Category: World Cup 2022

Friday roundup: March is for veiled threats (by the Rays, Bears, Browns, burger lovers)

access_time personNeil deMause

Baseball season kicked off yesterday, with the introduction of such new innovations as a pitch clock that drove a sharp increase in the all-important (?) metric of hits per hour of baseball and LED stadium lights that can be made to flicker artistically, even in the middle of a play. Truly, this is the future, if the future even exists.

Inarguably, this is Friday, which means we take a spin through news of the past week, if you believe there was one:

  • Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg says it’s his “belief” and “a very reasonable anticipation” that he’ll have a new stadium deal in either St. Petersburg or Tampa by the end of the year, and that if he doesn’t, “there’s not a deal to be done, basically.” If you didn’t get the veiled threat there, he added, “At the end of the day, it’s all about ensuring that the team is here, throwing out its first pitch in 2028. And then here, throwing out its first pitch in 2053 as well.” Then he held up a stuffed Raymond the Seadog and made a slashing gesture across its throat, while dramatically tilting his head to one side with his tongue out and his eyes rolled back in his head. (Okay, not that last one, but only because Stuart Sternberg has no sense of drama.)
  • Chicago Bears owner George McCaskey said that the team still hasn’t made a decision on “whether we’re going to develop the property” it bought in Arlington Heights and “whether the development is going to include a stadium.” He added, “I don’t have a timeline” for making those decisions, and “we’d like to have” discussions with Chicago about revamping Soldier Field. The Vegas betting line on “Are the Bears just trying to get a bidding war going here?” has now fallen to –300.
  • Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam said Monday that “we’re committed to redoing the stadium” and “in all likelihood, it’s not going to have a dome.” Zero details on cost or who would pay for it, but Dee Haslam said “it’s a year-long phase” to get a more concrete plan, while her husband Jimmy said “we’re probably three, four, five years” from a stadium renovation “happening,” so clearly they’re not yet in the Rays/Bears stage of more concrete idle threats and promises.
  • The Detroit city council has awarded developers of the area around the Detroit Tigers stadium and Detroit Red Wings and Pistons arena $783 million in public subsidies, because the last batch of subsidies for the sports venues themselves only created a bunch of parking lots. Will the Ilitches and their developer partners be able to score the elusive triple-dip? Herb Simon and the city of Indianapolis know it can be done!
  • The proposed Oakland A’s stadium project at Howard Terminal cleared a legal hurdle as an appeals court tossed a challenge to the building’s environmental impact statement. Yes, that’s the same legal hurdle that a lower court cleared last September. No, still nobody knows who would pay all the costs of the thing. Yes, you may now move on to the next bullet point.
  • Qatar hasn’t actually yet dismantled and reused its World Cup stadiums that it promised to have dismantled and reused by now. If anyone is surprised by this, they really haven’t been paying attention.
  • Tempe’s duplicate Arizona Coyotes arena vote set for August has been officially canceled as unnecessary since voters will already be casting ballots in May, which is sad news for anyone who was hoping that future Arizona Coyotes seasons would be replaced by the more interesting spectacle of 82 televised arena votes a year.
  • Also just in from Tempe: “We are a community that likes to be outdoors enjoying our Arizona sunshine, having coffee on the balcony, walking the dog, grilling burgers with neighbors. We are not a community that remains inside of a sound-insulated apartment with windows closed.” No, I didn’t expect the Coyotes arena battle to turn on the inalienable right to grill burgers either, but stranger things have happened.
  • New York state is likely to use cash instead of selling bonds to finance a large chunk of the new Buffalo Bills stadium. You’ll notice I said “finance” there instead of “fund”; the amount being funded by the public hasn’t changed (still $1 billion), but how the state will raise the money may change. This is like deciding whether to pay for your new car up front or with monthly payments, and so should be completely uninteresting unless you’re an accountant for New York state, but it made headlines so I thought someone might need a reason to skip reading them, please go read about the liquid trees instead.
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Friday roundup: Bengals naming rights deal called “(XXX)” and other titillating stadium commentary

access_time personNeil deMause

Well, that was certainly another week. Thanks to all who engaged in the spirited comment debates about Garth Brooks an Andy Zimbalist and other celebrity stadium experts, and thanks also to all who responded to my latest fundraising appeal — I look forward to a productive weekend of mailing out Cab-Hailing Lady art prints.

