Category: MLB

Friday roundup: Lightning win $250m in tax money for 6-year lease extension, Missouri holds secret talks on Royals stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

We have a bunch of new followers here thanks largely to all the tumult over the Kansas City Chiefs stadium deal, so it’s worth another mention that Field of Schemes continues to exist after almost 28 years thanks to the kindness of its readers. If you have any money left after donating to help the families of government-kidnapped five-year-olds [UPDATE: Or all the other less adorable Minnesotans who can use help], you can chip in to support this site here — you’ll even get some amusing refrigerator magnets in appreciation, if we can still even be amused in 2026.

And speaking of trying to wring amusement from horror, here is your weekly dose of stadium and arena bullet points:

  • Hillsborough County approved $250 million in arena renovations for the Tampa Bay Lightning in exchange for a six-year lease extension, which at $41.7 million per year would be one of the priciest per-year lease extensions in sports history.  Lightning owner Jeffrey Vinik could still request state sales tax money on top of this as well — if he does in exchange for no more years of lease extension, that would be a per-year cost of infinity, which would be an unbreakable record.
  • Officials from Kansas City, Missouri and Jackson County traveled to meet with Gov. Mike Kehoe on Wednesday about the Royals stadium situation, and no you can’t know what they talked about, that’s for Royals owner John Sherman to find out and you not to find out until it’s all been hashed out. Both Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and Interim Jackson County Executive Phil LeVota said they hope to strike a stadium deal with Sherman by the end of spring training; while we’re hoping things, let’s hope that this threesome focuses on getting a good deal, and not just a deal that is resolved quickly.
  • An Indiana senate committee cast a vote on Wednesday that “establishes the necessary funding to pay for the construction of a new Chicago Bears stadium,” according to WGN, but actually just creates a stadium authority, as we discussed last week. Also the full Indiana state senate still has to vote on it, and then the state house has to, before even this can become law, but don’t let that stop reporters from calling this a “bidding war.”
  • Dallas Mavericks execs have narrowed their arena site search to two locations, one an undisclosed one downtown and one at an abandoned mall site that, uh, is already getting redeveloped? Only having two prospective sites, both in the same city, wouldn’t bode super well for Mavs owners Patrick and Sivan Dumont’s leverage in demanding taxpayer money to build the thing, but they still have land in Irving they could consider using as a threat, as one does.
  • The Buffalo Sabres owners have hired a lobbyist to seek state funding of a $400 million renovation of their arena, good thing New York state has plenty of money for that.
  • The Sphere people want to build another Sphere, this time smaller and in the D.C. suburbs, using a tax increment financing district to siphon off property taxes to pay to build it. That’s okay, though, because Prince George’s County Executive Aisha Braveboy and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore say a Sphere would generate $1 billion in economic impact [citation needed], so everything should be fine [citation needed].
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Rays don’t have to threaten Orlando move to get billions from Tampa, because county official is doing it for them

access_time personNeil deMause

If there’s one basic principle in negotiations of any kind, it’s to hold your cards tight and not give your opponent any unnecessary leverage. Even if you want to ultimately agree to a deal, to get the best one possible for your side you want to keep your focus on your own advantages, and don’t let — oh just never mind:

“I believe that it’s either going to be located at (Hillsborough College) or the team’s going to be in Orlando,” [Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken] Hagan said on a sports radio show Wednesday. “The reality is the they have significantly more bed tax revenue than we do, and they’ve been pushing for a team.”

Let’s say that it’s true that Orlando officials are likely to jump to throw money at the Tampa Bay Rays if Tampa does not. (They haven’t before now, but also former Rays owner Stuart Sternberg was mostly focused on playing off cities in Tampa Bay against each other, plus Montreal for some reason.) Or even let’s just say that Hagan believes that Orlando will jump to lure the Rays, and that new Rays owner Patrick Zalupski would be willing to move there. You still don’t say that out loud! Not when your city and county are about to have to negotiate unspecified “incentives” to help Zalupski build a new stadium on the campus of Hillsborough College, on top of $1 billion or more in land and tax breaks.

Hagan said something similar back in September when Zalupski first bought the Rays, declaring, “If for any reason we’re unable to get over the finish line, then the team may ultimately be in Orlando. It’s Tampa’s to lose.” But this week’s statement was phrased as even more of a threat on Zalupski’s behalf.

There’s been a lot of speculation over the years about why local elected officials do the bidding of sports team owners when they don’t have to, most of which come down to the ideas that they’re 1) stupid or 2) on the take. (My leading theory remains that they’re just doing what all the lobbyists and other people at the right parties are telling them to do.) But statements like Hagan’s betray a deeper problem: Many elected officials just want to make team owners happy, regardless of the cost to taxpayers. Announcing that the Rays will move to Orlando without subsidies in Tampa is horrible tactics — it will almost certainly raise the eventual public cost — but it does increase the chances that Tampa will win the right to shower Zalupski with money, and if that’s the only goal, then Hagan has done his job perfectly.

This has been Hagan’s M.O. for a long while now, back to when he declared the “sense of urgency” around building a Rays stadium to be “borderline dire” way back in 2013. Normally I would warn that being the commissioner who cried wolf will stop you from being taken seriously, but here Hagan is still getting headlines in the Tampa Bay Times with his dire warnings, so I guess it works different when you’re a county commissioner-for-life.

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Rays owners probably demanding another $1b stadium subsidy in Tampa, counting free land and tax breaks

access_time personNeil deMause

The Tampa Bay Rays‘ proposed memorandum of understanding with Hillsborough College on a site for a new stadium is out, and the initial news coverage of same tells us next to nothing we want to know about who’ll actually pay for what. So let’s go to the actual document and see what’s what, then reconvene at the bottom to try to estimate a total subsidy cost:

The Property is an approximately 113 acre-site located in Tampa, Florida, bounded by W. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, N. Lois Avenue, W. Tampa Bay Boulevard., and N. Dale Mabry Highway

This is Hillsborough College’s Dale Mabry Campus, which would largely be turned over to the Rays, with the college building new facilities on one corner of the property. How much room the campus will get to retain “shall be agreed to in the Definitive Agreements,” which are TBD.

HC and the Rays will negotiate in good faith to agree on an ownership and financing structure and the conditions precedent for the contribution of the Property by HC.

I.e,, final lease terms, including things like whether the Rays will pay any rent for the state-owned site, are also TBD.

The Rays will construct a mixed-use development that may consist of, but is not limited to, hotels, retail space, multifamily buildings, sports and health related buildings, commercial buildings, parking structures, restaurants and other related buildings (“Mixed-Use Development”). The Parties acknowledge that the Rays will have sole and exclusive control over the Mixed-Use Development, during and after construction. The scope of the Mixed-Use Development will be determined as part of the Definitive Agreements

In addition to a stadium, Rays owner Patrick Zalupski will get to build a whole new neighborhood, as former team owner Stuart Sternberg planned to do at St. Petersburg’s Gas Plant District before backing out of that deal early last year. All revenues from that project will go to Zalupski, nothing to the land’s state taxpayer owners.

HC will ground lease the entire Property, except for the College District, to the Rays or a Rays’ affiliate by long-term lease of not less than 99 years.

Since Hillsborough College is a state facility, the property will be exempt from property taxes, including the parcel the team plans to build its mixed-use district on. Also, hey, it’s another 90-plus-year lease, just like the Washington Commanders deal! Lease terms TBD, of course, but it means that any discounted rent could add up to one hell of a lot, as it did for the $6.6 billion Commanders subsidy.

(Economist Geoff Propheter, who crunched the numbers for the Commanders deal, delivers the mic drop on this via email: “If there’s an upside to all of these stupidly long land leases that are so common in sports, I won’t be alive to remind people that I told them so.”)

The Parties anticipate the prominence and activity generated by the Project that will significantly enhance HC’s visibility, strengthen its community presence, and create valuable opportunities for outreach, partnerships, and student engagement.

LOL.

The Rays will pursue various economic incentive programs at the local and state levels in connection with the Project

You didn’t think Zalupski would be content with getting to build his stadium on state-provided tax-free land, did you? