Category: World Cup 2026

Friday roundup: On being a fan of the World Cup without being a fan of the FIFA World Cup 2026™

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we start with this week’s roundup, a note about the World Cup: I’m enjoying it! The one-game knockout format, even in its dumb expanded iteration, is great for generating drama, and when you mix in international politics and colonial history, you get even more opportunities for hilarity.

But I enjoy most sports, even the dumb ones. The issue about sports mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympics isn’t whether they should exist, but whether they should exist in their current form, as means for extracting tons of money from host cities and delivering it to corrupt oligarchs. The reports just keep coming in confirming that any claimed economic benefits of hosting the games are overwhelmed by the public costs — look, here’s another one from Atlanta about vendors trying to get their money back after being suckered into joining a city-sponsored program for World Cup-related booths that turned into what one called “a financial nightmare” — and while big public watch parties are fun, you don’t actually need to have the World Cup in your city, or in your country, to hold one. The World Cup, like pretty much all sports at this point (I may be willing to make exceptions for curling and Ultimate Frisbee), has been weaponized to transfer money from the many to the few, which is why we keep complaining about it here every week. If we have to live under toxic capitalism, the least we should get to do it the joy of pointing and laughing.

Anyway, here’s a bunch of dumb stuff that’s gone on recently that is likely to cost you money on the grounds that sports are fun, please enjoy ridiculing it:

  • Washington, D.C. is preparing to sell $975 million in personal seat licenses allowing fans to buy Commanders tickets and use the proceeds for stadium construction, which momentarily excited me until I realized it looks like the PSLs will be funding the team’s share of costs, notwithstanding the city’s involvement in doing the sales. Anyway, some quick long division determines that team officials are presumably planning to ask for an average of $15,000 per seat for the mere right to spend hundreds of dollars apiece for tickets, though it’s always possible the team will have to take a loss on the whole transaction if fans aren’t willing to pony up that much.
  • Congratulations, everyone in the United States: You now get to help pay for $25 million in road work around the new Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park, after that city won a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation for “reconfigured freeway ramps and streamlined local roads [that] will lead to the stadium and the surrounding entertainment district.”
  • The city of Oakland may try to sell the Oakland Coliseum and its neighboring arena in separate deals after concerns that wavering plans for redevelopment of the stadium site are holding up the arena sale. The Coliseum is set to finally be entirely empty next year, after the announced departure of the Roots USL Championship club to, uh, somewhere, they’ll get back to you on that.
  • Two contrasting headline styles in reporting on the return of corporate stadium names after FIFA decreed them unallowable during the World Cup because they might compete with their own sponsorship contracts: “Lumen Field returns as Seattle says bye to World Cup and Seattle Stadium” vs “Praise Be: ‘Philadelphia Stadium’ Once Again Bears the Name of Our Corporate Financial Overlords.” Well played, Philadelphia sports site Crossing Broad, even if you do appear to be mostly an excuse to run lots of posts promoting sports gambling.
  • Not sure which is more on the nose for 2026, a proposal to have the Bay Area’s Cow Palace host a data center now that it’s been superseded by the Golden State Warriors‘ new arena or a related proposal to have it host a helicopter landing pad. No word yet on whether these would require public money, but given that a data center is involved, probably.
  • New Dallas Stars vaportecture renderings, though they’re mostly unspecific and from a great distance, aside from the one that appears to show fans watching a Stars playoff game on a giant video screen atop a new team store, which is maybe even more on the nose for 2026.
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World Cup economic impact still hard to find, but at least we’ll always have the “togetherness”

access_time personNeil deMause

The U.S. Men’s National Team is now extremely out of the World Cup, joining co-hosts Canada and Mexico on the sidelines, but North America still has two more weeks of the sweet, sweet international tourism that comes with hosting the tournament. Or, you know, not:

As Toronto’s official FIFA World Cup 2026 hosting duties come to an end, data shows that the city saw little economic gain during the first two weeks of the tournament…

Data from payment processing company Moneris between June 12 and 26 — the first two weeks of the World Cup in Toronto — showed that debit and credit card spending at restaurants and bars in the city rose by just three per cent compared with the same time last year.

A 3% increase isn’t actually terrible in a city the size of Toronto, which can swallow 40,000 or so soccer fans without much noticing. The bigger problem, notes the CBC, is that Toronto taxpayers spent about $380 million on hosting six World Cup matches, which is tough to earn back one debit card charge at a time.

