Category: WNBA

Where are the Connecticut Sun moving and why? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

The increasingly contentious sale of the Connecticut Sun WNBA team isn’t quite a stadium or arena story, not just yet, but it may yet get there, and it’s so weird that it’s worth looking at anyway, so let’s dive in. The story so far:

This is … nuts? I’m going to go with nuts. Hartford and Boston didn’t bid for an expansion franchise for obvious reasons: New England already has an WNBA team, which is the Sun. (It’s about a 45-minute drive from Uncasville to Hartford; Boston is more like an hour and a half.) Even calling a move from Mohegan Sun to Hartford a “relocation” feels like a stretch: When the New York Liberty moved from Madison Square Garden to White Plains and then to Brooklyn those were arguably more significant moves, but nobody at the league suggested that the team be put up for bid to move to Austin or Nashville.

While I have no inside information, the three most likely explanations seem to be that either: 1) the WNBA is trying to assert its control over where its teams play, possibly in order to extract the biggest bids in terms of sale price and arena offers (there’s the Field of Schemes content you’ve been waiting for!), 2) the WNBA is hoping to keep the Sun in Connecticut somehow somewhere while also adding a Boston franchise (as the Boston Globe reported could happen, citing a “WNBA source”) or 3) someone in WNBA leadership really doesn’t like Pagliuca for some unknown reason. In the meantime, Sun president (and former UConn and New England Blizzard star) Jennifer Rizzotti says the team will remain in Uncasville for the 2026 season, while we wait to see who if anyone gets to steal the Sun.

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Friday roundup: Sports subsidy protests in Virginia and KC, plus 2023’s biggest non-sports subsidies went to an industry that may surprise you (this is how clickbait headlines work now, right?)

access_time personNeil deMause

No news worth reporting yesterday, but I instead spent my morning recording this interview about the Oakland A’s potential move to Las Vegas, which covered a lot of ground in just half an hour. Tune in to hear what Brodie Brazil and I discussed, or just to see what’s on my living room wall behind the other end of the sofa from where I usually sit for Zoom interviews!

And a few other things of note happened this week, let’s get to them:

  • The newly formed Coalition to Stop the Arena at Potomac Yard rallied yesterday at the site of the proposed $2 billion Washington Capitals and Wizards arena, with former Alexandria vice-mayor Andrew Macdonald saying, “We don’t need an arena to thrive,” and local resident Shannon Curtis saying the project would “create a traffic boondoggle.” In related news, apparently the Potomac Yard Metro station was set for possible closure until this project was proposed because nobody was using it, but now, as discussed before, it would need expansion to handle arena-sized crowds. Hmm, maybe that should be included in the already-$1.5 billion public price tag? Just a crazy notion.
  • People in Southeast D.C., which is home to the new arena where the Washington Mystics play but which may lose the team to the current Capitals and Wizards arena if those teams relocate from D.C. to Virginia, are equally steamed about the whole thing. “I can’t stress enough that we’re not leaving; there’s still a commitment to the neighborhood,” promised Caps/Wizards senior VP John Thompson III, saying the team owners would work with the city to “bring other events” to the neighborhood “to help fill the void” — which sure sounds like leaving, though I guess keeping the arena open and every once in a while holding a concert there or something is technically just “moving out and promising to visit.”
  • As if Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman didn’t have enough prospective stadium sites to play off against each other, now the owners of the old Kansas City Star printing plant site want back in the game. (No details on who would pay for a stadium at that location.) Meanwhile, residents packed the first public meeting by Jackson County yesterday on the Royals’ plans, with KMBC reporting that “many voiced their concern about continuing a tax when they didn’t know where the stadium would be or any specifics about how it would benefit low-wage earners.” The local food and retail workers union also demanded that the project include a community benefits agreement to require that stadium jobs be union, which is already part of the tax extension proposal, and anyway CBAs often don’t work out that well for many reasons. But sure, better-paying jobs are better than worse-paying jobs, can’t get if you don’t ask.
  • The owners of the new Oakland Ballers minor-league baseball team say they signed a deal to rent out the Oakland Coliseum to host one game this summer, but A’s execs blocked them by enforcing their exclusive right to play baseball at the stadium. (Yes, the stadium that A’s owner John Fisher is trying to get out of as fast as possible. Irony is not his strong suit.) A fan group spokesperson said he figures it’s because Fisher was in “a position of embarrassment” because “I think we would have outdrawn them,” which is maybe wishful thinking but also maybe not.
  • Wondering how the biggest sports subsidy deals compare to the biggest non-sports subsidy deals? Check out good Jobs First’s list of the top megadeals of 2023, headed by Ford getting $1.7 billion from Michigan for an electric car battery plant and Volkswagen getting $1.3 billion from South Carolina for its own EV battery plant. Nothing against electric car batteries any more than against sports, but at 6,500 jobs combined, that’s nearly half a million dollars per job, which is a sports-level awful ratio — good job, car companies, even if not good jobs!
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Wizards, Caps, Mystics owner wants $600m in public cash to redo his privately owned arena

