Category: the sports-media complex

Friday roundup: Arizona senate votes to give $500m to D-backs owner for stadium upgrades

access_time personNeil deMause

At 10 pm last night, the Arizona state senate voted 19-11 to approve spending $500 million in state money on stadium upgrades for the Arizona Diamondbacks. The bill had been passed by the state house in February but had stalled in the senate as Gov. Katie Hobbs and other bill proponents tried to round up enough votes for passage.

What did Hobbs agree to change in order to win over reluctant senators? Not a whole hell of a lot, at first reading:

  • The city of Phoenix’s contribution will be capped at $3.5 million a year in sales tax money, a little over half what Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego had estimated her city would be on the hook for under the original bill.
  • An increase in Maricopa County contributions to match the city’s cost.
  • No use of state income taxes from team employees, as was proposed in the original bill.
  • A provision by which if the Diamondbacks owners don’t spend $250 million of their own money on renovations, the state legislature can repeal the stadium subsidy and leave the team responsible for paying the full debt.
  • Probably other stuff, I’m still reading the bill.

It’s a weird laundry list, especially all the rejiggering of which level of government will contribute what — Gallego apparently demanded a city cost cap before she would sign off on the bill and thus flip some Democratic senate votes to yes, but the contribution amounts needed to still be tied to sales tax receipts to maintain the Casino Night Fallacy, so instead we get this odd mishmash of set dollar figures and dedicated tax revenues.

In any event, the overall thrust of the legislation is the same: A half-billion dollars will be pulled from city, county, and state sales tax revenues that would otherwise go to the general fund, and will now instead be siphoned off and sent back to D-backs owner Ken Kendrick to use for renovations to Chase Field. In exchange, Kendrick will agree to a new lease to keep the team in Phoenix through … oh, sorry, that hasn’t been determined yet, he insisted on the state approving public funding first before agreeing to what he would provide in return, because that’s totally how reasonable negotiations work.

The bill still needs to go back to the state house for a re-vote on its amended form, and then on to Hobbs for her signature, but those look like mere formalities at this point. Add Ken Kendrick to the list of billionaires who got commitments for several-hundred-million-dollar taxpayer checks this year because local officials were either too afraid of the possibility the team would move, too besotted with the alleged economic benefits of a team, or too beholden to lobbyists and campaign contributors to say no. Representative democracy: It’s not going great!

Lots of other stuff happened this week before last night’s vote in Arizona, let’s get to that:

  • Oklahoma City Thunder owner Clay Bennett has finally agreed to lease provisions in exchange for the $850 million in arena money he got from the city a year and a half ago, and they’re pretty skimpy: The team will pay about $2.4 million a year in rent, rising with inflation, and agree to a $1 ticket surcharge to go toward a capital improvement fund; anything above that for maintenance and operations will be on the city to provide. Also, Bennett will keep all the proceeds from sale of the new arena’s naming rights, plus will get exclusive rights to buy and develop the arena site, with the sale price going back to him to pay for his arena. “Worst arena deal in history” is a high bar to clear, but Oklahoma City seems determined to be in the running for it.
  • The mayors of both St. Petersburg and Tampa say they’re happy the Tampa Bay Rays are up for sale, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor calling it “a very positive step” and saying her city’s “bid is dusted off and we’ve sharpened our pencils,” while St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch said he’s “excited about the possibility of new ownership” and focused on ” the fulfillment of the economic promises made to the historic Gas Plant District community.” The preferred Tampa site is also being targeted by the owner of the Tampa Bay Sun women’s USL team for a possible soccer stadium, but as nobody has the slightest idea how any of this would be paid for, it’s a little early to start worrying about competing stadium requests.
  • Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne and some county councilmembers are shouting at each other about whether a Brook Park Cleveland Browns stadium would be an affront to Cleveland or a windfall that’s too good for the county to pass up. Not that Cuyahoga County’s position matters all that much, but with the Ohio state legislature still in its staredown, somebody’s gotta provide the juicy quotes that drive the click machine.
  • The New York Times’ Athletic sports site is excited that sports stadium subsidies are now also for the ladies, if you needed any more reasons to stop reading the Times. (They offer games-only subscriptions, you don’t have to give up Spelling Bee!) The Kansas City Star editorial board, meanwhile, is worried that Missouri’s recently proferred (but not yet accepted) stadium subsidies for the Chiefs and Royals has too many unknowns and that spending public dollars on sports teams is “deeply regrettable” if also “sadly, the world in which we live,” if any of that makes you more interested in reading the Kansas City Star.
  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred will be at the Athletics‘ stadium site groundbreaking in Las Vegas on Monday, this is gonna be the best Potemkin village ever!
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Here is your “questions the DC media should be asking about the Commanders deal” bingo card

access_time personNeil deMause

I hinted at it on Tuesday, and now it’s a reality. Behold, your unanswered Washington Commanders stadium questions bingo card!