In Texas, meanwhile, the news site Border Report interviewed our old frenemy, sports economist Andy Zimbalist, and learned that “events like the World Cup generate little or no net economic benefit because FIFA keeps most event revenue while host cities absorb major expenses.” Then the site ran this under the whiplash-inducing headline “Impact of World Cup in Texas goes beyond the dollars and cents,” because Zimbalist said the games were maybe “worth it because there was so much togetherness.”

But anyway, who are you going to believe, some pointy-headed bean counter or a respected international sports business entity? Philadelphia’s 6abc digital staff doesn’t need any “experts” or “numbers” when it can just reprint the official press release:

With the final match at the Philadelphia Stadium in the books, FIFA is releasing new details about the World Cup impact locally.

More than 409,000 people attended the six matches — five of which were sold-out. …

Fans consumed 290,000 beers and more than 55,000 hot dogs.

After each match day, any food from the stadium that was not consumed was given to local food banks, totaling 15,000 pounds of food.

Getting 15,000 pounds of leftover food for a mere $380 million — who can put a price on that? Other than $380 million, sure, but that’s the bean-counter way of looking at things, whereas if you count up all the actual unused beans … I’ll see myself out.

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Friday roundup: Pelicans owner seeks deal for state-funded velour, ballot measure on Royals stadium could face court fight

access_time personNeil deMause

First off, a special note of thanks to all the FoS supporters who get daily posts by email for your patience while I’ve spent the last week or two figuring out how to make the formatting more readable on mobile devices. (The actual code took just a few minutes to write; figuring out where to insert it in the convoluted system that sends out notices as soon as posts are published was a much longer saga.) I hope this reduces your eyestrain, even at the risk of easier access to stadium news raising your blood pressure.

And speaking of stoking ire, here’s the rest of this week’s news items that didn’t make the daily cut:

  • New Orleans Pelicans owner Gayle Benson is reportedly working on a lease extension with the state of Louisiana to be signed by the end of this year, which could be a 10-year deal with additional five-year options like Benson’s Saints got. No one’s saying a word about the important stuff — how much the state would kick in for arena renovations as part of the deal, and whether Benson would pay any added rent or revenue sharing to help repay the state’s costs — but given that the Pelicans owner has previously said she wants more luxury suites with crushed velour furniture in order to boost the team’s profits, which are currently only about $77 million a year, don’t hold your breath on this “public-private partnership” including a ton of private.
  • A Kansas City labor organization has succeeded in getting enough signatures to put a vote on the November ballot on whether to use city money to fund a new Royals stadium. Mayor Quinton Lucas has declared “the train’s already left the station” and threatened to get the deal signed off on before November, to preclude the public from having a say; the group Missouri Workers Power has threatened to sue to block Lucas from doing so, citing legal precedents where courts struck down legislative actions taken on issues where voter initiatives were pending.
  • North Carolina house speaker Destin Hall is not so crazy about the idea of setting aside a pile of state money to build a Raleigh-area baseball stadium for a proposed MLB expansion team, saying, “Private companies should pay for their own facilities instead of relying on the General Assembly. However, if someone presents a proposal showing that North Carolina taxpayers would get a strong return on the investment, I am willing to consider it.” State senate leader Phil Berger, who lost his primary by 23 votes in March, has been the main advocate of a stadium funding bill; both Hall and Berger are Republicans, while Democratic Gov. Josh Stein said this week, “We’re eager for this opportunity to be considered, and we’ll do all we can to support it.”
  • Some Illinois state legislators don’t seem inclined to revisit tax subsidies for a Chicago Bears stadium no matter what Gov. JB Pritzker says: Comments this week (all from Pritzker’s fellow Democrats) included, “What the Bears wanted was a blank check We not only said no but, excuse my language, hell no,” “If you come to the table in Springfield and you are a liar, it doesn’t bode well for you,” and “The big issue that came about was, Are we going to give billionaires more taxpayer dollars?”
  • A Cuyahoga County councilmember is suggesting using part of the proceeds of a 0.25% sales tax surcharge meant to cover building a new jail and repairing a courthouse to instead pay for repairs and upgrades to the Cleveland Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, because surely there’s nothing else the county could use that money for. Just not paying for unlimited upgrades ad infinitum and daring the team owners to give up their sweetheart leases — or even threatening to do so in order to get the team owners to agree to a compromise solution — remains an option, guys.
  • Neighborhood leaders around the Chicago Fire‘s proposed stadium at the The 78 site say if the city is going to devote tax money to parking garages for the stadium, it should also kick in for a community benefits agreement to provide funding for transit access, affordable housing, anti-displacement protections, public infrastructure, and support for local businesses. Whether to view this as a vital instrument of democracy to ensure that regular citizens can get dealt into public spending priorities or just a way for developers to buy off local community leaders by cutting them in on the deal is, as always, a reasonable question.
  • Most of the news coverage of the economic impact of the World Cup has disappeared as coverage of the games themselves has taken over, but Seattle’s KUOW did check in on local businesses this week and found that food outlets near the stadium that sell drinks or quick grab-and-go food items are doing great while businesses farther away or those that sell things fans may not crave before or after a soccer match (Vietnamese cookies, vintage clothing) are having a miserable time of it. Yup, checks out!
  • Buffalo Bills ticket prices are too damn high, clearly we need to reduce red tape so the Bills can build more seats.
  • Yes, that Crain’s Chicago Business article claiming Bears tax subsidies weren’t public money was real bad, but as Geoffrey Propheter reminds us, it’s still no Bridge Detroit.
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LOLWorld Cup report: Long lines, high prices, sea of red ink for host nations, windfall profits for FIFA

access_time personNeil deMause

The World Cup is now finally underway, and aside from the endless string of matches with no winner, how’s that going? A stadium workers’ strike in Los Angeles was averted, and the great water bottle kerfuffle died down, but have there are least been the promised travel nightmares and budgetary fiascos?

Early signs are mixed, but not great:

  • A KUOW analysis of World Cup spending concluded that Washington state is spending $120 million on hosting six matches, mostly for transit costs but also for such things as widening the pitch at the Seattle Seahawks‘ stadium. The Seattle tourism bureau only predicts $95.8 million in new tax receipts from hosting World Cup matches, meaning even the local agency inclined to take an optimistic view and ignore warnings that World Cup visitors will displace many regular tourists thinks that the public will end up taking a bath on hosting matches this summer.
  • Canadian economist Moshe Lander estimates that that country will end up spending more than $1 billion to host just 12 World Cup matches, including $145 million in federal money for security alone, and there’s no indication local governments will make more than a fraction of that back in new tax receipts, leaving the entire event a “toxic money sinkhole.”
  • FIFA itself is expected to bring in anywhere from $9 billion to $11.5 billion from the World Cup, though those are gross revenues, not net, and we’ll likely never know where all the money goes, because FIFA.
  • As for the experience of those attending the games, hundreds of fans at New Jersey’s opening match between Brazil and Morocco (ending in a 1-1 draw) were stranded for hours outside the stadium after authorities limited the number of rideshare drivers who could make pickups, presumably to leave traffic lanes open for shuttle buses. There were reportedly no lines for the shuttle buses, though, so it sounds like the stranded fans were just those averse to taking public transit, which seems to have worked fine right up until authorities parked those buses in midtown Manhattan and celebrating New York Knicks fans promptly set fire to them.
  • Fans attending the Uruguay-Saudi Arabia match in Miami (ending in a 1-1 draw) complained about parking passes costing upwards of $175 and then still leaving them with a mile and a half walk to the stadium. “I took an Uber just to save some money because that’s ridiculous,” said one Saudi Arabia fan.
  • Tens of thousands of Scotland fans made it to their opening match vs. Haiti (not a draw! Scotland won 1-0) in Foxborough okay, after renting their own school buses to get around exorbitant train fares, but then got stuck in hours-long lines to get into the stadium because of poor crowd management. “There were three gates for 65,000 people,” said one Scotland fan. “It was a bit of a joke really.”
  • Guadalajara avoided traffic nightmares for the South Korea-Czechia opener (a 2-1 South Korea win) by the simple expediency of ticket prices so high that there were thousands of seats left empty even in the tournament’s smallest host stadium. World Cup officials insisted that the missing fans were all standing and watching elsewhere, which, hmmm.

The World Cup story so far, then: Nobody has yet set any statues on fire, and the matches are coming off more or less as planned, although “as planned” included sky-high prices for fans and costs for taxpayers, and massive profits for FIFA. Maybe a series of games with no winners really is the best metaphor for the World Cup after all.

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Friday roundup: Manfred’s funny Rays poll numbers, Chiefs sales tax fight, MLS wants even more Big O money

access_time personNeil deMause

You probably noticed, but it’s Friday! Which brings us, with no further ado, to the rest of the week’s news:

  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has said that he’s “hopeful” that a Tampa Bay Rays stadium in Tampa will win final approval, given that “we think the polling runs about 60-40 in favor of the stadium.” Actual polling shows that residents would like a new stadium in the abstract by a 58-29% margin, but oppose the Rays’ funding scheme by 59-34%; congrats to Manfred, I guess, on figuring out how to dispense with the actual asking-people-questions business and pioneer vibe polling.
  • Meanwhile, the Tampa Sports Authority has issued a letter saying the Buccaneers should get first dibs over the Rays on any available public stadium money, which isn’t going to make any easier the already difficult road to approval of the couple billion dollars in stadium subsidies Rays owner Patrick Zalupski is seeking from the city, county, and state.
  • People in Wyandotte County is worried that the state of Kansas may try to bigfoot it into expanding its STAR district to redirect more county sales taxes to a Chiefs stadium; in other news, Wyandotte County included a poison pill in the STAR district legislation that if the state tries to expand it, the county automatically rescinds it. It looks like at the very least the county would have to go back and revote on a larger tax district, at which point hopefully residents would re-up their concerns like whether siphoning off more county sales taxes could force the county to, say, raise property taxes to make up for any resulting budget gap.
  • The province of Quebec is already spending $870 million (Canadian) to put a new roof on Montreal’s Olympic Stadium because it’s too big to tear down, but MLS commissioner Don Garber wants even more public money to make it a “best-in-class experience” for CF Montréal. The MLS team mostly doesn’t play at the Big O — it occupies the 18-year-old open-air Stade Saputo for all but big matches like the home opener and playoff games — but may need to more once MLS switches to a fall-to-spring schedule next year, plus Garber says the smaller stadium is “an MLS 1.0 stadium” and the team needs “an MLS 3.0 stadium.” Why any of this is Quebec’s problem to solve, Garber didn’t say, beyond insisting that CF Montréal’s owners are committed to staying in town but need to “have a best-in-class facility to be able to drive revenue,” hint hint.
  • Records obtained by Crain’s Chicago Business show that Bears attorneys called or met six times with their city counterparts in April, even as team officials insisted that remaining in Chicago was off the table by then. The team says these calls were all about their current lease at Soldier Field; a city source told Crain’s their lawyers wouldn’t have taken six calls on that. This all matters because Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is still holding out hope for keeping the Bears in Chicago while team execs insist they won’t consider it — if nothing else, it’s going to make for an even more complicated decision by team owner George McCaskey in coming weeks about whether to pull the trigger on a move to Indiana or keep pushing for public funding for a stadium somewhere in Illinois.
  • The start of the men’s World Cup is only a week away, and already fans are excited to maybe have to cross a picket line if they want to go to games or at least dodge flaming naked mannequins and certainly not be allowed to bring in water bottles during the peak of North American summer! It’s not great! At least a member of the L.A. Host Committee has described the deal U.S. cities got from FIFA as a “very tough, one-sided agreement,” and … oh, he means one-sided that way. Welp.
  • “Portland’s own study said the Moda Center needed $500M in repairs — so why are the Trail Blazers asking for more?” asks the Oregonian, and the answer appears to be that the $500 million figure was just to “maintain the building in its current configuration in good working order,” while $600 million is to conduct a “transformative renovation” that can “support the power, technology, and production demands of tomorrow’s largest concerts and events.” In exchange for which, Blazers owner Tom Dundon has agreed to extend his lease on the newly transformed arena by … oh, he hasn’t said how long, or agreed to a new lease yet at all? Welp.
  • And if even after all those bullet points you still want more stadium content for your weekend, I was interviewed this week by Heartland Labor Forum’s podcast about the Kansas City Royals stadium plans, check it out here.
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Friday roundup: Rays execs propose “squishy” MOU to unlock stadium vote; Bears tax hike proponent crushed in reelection bid

access_time personNeil deMause

Now that the Tampa Bay Rays stadium push has been pushed back to beyond the end of this legislative session, maybe we can get on with looking at some of the week’s news from other cities. Though wait: Could the Rays actually be on the verge of agreeing to an actual MOU with the city of Tampa and Hillsborough County, which might be voted on as early as next week? Or maybe: Is this just a vague outline of an agreement, not even looked at yet by actual city councilmembers or county commissioners, meant to convince the state legislature that it should move ahead with its own Rays funding? But what about: OLEICAT?

Okay, fine: There is a draft MOU, and it is this. Its very first word is “NON-BINDING,” and it changes some stuff around from the last proposed MOU. Instead of this public funding plan from the city and county:

  • $272 million from the county’s Community Investment Tax 0.5% sales tax surcharge that was passed by voters after promises it wouldn’t be used for stadiums
  • $268 million from county hotel taxes
  • $132 million from county cash reserves
  • $30 million from the county disaster relief funds
  • $224 million from the city of Tampa via the Drew Park TIF district
  • $74 million from reply hazy, ask again later

It would now be this:

  • $360 million from the county Community Investment Tax
  • $263 million from county hotel taxes
  • $40 million from more county hotel taxes
  • $30 million from county stormwater infrastructure funds
  • $100 million from the city of Tampa via the Drew Park TIF district
  • $80 million from the city Community Investment Tax
  • $103 million in county money from reply hazy, ask again later

The first set of numbers totaled $1 billion and the second one is $976 million, meaning the total public cost has gone down very slightly! Rays owner Patrick Zalupski would still keep all revenues from the county-owned stadium; he appears to have dropped his demand for a $10/year rent for now, with the MOU only saying that a lease agreement with the county will be negotiated at a later date.

