XFL – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: More Bears $2.6B stadium subsidy fallout, plus Indianapolis switches soccer horses

April 26, 2024 Neil deMause

Before we get to the news: I hope that those of you who enjoy using dark mode are enjoying the new dark mode plugin I installed this week (DarkMySite, if anyone cares), which seems, unlike the old one, to actually mostly work. If you haven’t tried it out and want to, click the little moon symbol at bottom right and take a load off your eyes!

Also, a special shoutout to a couple of FoS readers (unnamed, but you know who you are) who either sent in a large lump sum of cash or upped their monthly Patreon pledge for no reason at all in the last week. As I forget if I explicitly mentioned, I quit my previous day job last month, which should give me more time to devote to this site; and while I do have a new regular gig that seems promising, every step towards making this site self-sustaining is hugely helpful, so a huge thanks to all you supporters, at any level. (And for those who haven’t yet taken the plunge: There are still about a dozen more Vaportecture art prints, get ’em before they’re gone!)

Okay, enough of that, time’s a-wasting and there’s a whole week of news remainders to dig through:

The fallout continues from the Chicago Bears owners’ $2.6 billion stadium subsidy demand (see the updates for the math behind the updated figure), with so much more today that we’re going to have to break out the second level of bullet points:
- Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson says it’s no contradiction that he said during his mayoral race that the city shouldn’t spend billions of dollars on a Bears stadium when there were “dozens of other urgent needs” and now thinks this is a great idea, on the grounds that he, a “middle child” from a “working-class family,” got to talk to billionaires and make sure they put some “skin in the game” and also the stadium will be “transformational” and “the Bears are staying in Chicago” and “the type of economic development this project brings” and “14 more acres of space for our children in the city of Chicago to benefit from.” Is all that the best use of $2.6 billion? I’m sorry, we’re out of time for questions, thank you for coming.
- The Chicago Sun-Times editorial board did get a chance to ask Bears CEO Kevin Warren what would happen if the team got its $1.225 billion in taxpayer money for the stadium and nobody came up with another $1.175 billion to build new underground garages and park space, and Warren replied: “I’m not going to think negatively about that now. … If that’s the conclusion that … you want to reach now, then you can say that. I’m being positive about it … and being very transparent as far as what we need from the different three phases with this stadium project.” So, optional when projecting the city’s costs, not optional in the sense that you don’t want to go there in terms of what happens if the city doesn’t come up with another billion-plus dollars, got it.
- Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker reiterated yesterday that he’s agin’ the whole kit and kaboodle, saying: “I’m skeptical of the proposal that was put forward and I’m even more skeptical of the ability to get enough votes for it in the General Assembly.”
- Chicago Sun-Times columnist David Roeder suggests that if the Bears (and White Sox) want public money, they should give the public a cut of ownership of the team, though some stick-in-the-mud (okay, it’s me) points out that sports leagues love nothing more than to head off the possibility of public ownership, even blocking one-time San Diego Padres owner Joan Kroc from gifting her team to the city of San Diego on the grounds that that just isn’t done.
Way back in 2019, the Indiana state legislature approved giving $112 million toward a new soccer stadium for the Indy Eleven soccer team, provided owner Ersal Ozdemir got his team promoted from the USL to MLS. At the time, this seemed like an easy enough lift, since all the other kids were doing it, but it hasn’t happened yet, and now apparently Indianapolis mayor Joe Hogsett has gotten tired of waiting, announcing that he’s putting in a bid with another ownership group to get an MLS expansion team, using the same tax kickbacks that Ozdemir was looking to get. Ozdemir, who already broke ground on his stadium site last year, though it’s unclear if he’s actually started construction, is naturally enough extremely unhappy with this latest news, accusing Hogsett of “preparing to walk away” from “years of good-faith negotiations” and instead give the public money to some other soccer guy instead of him. Will there be lawsuits? Stay tuned!
A “hotel entrepreneur and former longtime Kansas City resident” got space on the Kansas City Star op-ed page to argue that Kansas Citians who voted against a tax subsidy for Royals and Chiefs stadiums missed an opportunity to become like Denver, where “the Coors Field development inspired a stunning downtown renaissance” where “dozens of restaurants, bars and clubs opened to serve crowds before and after the 81 hometown games each year.” I once again wish that I still had a copy of the chart someone once showed me that indicated that most of the development starts in Denver’s LoDo district actually preceded the construction of the Rockies stadium; if I can dig it up, I’ll post it here as an update.
The Arizona state senate is considering a bill to allow the state to approve “theme park districts” like the one Alex Meruelo wants for a Coyotes 2.0 arena, without city governments weighing in. (It did so by virtue of hollowing out an already-state-house-approved bill to give first responders access to treatment for PTSD and inserting theme park district language instead, which Arizona calls a “strike everything amendment” but “zombie bill” is a much better name.) This could make it easier for Meruelo to have the state levy a sales tax surcharge in his arena district that would be kicked back to him for construction costs; we’ll have to wait and see what the state senate thinks of it.
Buffalo Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula may sell up to a quarter of their team to help raise money for their share of a new stadium, after construction costs have soared by a reported $600 million. In case you needed more evidence that many if not most stadiums are money losers that are only built so that team owners can cash subsidy checks, here’s your Exhibit A.
Arlington, Texas is spending $4.2 million to upgrade the Texas Rangers‘ old stadium, which the team moved out of after 2019 into a new publicly funded one, because, according to Arlington Mayor Jim Ross, “it’s a regional injection of all economic development.” The stadium is currently home to the XFL Arlington Renegades and occasional concerts.
What more could happen to Montreal’s Olympic Stadium after costing $1 billion to build and hundreds of millions more to fix the roof on and now $870 million to fix the roof on again? How about catching fire and needing $40 million to fix the damage? You gotta wonder if the Big Owe is just trying to put itself out of its misery at this point, but Montreal officials aren’t getting the message.