access_time personNeil deMause

Washington Wizards, Capitals, and Mystics owner Ted Leonsis is reportedly asking Washington, D.C. for some money to renovate his arena, which opened in 1997, according to a Washington Post story that I almost missed because it dropped on Friday night. How much money, you ask? Well, the Baltimore Orioles and Ravens up the road are each getting $600 million (plus more if the state wants), what do you say we do $600 million?

The funding would make up the bulk of an $800 million renovation plan Monumental has outlined to the city, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations. The remaining $200 million would be covered by Monumental, which is owned by founder and chief executive Ted Leonsis.

One of the people outlined the ask: Monumental would receive the $600 million over four years and use it mostly on construction. The major priorities are to transform the seating bowl — fewer nosebleed seats, more seats close to the court and ice — as well as add a food court that would be open during nongame hours and a new, glassy entrance at Seventh and F streets. Monumental wants to do incremental construction over four consecutive summers, starting in 2024, to avoid disrupting the playing seasons of the Capitals or Wizards, this person said.

The source here is “two people with knowledge of the situation,” which isn’t very specific at all, but the details are detailed enough that it seems like they’re coming from somewhere, anyway.

The teams’ arena is owned by Leonsis’s company Monumental Sports & Entertainment, and there’s nothing requiring D.C. to fund upgrades, but district officials sound pretty copacetic about writing some kind of large check regardless. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, asked about the possible arena renovation subsidy, replied with a joint statement with Monumental saying that “The District recognizes that Capital One Arena serves as an important economic anchor as we continue to reimagine and reinvigorate our Downtown,” so that certainly sounds like the district and Leonsis are working together on something. D.C. Council chair Phil Mendelson said he would need to know the details of any plan before taking a position, but did say he in general “supports giving Monumental public funds because the arena is an economic anchor in a fragile downtown” (the Post’s words, not his).

And before you can get your bearings on this apparent $600 million ask that seems to have its political skids well-greased, the Post drops word down in paragraph six that Nationals owner Mark Lerner wants his own pile of public cash:

The Nationals, in September, sent local leaders a letter asking the city to repurpose parts of the existing “Ballpark Revenue Fund,” which is dedicated to paying off the municipal bonds floated to fund the construction of Nationals Park, into a “Ballpark Modernization & Sustainability Fund.” The proposal would put taxes on tickets, food and merchandise, taxes on parking and the lease payment into a new fund to maintain and modernize the city-owned ballpark, but it wouldn’t create a new tax or pull from other budgets.

That’s super-confusing wording, but it certainly sounds like now that the Nats’ stadium is two-thirds paid off, Lerner wants the taxes on in-stadium spending that are being currently kicked back to pay for about 30% of the cost of the stadium to start being kicked back instead to pay for future renovations of the stadium. How much would that amount to? The in-stadium tax money was initially projected to amount to $11-14 million a year back in 2004; I can’t find any more recent figures, but just assuming a standard rate of inflation that would be $20 million a year today, and more in the future, meaning Lerner’s ask could easily be worth well over $300 million in diverted future taxes that would otherwise go to the district treasury.

With the way stadium subsidy numbers are going, it’s easy to start getting a little jaded — oh, only $300 million, at least that’s not over a billion like some MLB owners I could mention. But between the Wizards, Capitals, Mystics, and Nationals, D.C. could easily be looking at over a billion dollars to zhuzh up sports venues that it expected to be done paying for now — and in the case of the arena didn’t even pay for in the first place — just because “economic anchors.” How big an anchor are they? Oh, hello, Stanford sports economist Roger Noll:

Noll said even when a new stadium is built, a city gets about as many full-time jobs as a Macy’s department store.

Nobody ever talks about spending $600 million to upgrade a Macy’s, but then, Macy’s probably doesn’t have as many lobbyists.

 

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Friday roundup: Leaked analysis says Royals stadium could cost taxpayers $6B wut

access_time personNeil deMause

Gonna be a bit of a weird roundup today, gang, because the Kansas City Star dropped this bombshell last night:

A new Royals ballpark in downtown Kansas City would cost Jackson County taxpayers far more than its $1 billion sticker price.

It’ll be more like $4.4 billion to $6.4 billion, if the stadium sales tax and other payments required by the current lease agreement extended 40 years beyond its expiration date in 2031, as the Royals have suggested.

6.4 what now? Is this one of those stress dreams where I’m going to laugh about how I could ever have found it believable once I finally wake up?

If you don’t feel like reading the whole Star article, or just can’t see it through all the pop-up ads, here are some of the main points:

  • The 0.375% sales tax surcharge that funded the most recent Royals and Chiefs renovations currently generates about $53.4 million a year. [CORRECTION: The $53.4 million includes the parks tax and other payments listed below. I’ve adjusted the rest of the calculations that follow — the overall math doesn’t change much.] If that is extended by 40 years like Royals owner John Sherman wants, and sales tax receipts rise as expected, that would generate between $1.3 billion and $2 billion for the Royals alone according to a financial analysis that County Administrator Troy Schulte conducted last week and which someone “associated with the Legislature” leaked to the Star.
  • The Royals would get another $170 million, again over 40 years, from its half of a county parks tax and other payments from the city and state.
  • “What shocked Schulte,” writes the Star, was that Jackson County would face a projected $2.9 billion in increased insurance payments over the next 40 years if a new Royals stadium were built. The Royals’ current stadium comes with an annual insurance bill of $800,000; for a new stadium that would start at an estimated $4.5 million, then rise by a staggering 10% a year.

Some immediate caveats: None of the numbers above are in present value, meaning spending in the year 2070 is counted the same as spending now, which is not really kosher at all. And that 10% a year insurance hike sounds crazy on the face of it, plus also wouldn’t that imply that insurance on the Royals’ current stadium would rise as well, making the incremental cost less?

Still, even if it’s not $6.4 billion, we’re talking about a shit-ton of taxpayer money here. Using my best back-of-the-envelope scribbling and this present value calculator, it looks like the future tax surcharge diversion would be worth something in the range of $500-700 million in present value. The insurance bill, depending on your assumptions, could be up to $500 million. So it’s very likely well over $1 billion worth of taxpayer costs here, and that’s without any public infrastructure spending or property tax breaks or anything else that might eventually get rolled in as well.

If nothing else, this certainly explains why County Administrator Frank White sees $300 million paid out over 20 years as a preferable counteroffer: It very much is. It’s still maybe not a great counteroffer, since that’s almost $200 million in present value, but it beats $1-billion-plus all to hell.

So, yeah, that happened. And other things happened this week too, so let’s get to them as well:

  • Tampa Bay Rays execs presented their $600 million-ish stadium subsidy demand to the St. Petersburg city council yesterday, with city consultant David Abrams beaming that “You only have to look to the Battery in Atlanta to see how there was nothing there, the amount of economic impact that has happened in Cobb County for the Atlanta Braves has been nothing short of astounding.” Sorry, that is incorrect, but we have some lovely parting gifts. Rays exec Brian Auld also told the council that it has to approve a stadium deal by next spring in order for the stadium to be open in 2028 because “if we miss that opening date, this entire endeavor becomes impossible,” an assertion he backed up with I’m sorry, my time has expired.
  • Meanwhile, the Tampa Bay Times editorial board wrote an editorial this week that praised the city of St. Petersburg for its “transparency” by getting the Rays to share economic projections for their new stadium project with the city council by promising not to let the public see them, which is a new twist on the meaning of that word. “This marks a good start in what could be a beneficial new era for area residents and the Rays alike,” wrote the board; it will be left as an exercise for readers to determine what innovative definition the Times is using for “beneficial.”
  • The African-American Sports and Entertainment Group, which was announced with great fanfare a couple of years back as the city of Oakland’s choice to redevelop the Oakland Coliseum site, isn’t doing too well, with two of its eight owners suing the others for something about unfairly diluting their shares by creating multiple LLCs in Delaware. The group has already seen its plans for a WNBA team in Oakland get derailed by the league granting an expansion franchise to San Francisco instead, and getting a new NFL team for Oakland has always seemed kind of pipe-dreamy, so yeah, definitely not doing too well.
  • It’s been a couple of years since we’ve heard about the Minnesota Timberwolves owners — yes, A-Rod and that other guy — and their desire for a new arena to replace their renovated-in-2017 old one, but somebody asked Minnesota city council candidates what they think of paying for one, and they’re not crazy about the idea. “Subsidizing billionaires’ hobby investments is not a responsible use of taxpayer dollars — especially when there is no evidence that these tax outlays provide a return on investment,” said councilmember Elliott Payne.
  • Add Country Club Hills to the list of Chicago suburbs interested in being home to a new Bears stadium if the team’s owners want to pay to build one themselves, which they don’t.
  • The Arizona Diamondbacks are in the World Series, which means it’s time for more articles about why their owners think they need a new stadium. Also pitcher Merrill Kelly cast aspersions on Chase Field’s air-conditioning, saying, “I’m definitely sweating more here than I am other places”; there might just be other reasons for that, Merrill.
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Friday roundup: Billionaires all over get cash for their stadiums and arenas and car plants and movie shoots (I got a rock)

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! Ready for a heaping helping of news about America’s elected officials and business leaders working together to ensure smart investments of public dollars that will build a better tomorrow? If so, I am sorry to inform you that you have accidentally clicked on the wrong website, but if you stick around you may be rewarded with some grim laughs, or at least some links to old comic strips.

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Friday roundup: Pelicans, T-Wolves arena demands floated by sportswriters whether owners are talking about them or not

access_time personNeil deMause

Hey, remember just a few months ago when people could legitimately argue that the age of sports stadium and arena subsidy demands was coming to an end? That was before the Buffalo Bills, Arizona Coyotes, Chicago Bears, and Cleveland Guardians all joined the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays in seeking government money for new or renovated buildings, and now you can barely turn around without some new team joining the chase for the public purse:

  • The New Orleans Pelicans suck, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune asks: Maybe a new arena would help? The resulting billion-word article doesn’t really answer the question, but it does reveal that owner Gayle Benson (who also owns the Saints) says she needs “some big arena investments to stay competitive,” meaning either a renovation of their 22-year-old arena or a brand-new one, and the team’s lease expires in 2024, and Benson is 74 years old and her succession plan is for the Pelicans (and Saints) to be sold on her death with the proceeds given to a charitable foundation, and she says one requirement will be that the teams stay in New Orleans, but you know they could potentially leave, so isn’t it better to be safe than sorry? (Why a billionaire who says she’s giving away her wealth to charity because “I don’t need any more money” needs more revenue to “stay competitive” is another question the Times-Picayune article doesn’t answer.)
  • Meanwhile in Minneapolis, Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx owners Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez say they have “have no plans to move” the teams without a new arena, but that isn’t stopping the Minneapolis Star Tribune from reporting that they’ll move the teams without a new arena, because it’s been five whole years since their current arena got a $145 million renovation, and “I can vacuum the floor of my Chevy and repair the cigar burns on the seats. At the end of the day, it’s still a Chevy.” Also, Lore said that adding “augmented reality,” which apparently means fans wearing Google Glass-type glasses so watching in real life can be more like watching on TV, could be “incredible,” so this is totally something to dedicate an entire sports column to, how could anyone possibly think otherwise?
  • On the Bears front, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has declared that “I have not had any discussions, haven’t been approached by anybody, neither the city nor the Bears themselves, so it’s not something we’re currently looking at, like I said we’re focused on our own fiscal situation.” The headline that WLS-TV put on this was “New Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights won’t be paid for by IL taxpayers, Gov. Pritzker says,” which isn’t quite what he said, but I guess “New Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights won’t be paid for by IL taxpayers yet, Gov. Pritzker says” didn’t rank as high in SEO.
  • Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg isn’t putting up a sign inside his stadium for the postseason promoting his plan to move the team to Montreal half the year after all. “I made a big mistake, a real mistake in trying to promote our Sister City plan with a sign right now in our home ballpark. I absolutely should have known better, and really, I’m sorry for that,” said Sternberg. “I knew that a sign would bring us attention. And we do want the attention. I just didn’t completely process that now isn’t the moment for it.” Of course, one could argue that he’s already gotten the attention, so why does he need the sign, but that would be churlish, right?
  • Orange County Superior Court Judge David Hoffer has ruled that Anaheim city officials need to look harder for records on how they decided to sell 150 acres of land to Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno for a cut-rate price of $150 million. The ruling was part of a now-18-month-old lawsuit seeking to overturn the deal as being in violation of open-meetings laws.
  • Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer says he’s “become a real obsessive about toilets,” adding: “Toilets, toilets, toilets.” The Clippers’ new arena will have a record number of toilets per fan, and Ballmer says, “The architects keep getting on me. You’re supposed to call them ‘fixtures’ instead of toilets. But it’s the same thing. We’re putting a whole lot more toilets than anyone else in the NBA.” Also: toilets.
  • Hey, remember this crazy $1.7 billion lotus-blossom-shaped stadium for the Guangzhou Evergrande soccer team? You will be sad to learn that Evergrande is close to bankruptcy and doesn’t even have naming rights to the team anymore, and the stadium now looks like this and may never look like anything more. Unfinished, half-built stadiums are becoming quite the rage in international soccer, which if nothing else is making for some great vaportecture.
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David Perdue lobbied for tax break to benefit fellow Georgia senator (and WNBA owner) Kelly Loeffler

access_time personNeil deMause

If the names Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue aren’t immediately familiar to you, they will be soon, as they’re the two Republican U.S. Senators facing runoff elections in Georgia on January 5 that will determine which party controls the Senate. (The Democrats need to take both to reach a 50-50 tie, which would be broken in their favor by vice-president Kamala Harris.) Loeffler is also co-owner of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream, whose players have called her out for her pro-Trump and anti-Black Lives Matter stances (Loeffler wrote to the WNBA’s commissioner at one point blaming BLM for “the removal of Jesus from churches and the disruption of the nuclear family structure” and promoting “violence and destruction across the country”), even taking the court during pregame warmups wearing shirts endorsing Loeffler’s Senate race opponent.

So while it wasn’t surprising to see Loeffler and Perdue show up together in a ProPublica story on Friday, this one was a bit unexpected:

Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., privately pushed Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to give wealthy sports owners a lucrative tax break last year, according to a previously unreported letter obtained by ProPublica…

The Treasury ultimately declined to adopt the revision Perdue sought. If the regulation had been altered as Perdue wanted, it would have been a boon for some of his largest donors. Perdue has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the owners of professional sports clubs, including now-fellow Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who co-owns Atlanta’s WNBA team, the Dream.

The tax break in question has to do with pass-through entities, which are corporations whose net profits are declared on the tax returns of the individual owners. When the GOP’s 2017 tax law cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20% (among lots of other changes, including double-taxing residents of high-tax states that just happened to be mostly Democratic), it allowed many pass-through business owners to deduct 20% of their business income, effectively lowering their personal income tax rate to the lower corporate one. But not all, and one of the exceptions was owners of pro sports franchises, meaning that Loeffler was set to lose a pile of money as a result of not being included.