But first, we have more news for the roundup to round up:

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Friday roundup: Half-price books make great holiday presents for elected officials who can’t math

access_time personNeil deMause

For those of you who actually spend your Thanksgiving Fridays reading Field of Schemes, here’s a special bonus: If Rob Neyer’s Facebook page can be believed (and it’s never lied to me before), University of Nebraska Press is having a 50% off sale through the end of the year. That means that by entering the discount code 6HLW22 you can get Field of Schemes the book for just $11.48, or lots of other great sports (and non-sports) books for yourself, your family and friends, or that special city councilmember in your life. Buy now and buy often!

And if you just want the usual free weekly content, there’s plenty of that as well:

  • Nashville held its first of four public hearings on the Tennessee Titans‘ proposed $2.1 billion stadium deal on Monday, with the Tennessean reporting that speakers were about evenly split on whether they were opposed or in favor. (Advocates on both sides called for residents to come out and testify, so it was hardly an unscientific poll.) Also, according to WZTV-TV, Metro Nashville councilmember Courtney Johnston said the team owners still haven’t revealed how much it would cost for the city to maintain the current stadium to the terms of its lease instead of building new, but “it’s time to move forward” and “I’m not going to waste any more energy trying to find out what are we obligated to because we can’t afford it.” Just to be clear: Yes, she’s saying Nashville can’t afford renovation expenses that could be around $350 million, so instead must spend $1.2 billion for a new stadium. And no, cannabis isn’t legal yet in Tennessee, that can’t be the explanation.
  • In related news, let’s enjoy this guy taking to the smoking ruins of Twitter to attack sports economist J.C. Bradbury for critiquing the Titans deal without revealing his “sources of funding” and “the masters you serve that hate all Stadium deals.” Then let’s enjoy that said guy doesn’t mention that his school sports funding nonprofit gets money from the Titans. It’s not irony, it’s the other one.
  • With Pawtucket running short of local tax money to pay for its proposed USL soccer stadium as construction costs rise, local elected officials have come up with a new idea: use federal COVID relief money instead. Dylan Zelazo, the city’s chief of director of administration, told the Pawtucket city council on Tuesday that using American Rescue Plan Act and Community Development Block Grant funds to pay for $10 million in new public costs would allow stadium taxes to instead be used for the money from the stadium taxes can go directly into the city’s general fund to be spent on “relief for taxpayers [or] other city services,” which, uh, couldn’t the federal money have been used for that otherwise? Or been used to pay for other things that the city then wouldn’t have to spend local tax dollars on, which it could then use for tax cuts or city services? Anyway, expect lots more cities to take their federal windfall dollars and pour them into private sports projects so long as the feds don’t pay too close attention to how they spend it, and it sure seems like the feds aren’t keeping too close a watch.
  • Kansas City Chiefs president Mark Donovan says the team hasn’t yet decided how the Royals moving to a new downtown stadium would affect his team’s stadium plans for when their lease expires in 2031, but did say he’ll be “starting work [on stadium plans] in ‘24, if not before,” so there’s something to look forward to.
  • Pat Garofalo has collected a set of dumb headlines about how much the World Cup helps the economies of host cities and the economic evidence that those headlines are dumb so we don’t have to, thanks, Pat!
  • St. Louis area government bodies have agreed on how to split the $790 million from Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke and the NFL for skipping town with the Rams without going through the required league relocation process: The city will get $250 million, the county will get $169 million, the local sports authority will get $70 million, and the convention board will get $30 million. No, you are correct, that’s not $790 million, but it’s what’s left after $275 million in attorney’s fees, file this under “a lot better than nothing.”
  • The former Meadowlands Arena, driven out of business by arena glut in the New York-New Jersey area, has apparently found a second life as a film production studio. That’s encouraging that it can be reused without anyone demanding more public subsidies — or would be if New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy didn’t just provide a huge pile of new tax kickbacks for film production, sigh. Did New Jersey Sports & Exposition Authority president Vincent Prieto argue that it’s worth it because the film production “really helps the economy with the local businesses” around an arena literally named for being built in the middle of a swamp? Do you even have to ask?
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Friday roundup: NYCFC deal gets even worse; Royals and Titans plans, World Cup stay as awful as ever

access_time personNeil deMause

Every single damn time: I start thinking that things have calmed down and it’ll just be the same few sports subsidy deals for a while, and then suddenly someone drops a new one or two out of nowhere. The NYC F.C. and Kansas City Royals stadium demands weren’t entirely unexpected, but they also weren’t expected just now for the sums of money that are being asked for, so they definitely qualify as a surprise to me.

I’ve already been on one Kansas City TV station this week, and I’ll be on their NPR station KCUR this morning from 9 to 9:30 am Central time. And I wrote about the NYC F.C. plan for Hell Gate, and will likely be doing so again, so clearly more people are paying attention as the ongoing stadium game moves to, or rather returns to, a couple more localities. (If you’re new to this site as a result: Hi! This all has been going on for a long time, and seems determined to continue until we’re all dead, try not to be too depressed, near-hopeless causes are worth fighting for, and laughing to keep from crying is a perfectly acceptable way of getting through the days.)

And with that, let’s get to other news that fell by the wayside this week, or that has come up since yesterday:

  • With that NYC F.C. public price tag still very much an unknown, I put in an email to University of Colorado economist Geoffrey Propheter, who formerly specialized in property tax expenditures for the New York City Independent Budget Office, to see if he had any ideas for estimating how much New York City would be giving up by granting a full property tax break for a $780 million soccer stadium. As it turned out, he very much did: His new book “Major League Sports and the Property Tax Costs and Implications of a Stealth Tax Expenditure” is due out next week, and it includes a methodology for estimating the forgone property tax on sports projects. In the case of NYC F.C., he estimated that a full tax exemption over 49 years would cost New York City somewhere between $132.5 million and $197 million. Add that to the share of city infrastructure costs that would be going to the stadium (almost certainly $100 million or more, if the total infrastructure tab comes to $200-300 million as City Hall has projected), the value of getting the use of city land for 49 years (still TBD), and subtract out the $30 million the city will take in in rent, and we have … somewhere between a $200 million loss for city taxpayers and something substantially more than that. We’ll hopefully know more once Adams presents an actual memorandum of understanding and/or lease proposal to the city council, unless this is part of Adams’ whole pretending-things-are-true-just-because-he-says-them thing, in which case we may have to dig a bit more to come up with final numbers.
  • Oh, and also NYC F.C. paid one of Adams’ top campaign aides $20,000 to lobby his former boss on the stadium deal, according to the New York Daily News. This is totally legal, somehow.
  • On Royals owner John Sherman’s $2 billion stadium ask, Craig Calcaterra has feels that are so well stated that I’ll just quote them here: “Less than 15 years ago Kansas City taxpayers spent $250 million for renovations to what was the already wonderful Kauffman Stadium and made it even more wonderful. Indeed, it remains wonderful. It’s one of the best parks in all of baseball by any conceivable measure. To suggest that it even needs another $250 million, let alone eight times that much, just to keep pace with other ballparks is to insult the intelligence of literally any person who has ever stepped foot in that or any other ballpark. As for the economic benefits, literally every shred of comprehensive research on the economic impact of sports teams and stadiums has established that they are not drivers of economic development. I realize that the actual facts on this score are routinely ignored as team owners, team boosters, and credulous members of the media parrot utterly unsupported claims that ‘New sTADiUM mEAN BiG puBlIc bEneFiT!!!’ but their parroting does not make it true. It is bullshit even if they want people to believe otherwise.”
  • Economist J.C. Bradbury adds: Yup, that’s about the size of it.
  • The World Cup starts Sunday in Qatar, and there are two ways to write about it: List all of the horrors of slave labor that helped build a fleet of new stadiums, or … not.
  • The news has been too busy for me to get around to the collapse of FTX and what it means for the Miami Heat‘s naming-rights deal with the now-bankrupt crypto company, which is a shame because it’s a true laugh-to-keep-from-crying masterpiece. (FTX signed a penalty clause to pay $16.5 million if it defaults on its naming rights payments, plus pay for removing its signage on the arena — but now it’s penniless and bankrupt and can’t be made to pay anything! Hilarious!) Let’s make up for that now by enjoying the fact that a Miami strip club is offering to buy the used naming rights, which is truly the ending we all deserve.
  • Speaking of bankrupt things, Chester, Pennsylvania is now one of them. Guess that revitalization-through-publicly-subsidized-soccer-stadium thing is continuing not to work out so well there.
  • Anaheim is planning to do an appraisal of the condition of the Los Angeles Angels‘ stadium, in anticipation of maybe enforcing a lease clause that could require team owner Arte Moreno to do a couple hundred million dollars worth of maintenance. “It’s important for the people of Anaheim and the council to know the condition of the stadium and [whether it is] being kept at a first-class professional baseball stadium,” said councilmember Jose Moreno, no doubt cackling deep inside at the idea of holding Moreno to the kind of state-of-the-art clause that teams usually use against cities.
  • Nashville Mayor John Cooper says it would cost as much to renovate the Tennessee Titans‘ stadium as to built a $2.1 billion new one; Nashville councilmember Bob Mendes called this “the biggest lie the mayor has told” and said ‘there’s no way on Earth that ‘first class’ stadium requires a three-story sports bar or a luxury songwriters lounge or a covered rooftop area with grass and trees on top of Nissan Stadium.” Mendes also released renderings of what the Titans owners are looking for in a renovated stadium — do they include gratuitous balloons, people watching anything but the game, and ghostly figures from another realm? Would you have it any other way?

 

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Qatar 2022 World Cup stadiums still being built by slave labor, can’t wait to see how Fox Sports covers this

access_time personNeil deMause

Just your daily reminder that the 2022 World Cup stadiums are being built by workers who aren’t getting paid, or as it’s better known historically, slave labor. From Amnesty International, via the Associated Press:

Mercury MENA worked on several projects in Qatar, including the stadium, the new Qatar National Library and a workers’ hospital and modern accommodation for labourers, Amnesty said. Workers told the human rights-focused non-governmental organisation that the firm owed them on average between $1,370 to $2,470, a huge sum for their families back home. It said one worker was owed nearly $25,000 after over a decade of work.

That’s right, math fans: One poor migrant worker spent more than ten years building stadiums and such, despite his employer stiffing him on $25,000 in pay, yet couldn’t leave because Qatari law requires an employer-signed “exit permit” before they can go home. This is the year 2018.

You can read the full Amnesty report here. Or just crawl back into bed and pull the covers over your head, both are acceptable responses.

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Friday roundup: Austin MLS vote, Rays demand $650m in subsidies, Islanders renderings, more!

access_time personNeil deMause

I’m busy trying to figure out whether Congress is really going to rewrite the tax code to give a couple of trillion dollars to rich people or will melt down at the last second like it did with healthcare repeal, so this’ll be in superbrief mode this morning:

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Amnesty International says Qatar World Cup “built on human rights abuses,” must be stopped

access_time personNeil deMause

We already knew that construction workers on Qatar’s 2022 World Cup stadium were dying at a frightening rate and held in the country under slave-like conditions, but we didn’t have, say, an Amnesty International report outright comparing conditions to slavery. Until now:

Rights group Amnesty International has accused Qatar of using forced labour at a flagship World Cup 2022 stadium.

Amnesty says workers at Khalifa International Stadium are forced to live in squalid accommodation, pay huge recruitment fees and have had wages withheld and passports confiscated.

It also accuses Fifa of “failing almost completely” to stop the tournament being “built on human rights abuses”.

 

You can download the Amnesty report, “The Ugly Side of the Beautiful Game,” here; it’s long and detailed, so let me just cite two excerpts:

Amnesty International interviewed 132 of the men working on Khalifa Stadium. When Amnesty met them they were living in cramped and unhygenic labour camps. Many described how they had paid large sums of money and taken on debt in their home country in order to get a job in Qatar but were now being paid less than they had been promised. All of the men had their passports confiscated by their employers and some were denied an exit permit when they wanted to return home. In some cases the treatment amounted to forced labour.

And:

“My life here is like a prison. The work is dif cult, we worked for many hours in the hot sun. When I rst complained about my situation, soon after arriving in Qatar, the manager said ‘if you [want to] complain you can but there will be consequences. If you want to stay in Qatar be quiet and keep working’. Now I am forced to stay in Qatar and continue working.” —Deepak, metalworker on Khalifa International Stadium, a FIFA 2022 World Cup venue, speaking in May 2015

This is a big enough deal that even Al Jazeera, which is actually owned by members of the Qatari government, felt obligated to cover it. Meanwhile, FIFA, which granted Qatar the 2022 tournament after massive bribery in the bidding, continues to insist that it won’t move the cup to another nation that’s less slavey. This is going to get really ugly — not that pretty much all big sporting events like the World Cup and Olympics don’t get really ugly, and usually everyone forgets about it as soon as there’s some games to watch, but this seems like it might actually be the exception, maybe.

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Qatar killing World Cup workers at record pace, FIFA bribery arrests mean someone may actually notice

access_time personNeil deMause

Now that FIFA officials are getting arrested left and right following a three-year corruption probe by the FBI, the Washington Post has taken the opportunity to publish a chart comparing worker deaths in Qatar during construction of 2022 World Cup stadiums to worker deaths in other nations’ preparations for World Cups and Olympics. And while the numbers aren’t completely exact — there’s some guesswork involved, and it’s not possible to determine exactly how many of these deaths were on World Cup projects — still, holy crap:

imrs.phpThat’s an insane body count among the workers that Deadspin has taken to calling (entirely accurately) “FIFA slaves,” and is only likely to increase calls for a boycott of the Qatar World Cup, the ouster of FIFA president Sepp Blatter, the reassignment of the 2022 World Cup (and maybe the 2018 World Cup currently slated for Russia) to another nation, or all of the above. Not that any of those are exactly likely, but they’re a hell of a lot more likely than they were before the concierge at a five-star Zurich hotel called upstairs to say, “We’re going to need you to come to your door and open it for us or we’re going to have to kick it in.”

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Entire world wakes up, realizes World Cup and Olympics are stupid

access_time personNeil deMause

I don’t know exactly what tipping point we reached last week, but it appears that the entire planet came to a mass realization that mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympics, far from being massive revenue generators for host cities, are gigantic money pits that any public official should run screaming from as fast as possible. Witness, all within the past seven days:

No, it doesn’t mean that the World Cup and Olympics are now defunct, and will be replaced by one of those sporting events that involves everyone batting a giant ball into the air. But suddenly lots and lots of people are saying aloud that these mega-events tend toward being terrible catastrophes for the locales tabbed to host them, which isn’t a new concept, but isn’t usually discussed quite so widely. Though, of course, a few months ago people were actually interested in Russian human rights abuses against lesbians and gays, until they actually started playing sports and there was curling to watch, so maybe this is just the usual “the games haven’t started, we’re bored and have nothing to report on” run-up that will be completely forgotten later on.

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Qatar takes aim at World Cup record for killing migrant workers

access_time personNeil deMause

Remember that human rights group charging that 4,000 workers will end up dying while building Qatar’s 2022 World Cup facilities? Now there’s a new report that says just in the last two years, 964 migrant workers have died in construction projects —and the new report is from the Qatari government itself:

The report by the international law firm DLA Piper calls for changes to the much-criticised kafala system that ties workers to their employers. It also contains the Qatari government’s own figure on the numbers of migrants who have died on its soil: 964 from Nepal, India and Bangladesh in 2012 and 2013. In all, 246 died from “sudden cardiac death” in 2012, the report said, 35 died in falls and 28 committed suicide.

Note that that’s not only on World Cup facilities, but given that there are still eight years to go before 2022, that’s plenty of time to wrack up 4,000 soccer-specific deaths. And anyway, as Deadspin puts it:

A country that needs an independent law firm to tell it that hey, maybe it’s worth looking into why workers are just dropping dead from heart attacks for seemingly no reason is not one that should be hosting the World Cup.

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