(Thanks to Ed Lazere, director of legislative advocacy for the United Planning Organization and founding director of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, for help coming up with the entries.)

How to play: Watch the news coverage of the proposed Washington Commanders stadium deal, and check off a box every time you see reporters asking either elected officials or Commanders owner Josh Harris one of these questions. (You get to check it off whether or not the question is answered — we don’t want to make this too impossible.) Once you’ve scored five in a row, announce somewhere — in comments on this item, on social media, in a press conference on the U.S. Capitol steps — that you’re a winner, and you’ll be a winner!

And in case you’re wondering: Yes, journalists themselves are eligible, so if you’re a D.C.-area reporter who wants to ask these questions yourself and claim the prize, be my guest! What exactly you’ll win has yet to be determined, but it will at least include living in a country where journalism is still alive, and who can put a price on that?

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Friday roundup: DC hires same clown consultants for Commanders deal who screwed up DC United math

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the weekly news roundup, a commenter asked me a question yesterday — I mean, I think they may actually have been trying to troll me, but it was in the form of a question — about how it could be better for Missouri to risk the Kansas City Chiefs moving to Kansas and losing all the tax revenue that comes with games. After initially going the “because economists say so” route, I tried to write up an actual detailed answer, and I want to include it here, because I, at least, found it instructive to see how quickly these kind of “sports stadium pay for themselves through economic activity” arguments fall apart once you subject them to actual math:

I found where your numbers are from, and they’re not from any economic impact study by the sports authority or an independent auditor or anyone else. They’re from a consultant hired by the Chiefs, who declared that the team and the stadium “generate $28.8 million in direct, indirect and induced tax revenue for the State of Missouri annually.” (The supposed $572 million is just “economic activity,” and the $28.8 million is the presumed taxes on that; if you include both, you’re double-counting.)

So, we already have Missouri spending $500 million in order to save $28.8 million a year, which would be a negative return on investment right there. But where does that $28.8 million figure come from? The Chiefs consultants, Econsult Solutions, only released a one-pager with no footnotes or other methodology, so we have no idea.

Most importantly, we have no idea if Econsult included money that would otherwise be spent elsewhere in Missouri if the Chiefs left. Is that all of it? No, of course not. Is it enough that it would reduce the $28.8 million a year in new taxes to a level where Missouri would be better off if the Chiefs left? Given that Missouri would be better off even if the real number were $28.8 million a year, yeah, that’s a near certainty.

But there’s an easier way to figure this out than guesstimating where people would be spending their money in some hypothetical situation: Look at cities that have gained or lost teams, and see what happens to local tax revenues. Innumerable economists have now done this, and found that the resulting losses are somewhere between 1) nothing and 2) next to nothing. (It’s actually worse than that: Some cities brought in *more* tax revenue without a team.) And that’s cities — the numbers are going to look even worse for states, since you can’t even make it up by stealing tax revenues from the suburbs.

No matter how you slice it, the numbers show that at the price points we’re talking about, $500 million and up, there is no way on earth for local governments to do better with the teams than without. You can wish it were otherwise — and team owners will certainly hire people to claim that it’s so — but good luck finding any data to support your case.

And now, on to the news:

  • Speaking of economic impact reports, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser just released one for her proposed Commanders stadium that would cost the city upwards of $7 billion, and you’ll never guess who wrote it: That’s right, Convention, Sports & Leisure, everyone’s favorite Dallas Cowboys–and–New York Yankees–owned clown consultants! I have no plans to go over it in detail (though the page with the large heading spelled “MULTPLIERS” does stand out), but I am obligated to point out that the last time D.C. hired CSL to do a stadium study, it was immediately revealed that about two-thirds of the projected city benefits weren’t benefits at all, forcing the consultants to put out a letter “clarifying” that its 400-page report didn’t actually say what it said it said. That CSL they got hired again by D.C. to do their next big stadium study is either a sign that Bowser wasn’t paying attention in 2014 (when she was a city council member) or that stadium consultants aren’t getting hired for the quality of their work, but rather for how reliably they report what team owners and elected officials want to hear, yeah, that’s undoubtedly the one.
  • Sports economist Geoffrey Propheter read far enough into the CSL report to find this knee-slapper: “Suppose I attend a conference in Denver, get a hotel room, and eat a Subway. According to CSL, the Subway gets to count my conference fees, room fees/taxes as economic impact. And so can the conference and the hotel. So now all my spending gets counted x3. Please stop being terrible at thinking.”
  • The Chiefs and Royals owners may now have blank checks from the state for up to 50% of their stadium costs (or will once the Missouri state house passes the bill and Gov. Mike Kehoe signs it, which should happen soon), but they still want even more city and county money to pay for their stadium dreams, and that could require more public referendums. The Kansas City Star reports that the two teams are likely looking at separate ballot measures after a combined one failed spectacularly last April; no word yet on when these would happen, but the teams are clearly going to have to ask the state of Kansas to renew its offer of state money for stadium there beyond its June 30 expiration date, or else “We must outbid the evil barbarians from beyond the western realm!” is going to have somewhat less impact on election day.
  • The plan by Ohio state senators who accepted tons of campaign donations from Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam to raid the state’s unclaimed funds account to borrow money for a Browns stadium may be stoking outrage from residents about what one called “legal theft,” but it’s doing wonders for publicizing the existence of the unclaimed funds and getting Ohioans to start claiming them.
  • Also, the Browns’ stadium hasn’t even been approved yet, and it’s already racking up cost overruns: The city of Brook Park just asked for $71 million in state road improvements for the planned stadium site, on top of the $1.2 billion in public money that’s already been proposed.
  • Want to read an article about how a min0r-league baseball stadium has “revived a struggling downtown” in a South Carolina city, while quoting only the mayor, the team owner, and the stadium developer? Sorry, I’m going to link to it anyway.
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Friday roundup: How real is the threat of a Royals or Chiefs move to Kansas, and other pressing questions

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy zeroth anniversary of that time we decided to all die of bird flu! It’s a fitting way to go out, honestly.

While we’re still here, though, there’s plenty of other stuff to keep getting wrong in the meantime:

  • A company affiliated with the Kansas City Royals has bought the mortgage to a potential stadium site in Kansas’s Johnson County, and … guys, you know that buying the mortgage isn’t anything like buying the land, it just means the property owner makes their payments to you instead of to the original mortgage issuer, right? Sure, if the property owner defaults, you get the land, but that’s a slim thread on which to hang a potential stadium plan — unless of course you’re just looking for easy ways to get “Royals” and “Kansas” into a headline to throw a scare into Missouri, in which case, nice outside-the-box thinking there.
  • Speaking of moving to Kansas, two economists have looked at that state’s STAR tax diversion deal and determined that there’s no way the state can build even one stadium, let alone two, without cannibalizing existing revenue. “A majority of Kansas lawmakers disagree,” reports the Kansas City Beacon, meaning “whether STAR bonds can support one or two teams depends on who you ask” — if you ask people who know what they’re talking about, you get one answer, if you ask people just grandstanding on behalf of the edifice complex you get another, whoda thunk it!
  • Over in Missouri, meanwhile, a group of Republican senators are refusing to consider Chiefs and Royals stadium funding unless the state approves new tax cuts, while Democrats are objecting to spending billions on stadiums when the state is only providing $25 million to tornado relief. “It’s not coming together just swimmingly as of right now,” summed up state Sen. Lincoln Hough.
  • At least one Missouri legislator is still on board: Republican Sen. Mike Cierpiot said spending on stadiums is worth it because “we’re not giving this money to billionaires. We’re giving it to the stadiums, which is owned by the county.” That’s not how stadium ownership works, unfortunately — owning stadiums just costs you property taxes, what’s important is to own the revenue streams from them, and here those would be controlled by the team owners — and isn’t how number agreement works either, this really isn’t going swimmingly.
  • Over on the other side of Missouri, meanwhile, a state audit has found that the Dome at America’s Center — that’s the former home of the St. Louis Rams, not a missile shield program — needs $155 million in maintenance over the next decade, and while that’s not all that much all things considered, the dome is losing money just hosting St. Louis Battlehawks UFL games and the occasional concert, so, you guessed it, the St. Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority is considering asking for state money. If they can find a way to increase that maintenance price to $500 million, they could qualify for funding under Gov. Mike Kehoe’s everybody-gets-a-stadium plan, I bet diamond-encrusted cupholders would go a long way toward meeting that requirement.
  • And to answer your question, yes, there was some news this week that was not in Missouri or Kansas! Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed not to provide any state money for a Tampa Bay Rays stadium — except for “roads and exits,” of course, gotta have roads and exits. And stairs and ramps are really exits of a kind, right? Not that any local governments are really proposing a new stadium for the Rays at this time, so DeSantis is unlikely to get called on his promise, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens if he’s in office long enough that he does.
  • This New York Times op-ed is getting a lot of likes for its headline (“Sports Stadiums Are Monuments to the Poverty of Our Ambitions”), but fewer seem to be reading down to the part that argues that “cities build stadiums in part because it’s so hard to build almost anything else,” which is presented without evidence and isn’t really historically true, but it’s of the moment because something something Ezra Klein.
  • Does everyone who plays at the don’t-call-us-Sacramento Athletics‘ ad hoc stadium still hate it? You betcha! Sports Illustrated speculates that John Fisher could consider relocating the team again, perhaps to Salt Lake City, but notes that then he wouldn’t be able to get sweet Northern California TV money, and … remind me what size TV market his intended destination of Las Vegas is again? Hmm.
  • And finally, this week in one-sentence media criticism:

Why investigate the public financing of a billion-dollar stadium when you can post pictures of Trisha and Garth with hardhats and shovels?

— J.C. Bradbury (@jcbradbury.bsky.social) 2025-05-30T12:31:50.461Z

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Rays execs again blame city and county for stadium delays, while further delaying stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Tampa Bay Rays co-presidents Brian Auld and Matt Silverman waded back into the stadium wars late last week, and the Tampa Bay Times scrambled all its reportorial jets to cover it. For those who haven’t been following, the Times has three writers who’ve been working on the Rays’ stadium story: baseball beat reporter Marc Topkin, who is historically a mouthpiece for Rays leadership; sports columnist John Romano, who is more a “can’t we just find a solution here” guy; and St. Petersburg reporter Colleen Wright, who actually reports the news. All three were on display over the weekend, and they did a classic job of describing the elephant:

  • Wright kicked things off on Friday by reporting on how Auld and Silverman went on a team-sponsored radio show Thursday night and again blamed St. Petersburg and Pinellas County officials for delaying their stadium financing votes from October to December following Hurricane Milton, which they said “effectively broke the deal.” City and county officials, in turn, were “expressing growing impatience” with Rays execs, wrote Wright, with County Commission chair Brian Scott, a strong supporter of the stadium deal, saying,  “If you can’t make a deal work with $600 million in public funding [Ed. Note: more like $1 billion actually], then you’ve got a business model that’s not sustainable. That’s not something that public dollars are going to fix.”
  • Romano followed up Saturday evening with a column on how “Mayor Ken Welch and a handful of city council folk were just about the last allies the Rays had in the universe and now they’ve managed to tick them off, too.” And while “to a degree” the Rays ownership’s anger was justified, he wrote, because the county commission did delay their vote until new members came on board, those new members “realized their error” and decided they didn’t want to be blamed for “the bungling of a $6.5 billion redevelopment deal” and approved the funding anyway. This is Rays owner Stu Sternberg’s last chance to get a stadium in the Tampa Bay area, Romano argued, and if that doesn’t happen, either 1) Sternberg will move the team, 2) Sternberg will sell the team to someone who moves it, or 3) Sternberg will sell the team to someone who gets a new stadium built locally. (The idea that maybe the Rays don’t actually need a new stadium, or at least a new stadium that costs $1.3 billion plus whatever the Trump steel tariff surcharge will be, seems not to have crossed Romano’s mind, despite his writing that it’s likely “the team will not see huge profits upon the opening of a new stadium” because nobody really wants to go see Rays games.)
  • A few hours later, Topkin chimed in by turning over all his column inches to Silverman, who said “we have four years to figure this out” and “we’ve always wanted to be here” and “we’re going to try to figure it out,” but that Rays execs are still deciding whether to go ahead with the new stadium deal by March 31, after which it turns into a pumpkin and everyone goes back to square one.

It was all really quite the case study in the breadth of U.S. newspaper coverage, running the gamut from straight-up team boosterism to even-handed reporting. And even more than that, it’s a reminder of how daily news outlets seldom convey a perspective that isn’t held by someone in a position of power: We have Topkin telling us how Rays execs see the stadium fiasco, columnist Romano expressing how Mayor Welch and other pro-stadium councilmembers see it, and Wright reporting on the perspective of city and county officials as a whole. The idea of consulting economists or budget experts, or just regular local residents who still haven’t been asked what they think of the deal, is crazy talk — who even are those guys?

Meanwhile, none of this gets us any closer to understand whether Sternberg and Friends are truly set to walk away from a $1 billion check because they just realized stadiums are expensive or Florida gets hit by hurricanes or something, or if they’re waiting to see if St. Pete officials will sweeten the deal if they hold out until March 31. That sure doesn’t sound likely given the latest statements by local elected officials — don’t forget, even Welch indicated two weeks ago that he’s ready to walk away from the stadium deal if Sternberg doesn’t live up to his end of things — but we’ll see. The power of “let’s just get things done” is powerful, especially when it’s posed as the sensible middle.

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How not to write a sports arena editorial, San Antonio Spurs division

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the key factors in perpetuating the billions-of-dollars-a-year system of public subsidies for private sports stadiums is what’s been dubbed the sports-media complex: the way that local news sites in most cases parrot the arguments of team execs and local elected officials for devoting taxpayer money to new sports venues. There are a bunch of reasons for this, from news outlets’ reliance on team access for reporters and team-related ad spending to the media’s inclination to uncritically repeat claims made by powerful people — Joanna Cagan and I were writing about this as early as 1998. The upshot is that voters, when they even get any kind of say in these deals, are usually working from information that is heavily skewed toward what the people who stand to benefit from stadium subsidies are saying, whether it’s true or not.

To see how this works in practice, let’s check out today’s San Antonio Express-News editorial on the prospect of a May vote to direct tax money toward a new arena for the Spurs:

Winning May vote for Spurs arena combines county venue tax, private funding

Okay, that is just a terrible headline. Is county tax money and private funding required in order to win the May vote? Is the May vote a winning idea, because it would include both tax money and private funding? How much of each would be combined? Why does a vote to spend tax money on a Spurs arena qualify as “winning,” as opposed to a more neutral term like “passing”? The whole thing seems designed to confuse readers more than enlighten them, which is not the traditional goal of journalism.

May is absolutely the right time for a public vote. A May election provides ample time for debate and discussion. A vote would serve as a capstone to Mayor Ron Nirenberg’s tenure. … Finally, with the Spurs’ lease agreement at Frost Bank Center set to expire in 2032, should a public vote fail, there would be plenty of time to bring a revised plan to voters.

So voting on (or for?) an arena deal would be a “capstone” for the mayor, because what longtime local politician wouldn’t want their legacy to be “tried to send a bunch of tax money to the local nepo baby rich guy“? And no worries that voters might not agree, because if they say no, there’s plenty of time to ask them again and see if they can be convinced to say yes.

Should Bexar County dedicate its venue tax — on rental vehicles and hotel rooms — toward the new Spurs arena? Yes, it absolutely should. But commissioners should do this with a negotiated guarantee from the Spurs and the city for investment in around the Frost Bank Center.

It absolutely should! Because reasons! But only if the Spurs owners agree to “invest” enough in and around the arena to make up for the cost of … how much would this be costing the city again?

Should the Spurs make a major contribution toward a project that will exceed $1 billion? Yes, absolutely.

The whole project will cost over $1 billion, okay. (Actually previously reported as maybe as much as $4 billion total, but who’s counting?) But what deal exactly does the Express-News think voters should be voting on, or for? The only attempt to estimate how much hotel and sales tax money San Antonio could divert to pay for arena costs is “holy sh*t that’s a lot of money” (actual quote from an actual economist!), so it would be nice for the paper to provide some numbers, but that’s apparently outside the scope of the editorial board.

One criticism of a potential new arena is that the Frost Bank Center would sit empty, but the reality is that if the Spurs were to move (and we are not suggesting that will happen), then the Frost Bank Center would still be empty and the surrounding area would still lack economic development.

So building a new arena would leave the city’s 22-year-old current arena vacant and redundant, but that’s okay because if the Spurs moved, to somewhere, which they won’t, but they could, to somewhere, then the arena would be vacant anyway. Checks out!

The best path forward is for a May vote on a new arena downtown, with a commitment to a new economic development approach to the area surrounding the Frost Bank Center and a sizable contribution from Spurs ownership.

And from city taxpayers, a contribution that is … what’s 100% minus “sizable”?

Newspaper editorials are always weird and maybe a bad idea overall: They simultaneously give newspaper editors a soapbox where they can throw all pretense at accuracy and fairness out the window, while simultaneously making it seem like the paper’s news coverage must be objective, because it’s not the editorial page. But to the extent that there is any point in the things, it’s that newspaper editors are supposed to know stuff, by virtue of being in charge of reporting the news all day, so when they say something is a good or bad idea, they know what they’re talking about. When instead they just use that public stage to repeat what Important People are whispering in their ears … I’m not sure what it is, but it sure ain’t journalism, and it sure ain’t earning the public’s trust.

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Roof firm expressed willingness to attempt “monumental task” of repairing Rays stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Finally some actual news about the Tampa Bay Rays stadium roof situation, courtesy of the St. Pete Catalyst, one of those nonprofit news sites springing up that could no doubt use your subscription money if you have some burning a hole in your pocket for other reasons. The Catalyst got hold of emails (it didn’t say, whether via a public records request or leaks) revealing that city building officials met with representatives of roof construction firm Dunn Lightweight the day after Hurricane Milton tore the roof off of Tropicana Field, and that company was at least initially ready to take a shot at having the roof replaced by Opening Day 2025:

In a Friday, Oct. 11 email sent after visiting the site, Javier Rattia, partner director for Dunn Lightweight, noted that his firm was under a “very tight schedule” to dismantle and replace Tropicana Field’s roof in time for the 2025 season.

“We will airfreight some of the materials and use most of our stock to achieve this monumental task,” Rattia wrote.

The next day, Dunn signed an agreement with the city to just dismantle and remove the existing roof, at a cost not to exceed $548,534. Nine days later, however, the city hired Global Rope Access to provide seven “rope technicians” to remove the roof at a cost of $416,353. (The Catalyst didn’t attempt to explain the discrepancy; I’ve reached out to Dunn and GRA to try to clarify.)

All this could either mean 1) St. Pete is giving up on trying to replace the roof, despite Dunn’s willingness to give it a go, 2) St. Pete is just working on cleaning up the debris for now while it evaluates the possibility of repair, or 3) something else, probably, this is one of the hazards of writing articles based entirely on email records. But it definitely tracks with the idea that nobody has yet figured out if the stadium roof is reparable, what it would cost, or how long it would take, though presumably Rays and city officials are working on that.

Speaking of which, somebody asked MLB commissioner Rob Manfred during World Series batting practice what he thought the timeline was, and he came up with a date:

“I think by Christmas they gotta have a pretty good plan in place, and there’s a lot to that.”…

“They’re still in the damage assessment mode,” Manfred said. “That needs to get done and obviously, it’s not just the roof, there was damage internally as well. Won’t know exactly what’s going to happen until they complete that process. … It’s just a guess as to how long it’s going to be.”

That’s hardly definitive, even before Manfred got to “just a guess”: What does that even mean to “have a pretty good plan in place”? Do Rays execs have to know for sure where they’ll be playing at the start of 2025, or just have various contingencies in place? When to MLB’s schedule makers need to know, so they can adjust game and travel times if necessary? Quick, somebody ask Manfred some followups — nope, he’s already on to the next thing:

“We can make it work in a minor-league park,” Manfred said. “I think there’s probably some flexibility in terms of what we do with the big-league schedule.”

Probably! This is not really helpful at all, even if it did get the Athletic some quotes to justify an article to lure you behind the New York Times’ paywall. Somebody get the St. Pete Catalyst (or Hell Gate, they’re in town already) a World Series press pass already so we can get some actual damn answers.

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NYCFC releases more pretend stadium images, pretend public cost numbers

access_time personNeil deMause

New York City F.C. officials held a press event last week to promote their new stadium set to open in 2027, let’s see how that went:

Okay, yes, that’s a new rendering. (Or a “model” as the New York Daily News caption puts it.) It’s not exactly an improvement on the last round of vaportecture, given that the entire surrounding neighborhood (plus the Mets‘ stadium across the street) appears to have been demolished and replaced by a gray void featuring only some kind of elevated highway called the “Queens,” but maybe they just wanted people to stop clowning on it as “Naming Rights Sponsor Stadium.” (Team officials said they hope to have a naming rights deal in place by the end of the year, at which point people can clown on it for that name.)

And what about details regarding the possibly $700 million in tax kickbacks and infrastructure spending this all will cost New York City taxpayers?