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Friday roundup: Drumming clowns, vaporgondolas, and the XFL rises shambling from its dusty grave

September 18, 2020 Neil deMause

The magnets have shipped! Repeat: The magnets have shipped! If you want to get in on this, act now, or you might have to wait until I make my second trip to the post office.

This was an extra-busy news week, which felt like a bit of a return to normalcy after several months of sports team owners mostly focusing more on getting back on the field than on getting money to pay for new fields. But life can’t be put on hold forever, and by “life” I mean “grubbing for someone else’s cash,” because what is life if not that? (Answers may differ if you are not a sports team owner.)

Here’s a bunch more stuff that happened than what already made FoS this week:

That protest to call for the New York Yankees to pay their fair share of taxes or maybe just bail out local struggling businesses only drew about 10-15 people, according to NJ.com, but also “clowns playing a drum on stilts.” The site’s accompanying video features less than two seconds of drum-playing stilt clowns, and a whole lot of 161st Street BID director Cary Goodman talking about the plight of local businesses, and while I know Cary and he apparently paid for the clowns, I still say that this is a dereliction of journalistic duty.
Along those same lines, the gondola company owned by former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt has reportedly released new renderings of its proposed gondola to Dodger Stadium, but does NBC Los Angeles show us any of them? No, it does not. (I so yearn to see Cab-Hailing Purse Woman cast off her foam finger and hail a gondola.) We do learn that “the gondola system could move up to 5,500 people per hour in each direction, meaning more than 10,000 fans could be transported to Dodger Stadium in the two hours before the start of a game or event,” which seems to misunderstand how people arrive at baseball games, which at Dodger Stadium is mostly all at once in the third inning, and even more misunderstand how people leave baseball games, which is all at once when they’re over, at which point there would suddenly be a two-hour-long line for the gondola. McCourt’s L.A. Aerial Rapid Transit company says it will pay the project’s $125 million cost, but even if true — and you know I’m always skeptical when people ask for public-private partnerships but promise there will be no public money — that doesn’t make this much less of a crazy idea.
The XFL’s Los Angeles Wildcats might have to share their stadium this spring with a college football team, and, wait, didn’t the XFL fold? I swear the XFL folded. Oh, I see now that The Rock bought it, so: In the unlikely event that the XFL gets going again, its L.A. team will have to share digs with a college football team playing in the spring. Honestly having to use a football stadium more than 10 days a year just seems like efficient use of space to me, but sports leagues do get gripey about scheduling, even sports leagues that barely exist.
That Palm Springs arena being built by AEG now won’t be built in Palm Springs after all, but rather nearby Palm Desert, because the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, whose land was going to be used for the project, decided after Covid hit to “reevaluate what was going on just like most other businesses because they had so many other projects,” whatever that means. Given that the Palm Springs police and fire departments said they’d need tens of millions of dollars to provide services for the new arena, I think it’s safe to say that Palm Springs just dodged a bullet here.
The San Francisco 49ers are finally paying rent again to the city of Santa Clara, after initially trying to get out of it because their two exhibition games at home were canceled.
This Athletic article about the attempts in the 1980s and ’90s to save Tiger Stadium is paywalled and is not nearly as comprehensive as the entire chapter about the same subject in Field of Schemes, but it does have some nice quotes from Tiger Stadium Fan Club organizers Frank Rashid and Judy Davids (the latter of whom worked on a renovation plan for the stadium that would have cost a fraction of a new one, a scale model for which I once slept in the same room with when she and her husband/co-designer John put me up at their house during a FoS book tour), so by all means give it a read if you can.
If you’re wondering how $5.6 billion in subsidies for a new high-end residential/office/mall development in Manhattan is working out now that Covid has both residents and offices moving out of Manhattan, I reported on it for Gothamist and discovered the unsurprising answer: really not well at all.
The KFC Yum! Center in Louisville’s naming rights are about to expire, but KFC is talking about signing an extension, so with any luck we have many more years ahead of us to make fun of the name “KFC Yum! Center.”
That’s not how you spell “ESPN,” Minneapolis-St.Paul Business Journal.

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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

October 18, 2019 Neil 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:

Three days after evicting the indie minor-league baseball Kansas City T-Bones from their stadium for nonpayment of rent, the city of Kansas City, Kansas welcomed new owners of the team with a new lease that will provide $1 million in tax money to help pay for $1.5 million in stadium upgrades. If this doesn’t quite feel like tough negotiating to you, does it make you feel better that the new team president is promising to bring shuffleboard, pickleball, sand volleyball, and bocce ball to the stadium as well? Can anyone truly put a price on getting to watch professional (?) pickleball?
Most of the $30 million the Los Angeles Angels have spent on stadium “maintenance” over the last seven years actually went to building a new scoreboard, which has sports economist Roger Noll worried that the team is skimping on actual upkeep of the building as it negotiates a new lease. Also, the long-hidden appraisal of the Angel Stadium parking lots that team owner Arte Moreno wants development rights to has reportedly been leaked, but not to anyone who’s actually made it public, which isn’t really my idea of what “leaked” means.
Still nobody is quite sure how much money St. Louis taxpayers will have to put up for a new MLS stadium, or for cost overruns that the city has promised to cover, or even where the stadium will be built. These are maybe things St. Louis might have wanted to work out before approving the funding plan, but it did land the city an MLS expansion franchise, and not everybody gets those. Not quite yet, anyway.
The New York Islanders‘ new arena will reportedly include “smart jerseys” for sale that can change what player and number they feature, which seems not to have anything to do with the new arena per se? Regardless, I’m sure the Cincinnati Bengals will be demanding that county taxpayers pay for some soon enough.
MLB TV ratings are up even though attendance is down, and MLS per-game attendance is down while TV ratings are up. One might be tempted to conclude that something is going on here other than MLB being a dying sport while MLS is the choice of a new generation, but far be it from me to ruin a good meme.
Were you wanting an article whose headline reports that “new stadium buzzing is getting louder” for the Tampa Bay Rays when the only actual news in it is about a Rays stadium lobbying group shutting down? Florida Politics has got you covered!
MLB is exploring ways to let investment funds buy minority shares in baseball teams, which I don’t fully understand the consequences of beyond “more potential buyers means you can charge more for shares,” but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that investment funds aren’t the best employers for workers and other living things.
The XFL’s Dallas Renegades have released a schematic of how their football field in the Texas Rangers‘ old baseball stadium, and yeah, that seems about right.
The Columbus Dispatch editorial board says it’s fine with the city’s soccer stadium costs having doubled — because who can put a price on keeping the Crew in town? — but just wishes someone in city government had mentioned it rather than forcing the paper’s reporters to go dig up secret documents, which was a lot of work, man.
The New York Liberty are relocating to Brooklyn after two years in exile in Westchester after the team’s former owners, Madison Square Garden, moved the WNBA franchise there to make room for more lucrative concerts and such. This isn’t a huge surprise given that the Liberty’s new owner is also the new owner of the Brooklyn Nets and the arena, but as someone who will now be able to get to games via a 20-minute subway ride, I applaud corporate machinations finally working in my favor for once.
With the Oakland A’s looking at building a waterfront stadium because fans dig waterfront stadiums, the Washington Post has investigated whether it’s really such a good idea to be building waterfront stadiums when sea level is projected to rise by several feet in coming decades thanks to the climate crisis. My favorite bit is where a University of Miami geologist does say that Miami is “not a long-term option” — not Miami’s stadium, mind you, but Miami itself, which should be a sobering notion for anyone concerned about the future, which of course is where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives.
And speaking of Miami, please enjoy this moment in the Miami city commission’s continuing debates over Inter Miami‘s new stadium in which a city commissioner said to Miami’s mayor, “Let me call you Lord Mayor, so you get even happier!” I’m truly going to miss Florida when it’s gone.

