether the Rays owner will accept the offer of $1 billion in public money for a new stadium or demand even more, we’ll likely see more of this brinksmanship in the coming weeks and months and … years? There’s nothing stopping the city from dragging its heels for years, honestly. It’ll almost certainly be resolved before then by either negotiations or lawsuit, but it’s still fun to watch in the meantime.

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Bostonians call spending $100m to convert public park for pro soccer “appalling and criminal”

January 23, 2025January 23, 2025 Neil deMause

The projected public cost of tearing down a public high school soccer stadium and turning it into a home for the women’s soccer team BOS Nation F.C. (which public high school students will get to use when the NWSL team is on the road) has now reached $100 million, out of a total cost of at least $200 million. And lots of Boston residents are hopping mad, as exhibited at 9-hour city council hearing yesterday:

“Boston students deserve a renovated White Stadium – they deserve a public White Stadium, not a private sports and entertainment complex built to enable private profits,” said Jean McGuire, resident of Roxbury and longtime civil rights advocate. “It’s clear that this entire process is being driven by the needs of private investments, not the needs of Boston students. The process has been launched, the state reviews having been conducted, and community members’ concerns about public access and transportation impacts are being ignored, all in a mad rush to next March for White Stadium in order to be a soccer team’s desired opening day.”…

Stevan Kirschbaum, a former BPS bus driver, described the White Stadium plan as “appalling and criminal.”

“We should be chaining ourselves to those trees – this is a criminal rush to judgment.”

And at least one elected official is none too pleased by the soaring price tag:

“We have now said we can come up with $100 million,” [city councillor Erin] Murphy said. “Just like any responsible person, anyone who runs their home budget, at some point you have to say, that’s great but I can’t afford it, so I’m going to have to say no.”

As reported previously, the team owners will “keep the bulk of revenue from matches” aside from 10% of in-stadium ad revenues and 3% of concessions revenues, as well as $400,000 a year in rent and a $1-per-ticket surcharge — the math on which suggests that it would require the average ticket buyer to spend around $1,000 per game on concessions for the city to break even. Boston public school students will get the benefit of a nicer stadium — when they’re allowed to use it — though it’s not clear what benefit they’ll get from such upgrades as a new beer garden.

The parks group the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, which has filed a lawsuit to block the stadium plan, has estimated that a scaled-down high school facility would cost the city just $29 million. Council Ben Weber said of the lawsuit at yesterday’s hearing, “I hear a lot of rhetoric, I don’t hear much about solutions” — maybe proposing a scaled-down stadium isn’t a solution to BOS Nation F.C.’s owner, venture capital CEO and daughter of a Celtics co-owner Jennifer Epstein, but that all depends on how you define the problem.

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Was the Carolina Panthers’ $650m renovation deal really the worst of 2024? An investimagation

January 2, 2025 Neil deMause

The Center for Economic Accountability, a friend of this site, announced its annual “Worst Economic Development Deal of the Year” award for 2024 this week, and the winner was the city of Charlotte, for giving $650 million to Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper for renovations of his team’s stadium. CEA said in a press release that “Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium deal stood out from the rest of the competition for a combination of factors that included its high cost, lack of transparency, poor returns, questionable economic justifications and the Panthers ownership’s checkered history with subsidized projects.”

There’s certainly a lot to be said for the Panthers deal as a terrible one: The city of Charlotte put up $650 million out of $800 million for renovations to a 28-year-old stadium it didn’t build and doesn’t own, in exchange for Tepper extending his lease for just 15 years and getting to open “good faith” negotiations for a new stadium as early as 2037. Still, it’s worth looking at some of the other contenders from 2024:

St. Petersburg and Pinellas County providing over a billion dollars in cash, tax breaks, and discounted land to Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg to build a new domed stadium right next door to the old domed stadium that everyone said was bad because it was a dome and in a bad location.
Washington, D.C. giving Capitals and Wizards owner Ted Leonsis $515 million in renovation money for what’s effectively a three-year lease extension, even after the state of Virginia rejected Leonsis’s bid for an arena there, which should have left D.C. officials able to drive a hard bargain.
In the non-sports world, Good Jobs First’s Subsidy Tracker lists four megadeals that came in at more than $500 million in subsidies, including $929 million in fresh tax breaks that the state of Indiana offered to Eli Lilly for an expansion of its campus in Lebanon, in a deal costing Indiana taxpayers $1.4 million for each new job created.
A bunch of states upped their film tax credit offerings, something that has been proven time and again does next to nothing to create jobs, instead just shuffling them from state to state while movie studios get to have taxpayers underwrite huge chunks of their ever-expanding production costs.