Enter Perdue, who as ProPublica writes with eyebrow exquisitely raised, “was not on the committee that crafted the legislation, making his in-the-weeds lobbying on the arcane regulation unusual, congressional experts said.” He did have another reason to be interested in the tax break, though:

A review of his campaign contributions shows that Perdue has taken more than $425,000 from the owners of professional sports teams and their relatives. Some of the top donors include the DeVos family, which owns the Orlando Magic; John Ingram, who owns the Nashville SC soccer team; Los Angeles Kings owner Philip Anschutz; and Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam.

On the same day Perdue sent Mnuchin the letter, he received $3,000 in donations from three lobbyists at GeorgiaLink Public Affairs Group, a lobbying firm that was representing the Atlanta Braves. Because of the Braves’ ownership structure, it’s unlikely the team would have been affected by the regulation, but around that time, MLB was lobbying on the rule, urging the Treasury to give its team owners the tax break.

Perdue also got $108,000 in donations from Loeffler, her husband, and her Dream co-owner Mary Brock.

Perdue’s letter ultimately went nowhere: Mnuchin didn’t direct the IRS to change the tax law to benefit sports team owners, so Loeffler’s tax bill remains undiminished. But it’s nice little moment to remember the next time you wonder how come so many corporate titans can duck paying taxes so easily: When you can ask the senator who sits next to you to write a letter to the IRS requesting you get a tax break, and enclose $108,000 in checks to sweeten the pot, that’s going to get you a lot more consideration than the average taxpayer.

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Friday roundup: Ex-D.C. mayor says his $534m Nats stadium expense was worth it, Clippers arena stymied by car trouble, MLS franchise fees to go even higher

access_time personNeil deMause

Shouldn’t posting items more regularly during the week leave less news to round up on Fridays? I’m pretty sure that’s how it’s supposed to work, but here I am on Friday with even more browser tabs open than usual, and I’m sure someone is still going to complain that I left out, say, the latest on arena site discussions in Saskatoon. I guess lemme type really fast and see how many I can get through before my fingers fall off:

 

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Friday roundup: How Kansas City evicted a team for rent non-payment and ended up costing itself $1m, and other stories

access_time personNeil deMause

This week’s recommended reading: Girl to City, Amy Rigby’s just-published memoir of the two decades that took her from newly arrived art student in 1970s New York to divorced single mom and creator of the acclaimed debut album Diary of a Mod Housewife. (Disclosure, I guess: I edited an early version of one chapter for the Village Voice last year.) I picked up my copy last week at the launch of Rigby’s fall book tour, and whether you love her music or her long-running blog (guilty as charged on both counts) or enjoy tales of CBGB-era proto-gentrifying New York or coming-of-age-stories about women balancing self-doubt and determination or just a perfectly turned punchline, I highly recommend it: Like her best songs, it made me laugh and cry and think, often at the same time, and that’s all I can ask for in great art.

But first, read this news roundup post, because man, is there a lot of news to be rounded up:

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Friday roundup: New sports venues, new sports venue threats, and our dwindling journalistic resources

access_time personNeil deMause

Deadspin’s Albert Burneko is a national treasure whether he’s writing about sports or movies or punctuation, and his takedown this week of a Fivethirtyeight article that asserts there are too many minor-league baseball teams is very much no exception. Drop whatever you’re doing — which is reading this post, so okay, drop whatever you were going to do after that — and read it now, whether you care about the purpose of sports as entertainment or the role of the media in management-labor relations or the increasing propensity to reduce human beings to measures of technocratic efficiency. With the demise of the alt-weeklies, there are fewer and fewer outlets eager to combine tenacious reporting and big-picture analysis and engaging writing toward the end of helping us understand the world we live in beyond “here are some potentially viral things that happened today,” so we need to cherish those that remain while we can.

And with that, here are some potentially viral (in the not especially infectious sense) things that happened this week:

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