Rays CEO Ken Babby issued a statement boasting that the new MOU “protects all public funding currently allocated for police, fire, emergency management or response functions,” which is true inasmuch as it doesn’t dip into those particular budget pockets, but not true inasmuch as city and county governments with $975 million less in overall tax money than it would otherwise will find it harder to fund those things.

The new MOU was negotiated with city and county staff, not legislators, so this still has to get voted on by the Tampa city council and Hillsborough County commission — and then, since it’s nonbinding, presumably voted on again at some later date once all those blank spaces in the budget are filled in. (Tampa council chair Alan Clendenin described this MOU as “on the squishy side.”) In the meantime, this stopgap measure is intended to convince the state legislature to move ahead with approving its share of the deal while Zalupski’s buddy Ron DeSantis is still governor. It’s all a lot of balls to keep in the air, but if it all works out, the Rays’ stadium plan could at least live to fight another day.

Okay, now the rest of the news:

  • Add another casualty to the list of elected officials who have been voted out of office and/or shot in the butt for their support of taxpayer-funded sports subsidies: Porter County council president Andy Vasquez got stomped in his Republican primary to stand for reelection, and one reason may be that he supported a 1% county food and beverage tax surcharge for a Bears stadium in Hammond, whereas his opponent opposed it. (Hammond is in Lake County, not in Porter County, but the Bears are seeking tax money from both.) The counties aren’t set to vote on the tax subsidies until after a deal is struck to bring the Bears to Indiana, which seems like it would be the dumbest kind of throwing good money after bad possible, but hey, all the kids are doing it!
  • In tax subsidy news on the other side of the Illinois-Indiana Bears border war: Amanda Kass of Good Jobs First, who earlier this week worried that the Illinois megaprojects bill that the Chicago Bears owners want so they can get up to $2 billion in tax breaks on an Arlington Heights stadium would turn the state’s property tax base into “swiss cheese,” has penned an analysis of the bill along with Kristan Wong Karinen of Good Jobs First and Rita Jefferson of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy for Crain’s Chicago Business and concluded that it would result in “a direct property tax cut for corporations that other residents will pay for.” And since any projects costing at least $100 million would be eligible for the tax breaks, it would be down to individual municipalities to decide — which is especially worrying, they write, given that “billionaire developers come to the table with sophisticated financial models and experienced attorneys. Communities don’t.”
  • The Missouri legislature snuck $80 million into this year’s state budget for “wastewater, stormwater, and water infrastructure,” and some legislators are concerned it could be a stealth attempt to set aside money for a Kansas City Royals stadium project. “This is the stuff that makes me sick,” said state senator Maggie Nurrenbern, who noted that other programs received budget cuts even as this potential stadium slush fund was created.
  • “Vancouver city council could approve a deal by July with a potential ownership group in pursuit of a Major League Baseball team,” reports Business in Vancouver, before further reporting that “so far, no ownership group has publicly shown an interest.” But if some billionaire shows up wanting to get an MLB expansion franchise, and if they can come up with a way of building a stadium, and if MLB actually decides to expand, then Vancouver is willing to get in line along with Sacramento and anyone else.
  • No, the Atlanta Braves Battery project really doesn’t turn a profit for Cobb County, that’s not how math works.
  • Buffalo Bills fans have noticed that the new stadium they’re paying for with their state and county tax money so that team owners can make more money is charging more money for tickets, and now they’re unhappy.
  • The New York/New Jersey World Cup host committee has rented school buses to provide 18,000 rides to this summer’s soccer matches for only $20, providing a relief to fans but potentially undercutting New Jersey’s attempts to recoup its World Cup expenses by gouging on train fares. New York state taxpayers will be footing $6 million of the bus cost, courtesy of Gov. Kathy Hochul.
  • What do you get when you combine AI slop with clickbait vaportecture? The nightmare fuel that is “Ballparks Reimagined: If Every MLB Team Built a Stadium From Its Soul,” which is if anything even slightly more horrifying than the YouTube version three years ago.
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Friday roundup: Rays blink on June 1 stadium deadline, Illinois residents don’t want to break the bank to keep Bears

access_time personNeil deMause

Time to catch up on what else has been going on this week while we’ve been doing wall-to-wall Tampa Bay Rays coverage. But first, the latest in Tampa Bay Rays news!

  • With elected officials in Tampa still insisting on asking pesky questions about whether giving Rays owner Patrick Zalupski $2.1 billion or more in total stadium subsidies would leave the city and county with a budget shortfall if tax revenues fall short (or even if they’re just diverted from other uses), Rays execs finally blinked: CEO Ken Babby has backed away from his June 1 deadline for a deal, saying the team is now just “focused” on getting a “nonbinding” memorandum of understanding that would send a signal to the state that “the county, the city and the Rays are committed to this partnership.” (Zalupski added that even an MOU by June 1 isn’t absolutely necessary, but he wants one “real soon” thereafter, even if “it’s purely symbolic.”) Translation: Let’s get at least the state part of the deal done before Ron DeSantis leaves office, then we can come back and haggle over financial details for the city’s and county’s portions. It’s not clear if Tampa and Hillsborough County will be able to push for a less spendy MOU — or be willing to reject the plan entirely if they can’t — but score at least one point for elected officials refusing to fall for the two-minute warning.
  • A new poll shows that most Illinois residents oppose throwing a lot of state money at a Chicago Bears stadium to ensure the team doesn’t move to Indiana — or at least, it does if you include the 36.9% who want to allow the team to break their Soldier Field lease and build a new stadium in Illinois without any taxpayer funds, as well as those who want to force the Bears to keep playing there through 2033, are those even real options, this is a weird poll. Other poll findings: Opposition to funding most of a stadium’s cost with public money is consistent across the political spectrum, and Illinois residents outside the immediate Chicago vicinity don’t give a crap where the Bears play, with those in the southern half of the state “downright apathetic.”
  • Meanwhile, it turns out the clause in Illinois’ proposed tax break bill that would add “property tax relief” to any subsidy for a Bears stadium or other “megaprojects” wouldn’t be much relief at all: An average Illinois homeowner would only get $1.29 off their property tax bill as a result. (And that’s even if their overall property tax bill didn’t go up by more than that to cover lost revenues from the megaproject tax break.) The total cost of the megaprojects bill in future tax expenditures has yet to be calculated — and may be uncalculatable, since we don’t know how many future developments would apply or how much of a tax break they’d negotiate with local governments, but that doesn’t mean nobody should give it a try before the Illinois legislature goes ahead and votes on this thing.
  • And also meanwhile, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is trying to block a potential Bears move to the suburb of Arlington Heights by pressing Chicago-area state legislators to oppose the megaprojects tax break bill. State senate Legislative Black Caucus chair Willie Preston then said he’s on board to oppose it, then said he was misinterpreted, then said he would just like a megaprojeets tax subsidy that would let the Bears stay in Chicago somehow. Illinois Kremlinologists please report to the situation room, stat.
  • New Jersey has cut train fares to World Cup matches from $150 to $105, thanks to what Gov. Mikie Sherrill says are private companies that have “stepped up to lower the costs for ticket holders,” whatever that means exactly. (Sherrill has promised that New Jersey Transit’s $48 million in expected World Cup costs won’t come out of transit riders’ pockets, but the details of who’s donating what in exchange for what here are still very murky.) The price cut will be good for soccer fans, unless it ends up increasing the ticket prices that fans will accept now that they’ll be saving $45 on getting to the game, in which case it will only be good for FIFA.
  • A report by Oxford Economics says that World Cup cities should expect to see only a “modest bump” from fan spending this summer, says report author Barbara Denham, and no measurable impact at all on overall economic activity, noting “there’s a lot of displacement of tourism” as other visitors steer clear of cities that will be mobbed by World Cup fans. And that’s even if, of course, the World Cup mobs don’t steer clear as well: Add Seattle to the list of cities where fans are getting set to show up disguised as empty hotel rooms.
  • Houston Texans owner Cal McNair isn’t saying what kind of stadium renovations he’ll seek in advance of his team’s lease expiring at the end of 2032, but he did say he’s hoping they’ll be “transformative,” which is usually code for “a lot of zeroes after the dollar sign.”
  • A Minnesota legislator wants to apply the same ticket tax paid by Vikings ticket buyers to currently exempt buyers of luxury suites and earmark the proceeds to provide services to youth victims of sex trafficking. Bill opponents, clearly not eager to look like they’re siding with either luxury suite buyers or sex traffickers, have instead objected that she submitted her bill to the wrong committee.
  • Residents of Denver’s historic La Alma-Lincoln Park neighborhood are trying to work out a community benefits agreement with the Broncos owners to keep from being overwhelmed by traffic and displacement if the team builds a new stadium nearby. Community leaders say this will be the first legally binding CBA negotiated by an NFL team with a community group rather than a local government — something they might want to think carefully about, as history shows that it can be a problem if it comes time to enforce a CBA and none of the community group signatories are still around to do it.
  • New Orleans has just seized the lead in the race to be the first major sports city to be abandoned due to climate change.
  • And finally, RIP Gap cofounder Doris Fisher, who will now not be around to see if her middle son spends the family fortune on building a spherical armadillo.
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It may officially be time to call the 2026 World Cup an omnishambles

access_time personNeil deMause

The start of the men’s World Cup is now just five weeks away, and we’re getting to the point where it may be time to ask what happens if the world’s richest country holds one of the world’s biggest sporting events and nobody shows up:

With only six weeks to go before the start of the World Cup, hotels at most of the cities hosting the tournament are facing a major problem: Bookings are running far below what they had expected.

For some metro areas such as Kansas City, bookings are running even below what a typical June or July would bring, according to an industry survey released on Monday by the American Hotel and Lodging Association.

Mega-events like the World Cup are always a risky proposition for host nations, which take on tons of added costs in the hopes of raking in spending from international visitors, something that doesn’t generally work out that well. But this year’s tournament, split among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, has been especially disastrous and especially for the U.S., marked by sky-high ticket prices, host cities jacking up train fares by more than 1000% to try to cover their costs (and fans threatening to walk to games along highway shoulders in response), and growing signs that fans from other countries who might normally travel to see their teams are planning to sit this World Cup out amid both soaring prices and fears of harassment by Trump administration immigration agencies.

All this won’t necessarily add up to the spectacle of international soccer teams playing before acres of empty seats: FIFA can always dump unsold tickets by lowering prices, though so far it’s showing no interest in doing so. But it’s looking more and more like a large share of the attendees will be locals, which cuts into any hoped-for economic windfall from hosting the cup, since those people would be spending money in their home towns regardless.

While some of these problems are specific to this particular World Cup — we haven’t even gotten into the issue of soaring airfares in the wake of Trump’s war with Iran — some are more a matter of ongoing FIFA money grubbing and of the high costs of putting on sports mega-events, which is why study after study shows things like the World Cup or the Olympics are not a very good way to create economic growth. In the worst-case scenario, residents of host cities will all skip town during the World Cup to avoid the traffic and transit nightmares (New Yorkers are already being instructed to work from home on match days), while tourists steer clear because of high prices and ICE fears, leading to a situation where nobody will go to the World Cup because it’s too crowded. In the best … it’ll look good on TV, and maybe that’s all anyone cares about?

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Friday roundup: Rays may have bot-lobbied for stadium funds, OR gov says not rubber-stamping Blazers cash is “playing politics”

access_time personNeil deMause

We’ve run off the end of April, and — spoiler alert — neither the Chicago Bears nor Tampa Bay Rays stadium situations have yet been resolved as team owners had hoped. Sportswriters often like to portray a slow approval process as dysfunction, but it can equally well be the opposite: Taking your time and driving a hard bargain are good negotiating tools, and when billions of dollars in tax money are at stake, rushing to get something approved just because the local billionaire is impatient is a great way to end up with unexpected costs. It’s still very much unknown whether residents of Illinois and Florida will end up with better stadium deals as a result of legislators taking their time, but it’s hard to imagine it’ll end up being any worse than if they’d just signed off on whatever they were presented with without reading it.

Anyway, lots of news did happen this week, even in Tampa Bay and Chicago, so let’s get to it:

  • Hillsborough County Commissioner Joshua Wostal claims that somebody sent more than 2,000 bot-written emails from a single IP address in Los Angeles urging county commissioners to hurry up and approve the Rays’ stadium deal. Wostal says he doesn’t want to move forward with any stadium plan until the Rays owners provide documentation of where they’ll get the money to finance their part of the deal, which would include more than $1 billion for the stadium plus possibly billions more for surrounding development (some of which would be recouped by tax and land breaks), though the team hasn’t actually committed to what exactly it will build; a Rays statement said only that it would provide financing details “at the appropriate time as is standard with similar public-private partnerships,” which must be ownerese for “maybe after we’ve cashed your check.”
  • Bears executives held a meeting with NFL officials this week, in which everyone agreed that the best stadium options are either in Arlington Heights or Indiana. The assembled dignitaries then warned Illinois legislators that if a stadium bill to the Bears owners’ liking isn’t approved ASAP, the team and league could meet again.
  • Count Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek among the hurry-up-and-rubber-stampers: After signing a bill to provide $365 million in state money for Portland Trail Blazers renovations, she chided city and county officials for not swiftly approving their own $235 million, saying, “This is not a time to play politics. This is a time to get it done.” (“Playing politics,” in this case, includes things like not wanting to sign a nondisclosure agreement before entering into arena funding talks.)
  • The Cleveland Browns held a groundbreaking for their new Brook Park stadium, even as legal questions remain about the state unclaimed funds money that is supposed to pay $600 million toward the project. Everyone involved is still moving full steam ahead, though: Browns owner Jimmy Haslam said that “we’re not attorneys, OK?” but after talking to actual attorneys “we do think it’ll be resolved,” while Gov. Mike DeWine reassured everyone that if this public funding plan fails, the state could always go back to his plan to raise sports gambling taxes and give the proceeds to sports teams that everyone hated. No one is saying exactly what will happen if the state — and the city of Brook Park, which is still negotiating its own $245 million in stadium spending — can’t come up with the money after stadium construction is already underway, probably because nobody wants to admit that “let the Haslams figure out how to find the rest of the money” is still an option for fear of risking the benefits of moving the Browns from Ohio to Ohio.
  • But if (greater) Cleveland doesn’t get a new stadium, how will it host a Super Bowl? Don’t worry, it probably won’t get one anyway unless it builds more hotels, says NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who pointedly did not mention this during the runup to the stadium funding vote.
  • MLS has a prospective Las Vegas bidder for the Vancouver Whitecaps: a group led by Grant Gustavson, the 30-year-old son of Kentucky’s wealthiest billionaire. This doesn’t necessarily mean the Whitecaps will move if they don’t get a new arena deal in Vancouver — Vegas doesn’t have a soccer arena at all (though Gustavson said he’s ready to “privately finance” one, without providing details) and is getting dangerously close to a market glut of sports teams — but it’ll likely light a fire under officials in British Columbia, who already started scrambling the jets once the league announced its Vegas move threat earlier this week.
  • Team owner insists he needs state money for a new stadium, state says no you can’t have any, team owner finds an existing stadium to play in. Happy endings all around in the CT United F.C. story, unless you’re team owner Andre Swanston, who now has to settle for just selling tickets to watch soccer matches instead of getting $127 million in state aid to help boost his team’s bottom line.
  • Would this Comiskey Park–inspired stadium design be a better place for Chicago White Sox fans to watch a game? Undoubtedly, since it would bring back that ballpark’s close-to-the-action upper deck. Would it make more money for the White Sox owners? Probably not, because it would be missing the wall of luxury suites that are to blame for the current stadium’s unloved distant upper deck: Extra-nosebleedy cheap seats in modern stadiums are a feature, not a bug. Maybe work on reducing soaring income inequality that has created such a soaring market for high-priced tickets, and then we can get back to stadium design that actually works for everyone.
  • How did the economic impact go from the NFL Draft that Pittsburgh canceled school for? Not so hot, according to one restaurant worker who fought through draft-related bus rerouting only to have her hours cut because fewer customers than usual showed up. (Economists are shocked, shocked!) The city tourism agency responded with a statement that really the NFL Draft was less about bringing in new spending than “positioning Pittsburgh as a modern, globally relevant city well beyond the weekend.”
  • In related news, New Jersey transit officials are recommending that state residents work from home during World Cup matches to avoid the transit nightmare caused by rerouting trains to take fans to matches since they won’t be allowed to drive there. This could be good news for New Jersey restaurants, maybe, unless everyone just makes their own lunches those days, see why economic impact of sporting events is harder to calculate than just adding up all the fans and declaring “> ? > profit”?
  • No, the Athletics aren’t going to change their name to the “Las Vegas Black Fire” just because they listed that as a location in a job listing, it’s just the name of a co-working space in Vegas. Thanks to SF Gate for clearing this up, maybe everyone should have done a little more research before firing up the AI jersey designs.
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Friday roundup: Rays execs threaten to “evaluate alternatives” if Tampa won’t hand over $1B; could LA revise its Olympics deal?

access_time personNeil deMause

There’s an absolute ton of news to get to today, but first the biggest news of all: The Field of Schemes gift vault is down to only one remaining numbered Vaportecture art print out of the 100 created for site supporters! That means the next person to sign up as either a new Patreon subscriber or new one-time donor gets print #100, and then there are no more! I’m working on a fun new reward or two for those of you who allow this website to happen, but it’ll take a minute for those to be ready — meanwhile, site supporters are still eligible to get any refrigerator magnets you haven’t already received, plus of course my eternal thanks for helping me devote the time each day to this site that, tragically, still has reason to exist after 28 years of this nonsense.

And speaking of nonsense, here’s more of this week’s stadium and arena news:

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