“When [Mayor Eric Adams] got into office, that’s when the project really started getting some legs, because we were able to present what we really believe is a transformative project for Queens,” [NYCFC CEO Brad] Sims said.

“He was able to say, ‘100% privately financed [stadium]. The city’s in a housing crisis right now. [This is the] biggest affordable housing project that the city’s seen in four decades.’”

I mean, he was able to say “100% privately financed.” He wasn’t able to actually mean it, but he was able to say it. Somebody else — say, a sports economist, the city Independent Budget Office, me — could have told the Daily News otherwise, but as the Daily News didn’t speak to anyone not employed by the team, its readers will never know.

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Friday roundup: Sacramento celebrates A’s move with new golf simulators, KC residents say cap public stadium funds at one-third

access_time personNeil deMause

Sports economist Victor Matheson and I were both on a radio show this week to discuss the Cleveland Browns and Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium situations — you can listen to it here, but first check out the rest of this week’s stadium and arena news, it’ll be quick, I promise:

  • There’s a “major economic boost” coming to Sacramento now that the Oakland A’s are relocating there temporarily, reports KCRA-TV: A new brunch-and-golf-simulators venue is opening across the street! (It was going to open there anyway, but now that the A’s are coming, the owner is trying to open it earlier.) Also, the mayor is “in discussions” with three new restaurants! Feel the excitement!
  • There is no excitement in St. Louis, where the Cardinals are still technically in the playoff hunt, but fans in the best baseball city in the world don’t want to watch .500 baseball, it turns out, or even buy hot dogs. “I love being the hot dog lady,” says hot dog lady Karen Boschert. “I’ve cut my staff down. My prices are reasonable. You can take my food into the stadium.” Maybe she could pivot her sales pitch to point out that you can buy her food and not bring it into the stadium? Just an idea.
  • Pollsters in Missouri decided to ask an unusual question of local voters: not whether taxpayers should pay toward new stadiums for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, but how much. The average was two-thirds team, one-sixth state, one-sixth city and county, which is kind of arbitrary and doesn’t account for whether the public would get back any share of revenues or community benefits or anything, but sure it sounds fair. Ish. Time will tell if the team owners come back with “zero-thirds team, poke in the eye with a sharp stick public.”
  • Most of the San Antonio residents who testified at a Wednesday hearing on a $160 million Missions minor-league baseball stadium “voiced concerns and skepticism,” according to Fox San Antonio. For actual quotes we have to turn to KSAT, which notes that a local arts and social justice activist said, “This project is all about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer,” while a resident of a housing complex that would be demolished to make way for the stadium said, “I would not be able to get somewhere else, and I would end up in the street yet again.”
  • Chicago’s city budget is facing a $982.4 million shortfall, and Mayor Brandon Johnson says, “There are sacrifices that will be made,” but not new Bears and White Sox stadiums, those are important even if they would cost the city upwards of $1.2 billion and $2 billion respectively, sacrifices are for little people.
  • Team-funded studies of a Philadelphia 76ers arena say it would be great, other studies show it would be a disaster; the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board says it’s up to the mayor and city council to figure out where the truth lies in the middle!
  • Another group of developers unrelated to either the Royals or the city has come up with renderings for a new downtown baseball stadium, and guys, you should at least look up how many players are on the field for a baseball game.
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That big Economist article got more wrong than right about sports subsidies

access_time personNeil deMause

I almost wrote something earlier this week about this Economist article on the flood of new stadium subsidy demands, but decided it wasn’t worth my time or yours since it doesn’t really report any new news. But then all youse all kept emailing me about it so fine: We’re going to go over it, and do so in excruciating detail, because oh, are its details ever excruciating:

On a summer evening in Kansas City, Kauffman Stadium is a fine place to be. … But amid the bonhomie is an undercurrent of worry. In April nearly 60% of local residents rejected a sales tax that would have helped pay for a new ballpark. Now there is a chance that the Royals might pick up their bats and go elsewhere. “If it stopped them from leaving, I’d take the tax,” says Daniel Capp, a lifelong fan.

That’s all technically true as far as it goes, but “a chance that the Royals might pick up their bats and go elsewhere” is a gross exaggeration: All signs are that team owner John Sherman will either try again in Kansas City, Missouri, try next door in North Kansas City, or try the other next door across the Kansas border — and attempts at that last one are so far going nowhere fast. So the odds on lifelong fans no longer being able to watch the Royals are pretty long.

Whether the Royals end up staying in Missouri or moving, one outcome seems all but assured: taxpayers somewhere will end up footing much of the bill for their new stadium.

Assuming the Royals get a new stadium, and don’t just stay put at their current one, which continues to be ranked as one of the best in baseball.

Virtually every new professional-sports venue in America is built with public funds. And the subsidies are only growing, even as evidence piles up that they are almost always lousy investments.

True!

Stadium construction tends to come in waves. Most venues are used for about 30 years before their owners look for new digs.

Not true! Nowadays plenty of team owners start looking for new digs well before the 30-year mark, with the Atlanta Braves and Texas Rangers owners famously getting fresh stadiums approved just 26 and 22 years, respectively, after their previous ones opened. And that’s only because it’s harder to demand a new stadium before your lease is running out at the old one, or at least when the optics would look too bad — as sports economist Rodney Fort memorably said, “I don’t see anything wrong, from an owner’s perspective, with the idea of a new stadium every year.”

In baseball, Tampa Bay is building a new stadium, Cleveland is undertaking renovations and Oakland is hoping to move to Las Vegas.

Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg is currently waiting to see if St. Petersburg will approve public money for a new stadium. The Guardians renovations are already underway. Oakland is not moving anywhere (except maybe slowly southward relative to San Francisco), but A’s owner John Fisher is hoping to move his team to Vegas.

In basketball, Los Angeles is building a glitzy new arena, and Philadelphia and Oklahoma City hope to follow.

The Los Angeles Clippers‘ new arena is in Inglewood, not Los Angeles, and Clippers owner Steve Ballmer is footing the bill, though Inglewood did use its powers of eminent domain to obtain land for him. The Philadelphia 76ers arena plans are still very much up in the air, while the Oklahoma City Thunder had their arena approved by voters last December.

In the 1960s and 1970s cities regularly stumped up 100% of the money for new stadiums.

Yes, but they were also routinely repaid much of that money in rent payments and revenue sharing. That all came to a screeching halt in the late 1980s, as team owners began demanding that the public cover most or all of the costs while getting little to nothing in return.

As it became clear that über-rich owners captured many of the profits from the sports played there, officials started to demand that they should pay for more of the building.

[citation badly needed]

Public funding now covers about 40% of costs.

According to J.C. Bradbury, Dennis Coates, and Brad Humphreys’ big study in 2023, yes, for the first years of the 2020s, though that’s skewed somewhat by the new Los Angeles Rams and Golden State Warriors venues, both of which opened during that time and were entirely privately funded.

The economic case for stadiums rests on three pillars: they create thousands of jobs; they unleash a steady stream of consumption; and they serve as anchors for thriving neighbourhoods. But a half-century of evidence suggests that the three pillars are actually rather wobbly.

True! Though limiting the discussion of this to just two paragraphs seems like pretty short shrift.

[Some Kansas City voters] were upset that, along with a new home for the Royals, the money would have gone to renovations of the stadium used by the Chiefs, the city’s football team, including sprucing up VIP suites.

If anything, the Chiefs renovations were likely more popular than the new Royals stadium, both because they wouldn’t have required tearing down a neighborhood and because the Chiefs are more popular than the Royals.

In Chicago a proposed lakefront stadium for the city’s football team has run into political hurdles, but the project may well go ahead on a different site.

The “political hurdles” are at the state level, so the Bears owners are unlikely to get around them by moving to a different site unless they come up with a ton of money out of their own pockets, which doesn’t seem to be what they’re interested in.

The root of the problem is fandom itself. Local politicians craving re-election do not want to be known for presiding over the exodus of their city’s beloved team.

Don’t make me come in there with the fact that only one city in history (Seattle) has voted a local politician out of office by fans angry at a team leaving, while several cities have voted out elected officials for approving stadium subsidies!

Love of sports, like many passions, is not reducible to rational calculations.

Really, that’s your kicker? Those Americans sure do love their sportsball, enough to give billions of dollars in tax money to it. Perhaps you might want to explain, then, Economist, why your native England has a little bit of a rabid sports fandom thing going on, yet massive stadium subsidies there are rare?

Overall: A C-minus, maybe? It gets right that sports stadium subsidies are common in the U.S., but gets wrong the reasons why, which way things are trending, and the details of a lot of specific sports subsidy demand campaigns. I would expect this from an American news outlet that assigned this to an intern along with 10 other articles that day, but not so much from a 181-year-old British magazine that says right there in its name that it has expertise in economics. I guess love of a cheap clickbait narrative, like many passions, is not reducible to rational calculations.

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