All worthy candidates, even if there can be only one winner. The lesson here isn’t that Charlotte is singularly bone-headed when it comes to handing out public money to local billionaires; it’s that siphoning off public money for private profit is a pandemic with no end in sight, and even the less-bad deals would be scandalous in a saner world.

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Friday roundup: 2024 was the year cities said “no” to stadium subsidies, and team owners said “actually, yes”

December 27, 2024January 2, 2025 Neil deMause

Welcome to the last weekly roundup of 2024! It was a bit of a slow week thanks to the holiday, when even team execs and elected officials (though not always journalists) tend to take a break from stadium and arena shenanigans and focus on eating overpriced peppermint bark or whatever.

It was a weird year in the sports subsidy world: Kansas City voters rejected a sales tax hike to fund stadiums for the Royals and Chiefs, only to have the team owners get the state of Kansas to approve $1.4 billion or more in public bonds for new stadiums there, though they haven’t yet committed to taking the offer; the Virginia legislature rejected a $1 billion–plus subsidy for a new Washington Capitals and Wizards arena, only to have Washington, D.C. provide more than half a billion in renovation money; Illinois state officials said repeatedly that they weren’t interested in funding a new Chicago Bears stadium, only to have team execs keep coming back with even more proposals for new stadiums; Florida elected officials rejected an already-approved Tampa Bay Rays stadium before later unrejecting it. Or maybe it’s not such a weird year, given that the two constants since the whole great stadium swindle started back in the 1980s have been the populace being steamed about huge piles of their tax money going to wealthy sports owners and the wealthy sports owners coming back with “we’re sorry to hear that, but we would still like the huge piles of money.” They will fight eternally.

But let’s look forwards, not backwards! Time to clear away the remaining news items and get ready for 2025:

The city of Boston signed a lease with the NWSL club BOS Nation FC to play at the city-owned White Stadium, which will be rebuilt at a cost of around $200 million, of which taxpayers will cover $91 million or more. According to Boston Business Journal, the team will “keep the bulk of revenue from matches” aside from 10% of in-stadium advertising revenues and 3% of concessions revenue, while paying $400,000 a year in rent (rising by 3% each year) and a $1-per-ticket surcharge. (The renovated stadium will also be available for use by Boston public school teams on days when BOS Nation FC doesn’t need it, though presumably they won’t need things like the restaurant and beer garden being planned for the pro team.) There is no possible way taxpayers won’t take a bath on this unless every single soccer ticket buyer spends around $1,000 on concessions, which seems a bit ambitious.
WJLA-TV interviewed businesses near the current Washington Commanders stadium — well, a cashier at one brunch restaurant — to find out what they think of the team maybe moving to a new stadium in D.C., and she replied: “We’re busy on Sundays. I think the Commanders fans, they bleed into our Sundays. They’re in the areas. These are popular shopping areas. Definitely probably going to see an increase post- or before the games.” Definitely probably! No need to interview anyone else, slot that in for the 6 pm news.
George Petak died. You know, this guy. Out of respect for his family and friends, I will not make any jokes about potential efforts to recall him from heaven.

That’s all she wrote! See you back here on Monday.

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Friday roundup: Rays stadium, Sixers arena could both get final approval on Tuesday

December 13, 2024December 23, 2024 Neil deMause

No time to waste this week on a lengthy preamble, let’s get right to the news roundup:

It looks like we may have an answer to the question of how much Pinellas County commissioners will demand from Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg to approve $312.5 million in county bonds, and that is: nothing. Or at least nothing more than a promise that he’ll accept the $1 billion in cash and tax and land breaks he agreed to back in July: Commissioners Dave Eggers is looking like the likely swing vote at next Tuesday’s commission meeting, saying he wants to see proof that Sternberg will go ahead with the original deal before okaying the bonds, adding, “It’s really on them kind of to be moving this deal along, and maybe they can show us that’s what they’re doing.” (The county legally can’t sell bonds until the Rays provide more documentation of their own progress on the stadium, though it can approve selling bonds.) If the Rays execs are successful at responding to “We don’t know if we want to give you a billion dollars after we were hit with two hurricanes” with “Well, maybe we’ll ask for even more money” before settling on “Never mind, a billion dollars is fine,” then maybe there was a method to their madness after all.
The St. Petersburg city council moved slightly ahead on repairing the Tropicana Field roof as well this week, approving spending $1.7 million on architectural designs. Can, kicked.
The Philadelphia city council voted 12-4 on Thursday to approve the $60 million community benefits package for a new 76ers arena near Chinatown, signaling that they will almost certainly approve the entire arena deal at their final meeting of the year on Tuesday. That’s better than nothing (and marginally better than the $50 million originally proposed), but still a whole lot less than the $96 million to 273 million that Sixers owner Josh Harris will be getting in tax breaks, which sports economist Geoffrey Propheter sums up as “pretty f’ing stupid.”
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has weighed in on the question of whether the state should put up half a billion dollars toward a new Cleveland Browns stadium in suburban Brook Park, and his verdict is that he’s still “in a fact gathering process” and “I want what is best for Cleveland” and “This would be a decision that would have to be made by the legislature, and of course, I will weigh in on that as well.” Reply hazy, try again.
Diamond Baseball Holdings, which has been buying up every minor-league baseball team it can get its hands on, just announced that it’s moving the Modesto Nuts to San Bernardino, where they will become the Inland Empire 66ers. The new 66ers will take the place of the old 66ers, also owned by DBH, who are moving to Rancho Cucamonga to take the place of the Quakes, who are moving to a new stadium in Ontario that that southern California city is paying about $100 million to build. Having the ability to move franchises around like chess pieces would be one advantage to monopoly control over all of MiLB, but it’s still not entirely clear if that’s DBH’s main gambit or if they have even more ambitious plans.
Boston’s plan to renovate White Stadium to be the home of the NWSL’s new BOS Nation FC women’s soccer team (yes, that is officially the worst team name ever) has risen in cost to $200 million, with the city’s share going from $50 million to $91 million. “We are going to pay for our half of the stadium, no matter what it costs,” vowed Mayor Michelle Wu, which critics are calling a “blank check.”

I’m going to be traveling for much of next week, so expect posts here to be a bit more sporadic than usual, though I will make sure to at least check in after the Pinellas County and Philadelphia votes on Tuesday. We will resume our regularly scheduled firehose of news after the Christmas log has pooped out its nougat.

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Friday roundup: A’s charging $200 each for Sacramento tickets, DC hires NFL-linked firm to study building NFL stadium

August 23, 2024August 26, 2024 Neil deMause

How much additional stadium news was there this week? So much so that I skipped posting anything yesterday, just so I could start on the bullet points for this roundup. That’s just how much I care about you, the readers of this site. (Also I couldn’t bear to write entire posts for any of these, they were all either too silly or too depressing or both.)

On with the news:

There were rumors that Oakland A’s management was going to force fans to also buy Sacramento River Cats season tickets if they wanted A’s season tickets in Sacramento next year, but it turns out that’s not true. What is true: A’s fans wanting season tickets will have to commit to buying them for the “duration” of the team’s stay in Sacramento, and tickets will run between $185 and $250 per seat per game. (UPDATE: The Sacramento Bee reports that that’s only for “premium” season tickets; it’s unclear if there will be non-premium season plans, or if so what they will cost.) At least A’s players won’t have to suddenly acclimate themselves to playing in front of crowds bigger than the intimate affairs they’ve grown used to since owner John Fisher alienated all his fans in the Bay Area.
Washington, D.C. is exploring building a new Commanders stadium by agreed to pay $565,000 for a feasibility study to ASM Global, which Fox5DC describes as “a company with extensive experience managing NFL stadiums,” but which is more accurately described as a subsidiary of Legends Entertainment, which is co-owned by the New York Yankees and Dallas Cowboys. Surely they will deliver an unbiased and comprehensively researched cost-benefit analysis of building an NFL stadium in D.C., why would you ever think otherwise?
Not only is the city of St. Petersburg forcing its top employees to pay back $250,000 in bonus checks it sent out for overtime work on the new Tampa Bay Rays stadium project, now city administrator Rob Gerdes has suspended city HR director Christopher Guella for a week as punishment, despite Mayor Ken Welch having defended the bonuses as “within budget and my administrative authority.” Gerdes says this is because the bonuses actually turned out to be illegal; Welch insists it’s just because he wanted to avoid a bad look, though if so he really should have checked first with Barbra Streisand about how well that works.
Illinois labor leaders are pushing for the state to fund sports stadiums for the Chicago Bears and White Sox and Red Stars, because “unions want to build,” according to AFL-CIO president Tim Drea. And they don’t like building the things that won’t get built if the state saves a few billion dollars by not building stadiums? Somebody get them on the phone with the Nevada teachers union, they have a lot to talk about.
Two Cleveland city councilmembers walked around the Browns stadium during an exhibition game and asked more than 3,000 fans if they’d rather the team stay at the lakefront or move to Brook Park, and most said they prefer the lakefront. Of course, since these were people at a game at the lakefront, you’d expect them to skew more toward wanting to see games there, since people who skip going to games because they’re at the lakefront wouldn’t be at a game at the lakefront. Anyway, what did the fans say about how much they want the city government to spend on a new or renovated Browns stadium? Oh, they didn’t ask about that? Opening day is two weeks from Sunday, plenty of time for the councilmembers to plan a new round of canvassing.
The Dome at America’s Center, former home of the St. Louis Rams, needs $150 million in upgrades, according to the stadium authority that runs it and surely would never lie about something just to get a nicer space to rent out at public expense. The dome is currently rented out for “assemblies for large conventions, Metallica and Beyoncé concerts, and even some lower-level professional football games,” which surely will make it easy to earn back $150 million, so long as Metallica never stops touring.
Saskatoon needs to come up with $400 million in public money toward a $1.22 billion development to include a new arena for the Saskatoon Blades, and it plans on raising the money via a long list of uhhhh, we’ll get back to you: maybe hotel taxes, maybe TIF property tax kickbacks, maybe money from the province, who knows? “What would the city look like without SaskTel Center or without TCU Place?” asked Saskatoon director of technical services Dan Willems. “Would we be able to attract newcomers and help major employers attract talent to our city without these types of amenities?” Shh, don’t tell him.

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Friday roundup: Oakland Coliseum redevelopment moves ahead (maybe), DeSantis writes $8m taxpayer check to Inter Miami stadium

August 9, 2024 Neil deMause

In case you’re wondering why sports team owners keep on releasing incredibly amateurish vaportecture stadium renderings that are just going to subject them to ridicule, check out these headlines from just the last two days: “Browns players share thoughts on Brook Park stadium renderings,” “Cleveland Browns stadium saga: Fans react to renderings of Brook Park proposal,” “Cavaliers Star Donovan Mitchell Chimes In On Browns New Stadium Proposal.” Pretty pictures, or even doofy-looking ones, are red meat to click-starved news outlets, and so long as they keep getting coverage that is more “ooh, shiny” than “who’s going to pay for this exactly?” the CAD mills are going to be kept busy.

And speaking of busy, let’s see what else happened this week:

Oakland A’s owner John Fisher has agreed to sell his half of the Oakland Coliseum property to developers African American Sports & Entertainment Group for $125 million, which is $20 million more than the city of Oakland got for its half. Now AASEG will convert it into a “$5 billion megaproject that could include a new convention center, restaurant, hotel, youth amphitheater and restaurants,” and maybe a soccer stadium — or could, you know, not, depending on how the economic winds blow. That the group’s private equity partner says the money will come from “investors” isn’t exactly reassuring, but at least a Coliseum development might pencil out as a better investment than the plan that Fisher is trying to sell.
One thing to breathe easy about with Inter Miami‘s much-delayed new stadium is that at least it’s not getting any public money, and … wait, why is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holding a giant $8 million check made out to the stadium? He can just do that? (Answer: Yes, it’s from an infrastructure slush fund he controls.) Technically the money is going toward traffic improvements around the stadium, but still, handing over $8 million to support a stadium that’s going to happen whether or not you spend the taxpayer dollars on it and then declaring “we just don’t believe that we give money to build sports stadiums” is a nice trick if you can pull it off.
And speaking of privately funded soccer stadiums getting public funding, how about Kansas City spending upwards of $30 million in cash and tax breaks for a parking garage for the KC Current‘s newly opened stadium? The deal isn’t final yet, so no publicity photos of oversized checks for now.
Signal Cleveland speculates that the proposed $2.4 billion Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park could use tax increment financing to cover some of its bills, with the $740,000 a year in property taxes the site currently generates continuing to go to local schools while anything above that number would be kicked back to help pay for the stadium. Except if you believe transit blogger and Browns dome enthusiast Ken Prendergast, the newly developed land would “generate millions more in property taxes or payments in lieu of taxes for Brook Park schools than it does now,” and both things can’t be right. We’ll just have to wait and see what’s actually in the financial plan, which the Browns owners seem perfectly content not to reveal anytime soon, not when they can get Donovan Mitchell making headlines by tweeting that a new stadium is “gonna be fire.”
The new Worcester Red Sox stadium has “put the Canal District’s emergence on overdrive,” according to a Boston Globe article citing … some bars that opened nearby? Not mentioned: What the numbers show about the city’s bang for its 150 million bucks, despite there being local economists who could have easily told the Globe the answer.
In Anaheim, meanwhile, the presence of the Los Angeles Angels has spawned a group of about 40 hot dog vendors who’ve set up outside the stadium, and Angels execs hate it because that’s money that’s not going into team pockets — no, of course not, they’re just concerned about someone “getting severely sick or even dying due to food poisoning,” because we know how devoted the Angels organization is to ensuring people get quality food.
Thomas Tresser, not the DC Comics villain but the author of a book on the successful campaign to defeat Chicago’s Olympic bid, has launched a petition to demand that the city of Chicago not provide any public money or land for sports stadiums, feel free to sign if you’re the petition-signing type.

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Friday roundup: Royals, Chiefs owners turn up heat before sales tax vote, VA gov tries to revive arena by insulting state senate again

March 15, 2024March 17, 2024 Neil deMause

Time to open up the ol’ Instapaper and see what this week’s leftover news items hold — seriously? Okay, better get started:

So much is going on in Kansas City in advance of Jackson County’s April 2 voting deadline for a referendum to extend the county 0.375% sales tax surcharge and give the resulting $500 million or so to the Royals and Chiefs for stadium upgrades that for the first time I’m having to break out a second level of bullets:
- Chiefs president Mark Donovan went on TV and was asked if the teams would leave town if the tax hike is rejected, and replied, “for us the Chiefs; we would just have to look at all our options” and “I think they would have to include leaving Kansas City. But our goal here is, we want to stay here.” It’d be a shame if someone was to set fire to the football players, wouldn’t it, Luigi?
- The two teams have doubled their campaign spending to $1 million each, with more presumably expected.
- A coalition of low-income workers and residents of the Crossroads district where the Royals owner John Sherman wants to build a stadium with around $1 billion in public money says they’re giving Sherman until Tuesday to provide a community benefits agreement for the neighborhood or else they’ll advocate for a “no” vote.
- And Chiefs mascot KC Wolf and Royals mascot Sluggerrr handed out “Vote Yes” stickers outside the city’s arena yesterday, and I had to dig through the Fox4KC video for photographic evidence but here it is:
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s own internal analysis of the proposed Washington Capitals and Wizards arena deal for Alexandria finds that in order for it to raise enough money to generate the taxes needed to pay its construction costs, fans would have to pay $75 for parking, the arena would have to host 53 more events each year than the teams do now in D.C., and the project’s hotel would have to be able to charge $731 a night. Youngkin says he’s “working on” reviving the arena plan and that the problem is “the Senate didn’t do the work,” he really hasn’t learned his lesson about how to win friends and influence people, has he?
Three members of the St. Petersburg City Council remain opposed to Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg’s maybe–$1.5 billion stadium subsidy deal, and it would only take four to vote it down. The nearest anyone else is coming to opposing it is Gina Driscoll’s “undecided but optimistic,” though, so don’t hold your breath, but there’s at least a non-zero chance this thing might not sail through without more haggling.
Two weeks after Wisconsin assembly speaker Robin Vos pushed through $471 million in stadium renovation subsidies for the Milwaukee Brewers, five team executives each donated the maximum $1,000 to Vos’s reelection campaign. Probably just a coincidence, though, as they doubtless give money all the time to all sorts of — oh, this was their first donations to any candidate in the state ever? Well then.
Why don’t pro women’s teams get as much public subsidies as pro men’s teams? That’s the question being asked by Karen Leetzow, president of the Chicago Red Stars NWSL soccer team, which is owned by Laura Ricketts, who co-owns the Cubs with her brothers Tom, Pete, and Todd, something USA Today utterly fails to mention in its article.
The Seidman Research Institute at Arizona State University (which, despite its name, is actually a business consultant) reports that spring training games in Arizona generated more than $710 million for the local economy in 2023, enough to pay Shohei Ohtani’s entire 10-year contract, and this breaks so many rules about not comparing economic activity with actual tax receipts and not comparing present and future value that I almost can’t muster the energy to point out that previous studies show that the actual number is closer to zero.

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Friday roundup: Mets casino gets bill, Angels deal lurches from grave, news outlets everywhere need editing help, stat

March 24, 2023 Neil deMause

Thanks to everyone for helping us make it through another week! (I’m assuming here that it’s you readers who someone make time progress; I don’t actually know that much about science.)

Here’s what’s been happening that we haven’t talked about yet:

A New York state assemblymember has introduced a bill to allow New York Mets owner Steve Cohen to build a casino in his stadium’s parking lot, which requires demapping it as parkland since that’s how it’s currently zoned. The THE CITY article reports that “the city would have to find at least 20 acres of replacement parkland or significantly improve other existing greenspace — paid for by the private developer”; but the actual bill says the city has to spend “an amount equal to or greater than the fair market value of the parklands being discontinued,” and it just needs to include 20 acres of “open space” on the current parking lots (possibly on the casino roof), to be paid for by Sir Not-Specified-in-This-Legislation. Local residents are excited, but probably not in the way Cohen was hoping!
Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno is set to meet with new Anaheim mayor Ashleigh Aitken, presumably to reopen talks about giving him development rights to the city-owned parking lots around his stadium. Maybe this time he’ll be willing to pay the full $500 million value of the property, instead of the $150 million the old mayor agreed to before being forced out of office by a scandal alleging he approved the Angels deal in exchange for campaign contributions? One can hope, or at least pretend to!
Regina, Saskatchewan, may not be able to pick a tourism slogan that doesn’t sound wrong, but they have committed to building $490 million worth of new projects, including a new arena to host its junior hockey league team, the Regina Pats. Though not committed to paying for them, as “council is not making a commitment to spend all the money on all the projects,” said a council official. If anyone has $490 million sitting around, please contact Barry Lacey, executive director of financial strategy and sustainability, at this phone number.
The Denver Broncos have done one of those push polls for season ticketholders to ask them which cool new things they want as part of their cool new stadium that would cost a rumored $2 billion. What’s more important, a roof or lots of restaurant chains? Would you prefer sports gambling or axe throwing? “There is something about a survey that makes the possibility of a Broncos’ new stadium a little more real,” says KUSA-TV, which is exactly the point of such a survey, but you can’t really expect a TV station to notice and remark on that when they can’t even copyedit headlines that read “Survey strikes cord to how Broncos new ownership wants fans’ input.”
It’s rare that economist J.C. Bradbury gets upstaged in terms of quotes about why public funding of stadiums is a bad deal, but it’s hard to beat a Cleveland city councilmember who is quoted as saying about a new Browns stadium, “I’ve heard all the lines of (crap) about how we’re going to turn this around and turn that around. We’re going to benefit all these minority jobs and dah-dah-dah-dah. What a crock of (bleep).”
Isn’t that rather a lot of drinks that the couple in the left corner of this Kansas City Current stadium bar rendering are drinking? It seems like rather a lot to me, though maybe they started off by ordering a pitcher of lemon water and two soup bowls to drink it out of, then decided to switch to (squints) orange juice?
The amazing thing about Buffalo-area middle schoolers designing a new Bills stadium in Minecraft shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has seen middle schoolers with Minecraft, it’s that their design looks less ridiculous than the official one.

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