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Texas Rangers’ old stadium to be permanently converted for XFL, what could possibly go wrong here

April 11, 2019April 11, 2019 Neil deMause

Texas Rangers execs have announced that when their new taxpayer-subsidized stadium opens next year, their 25-year-old prior taxpayer-subsized stadium will be converted to a football stadium for an XFL franchise, reports Forbes — notwithstanding that this was already announced by the XFL last December. But Rangers vice president of business operations Rob Matwick did at least provide a couple more details of how the retrofitting would go:

“It will require us at the end of the season to convert from a baseball configuration to a football configuration.”

Permanently?

“Probably,” Matwick said, “because we’re going to have a state-of-the-art baseball facility across the street.”

Matwick also said the Rangers were engaged in “some preliminary talks” about hosting soccer and high school football, according to Forbes columnist Barry Bloom.

Okay, let’s start with a look at how this will likely work in terms of geometry. Here’s a composite of Google Maps images of the Rangers’ old stadium and a football field, sized to the same scale:

That’s clearly going to require the demolition of some seats in center field, which shouldn’t be a huge undertaking. It would leave fans with pretty terrible sightlines, though — the 50-yard-line seats would be massively far from the field — plus it would be very difficult to fit in a soccer pitch, which needs to be 30% wider than an NFL field. So it would be far more likely to see a configuration like this:

That will require a fair bit more demolition, especially to fit soccer, but at least you’d have decent seats along one side, and I suppose could even add temporary bleachers on the other side to provide more seats.

Anyway, all this would clearly be totally worth it for the Rangers and Arlington to land a permanent … XFL franchise, did you say? The league that only lasted ten games in its first iteration (prompting creator Vince McMahon to call it a “colossal failure”), and which is slated to try again next year, on the heels of another attempt at an NFL alternative that only made it through eight games? This is truly a great idea, and certainly not a pathetic attempt to pretend that having two stadiums designed for baseball sitting right next to each other isn’t a tragic commentary on American subsidy-driven capitalism.

UPDATE: A commenter (thanks, Joe!) shared the schematic below that the Rangers previously issued, which is similar to my bottom image only with the field running third base to right field instead of first base to left field. It also has one corner of the end zone located in the front-row seats, and the overlap would be even worse for a soccer pitch, so clearly this is a work in progress.

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Friday roundup: Don’t subsidize bad people, XFL to pay St. Louis more in rent than Rams did, unscientific poll on Suns arena is unscientific

January 4, 2019 Neil deMause

Happy first Friday roundup of 2019! I could add a whole lot of thoughts on lists I’ve read and haven’t made of the best of this and that of last year, but to save time let me just stick with saying that this song is pretty damn excellent and get right to the news of the short week:

Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post wrote a column about how Washington NFL team owner Daniel Snyder is a bad person and a terrible owner and should never get a dime of public stadium money because that’d be “a bailout, welfare,” none of which I can disagree with, but at the same time I’m a bit uncomfortable with the implication that if Snyder were less unpleasant, he’d then be deserving of public largesse.
The XFL may still be considered a bit of a joke league, but at least it can pay the city of St. Louis a decent stadium rent, unlike the Rams ever did. (Of course, the “joke league” bit is exactly why they are being required to pay real rent whereas the Rams could refuse to; there’s not much advantage to being an 80-pound gorilla.)
This essay responding to Amazon’s tax breaks is pretty excellent, though it’s still a half-notch below this classic Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon.
An opposing team manager has demanded that Tottenham Hotspur be required to play the rest of their season at Wembley rather than moving into their much-delayed stadium, because … teams that got to play them while they were adjusting to their new grounds would have an advantage somehow? From what I’ve been able to tell, most of home-field advantage in soccer comes from home fans booing (or whistling) at refs to intimidate them into making calls that go their team’s way, but the last time I tried reading the literature on this it quickly went deep into the weeds, so I won’t belabor the point.
“Fans at Talking Stick Resort Arena” were “surprisingly” in favor of spending public money to renovate the Phoenix Suns arena, according to Fox10 Phoenix, compared to “the online response” which was more “mixed.” This is both an impressively off-label use of “surprisingly” and an impressively lazy attempt at polling Phoenix residents — two impressively lazy attempts, even — so fine job, Fox10 Phoenix!

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Friday roundup: Cincy stadiums still gobbling tax money, XFL to use old Rangers stadium, Crew stadium to require $50m+ in public cash

December 7, 2018 Neil deMause

So very very much more stadium and arena news from this week:

There’s a little money left over in Hamilton County’s sales-tax pool after paying off bonds on the Cincinnati Reds and Bengals stadiums, so county property owners will get an $8 million property tax reduction this year. That’s a mere fraction of what county officials promised when they passed the sales-tax hike 20 years ago, but at least this year they won’t have to sell any hospitals.
The XFL says it will restart play in 2020 with teams in eight cities, but the only interesting one (unless you’re a devotee of spring football, in which case more power to you) is Dallas, where the football team will apparently play in the Texas Rangers‘ old stadium, which will remain standing right next to the Texas Rangers’ new stadium, as well as the Dallas Cowboys‘ stadium. (Apparently football fans don’t care about air conditioning.)
Franklin County, Ohio, says it plans to build a new Columbus Crew arena … somewhere, costing … something, with the county putting up $50 million in cash — part of which would go toward turning the old Crew stadium into a “public sports complex” — plus land and infrastructure worth … something. But Franklin County commissioner Marilyn Brown told the Columbus Dispatch that “it will have mixed-use included, so it’s an economic-development deal that will include apartments, retail along with it. So it will have enormous economic-development benefit,” so it’s all good, because who can put a price tag on enormous?
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman says he’s “disappointed” that Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk is backing out of a downtown arena deal, and offered to provide league help in cutting a new deal. Hands up anyone who thinks that means “Leaning on Melnyk to pay for the arena he said he would” and not “Leaning on Ottawa to bail Melnyk out with public dollars”?
Plans for a Portland baseball stadium surrounded by affordable housing may have hit a snag, as two city commissioners say the land targeted for the stadium isn’t zoned for affordable housing. Or for a stadium, unless it can prove it has enough transportation first. These are the kinds of details you’d normally want to resolve before announcing a stadium plan, but then, so would making sure you’re using Euclidean geometry.

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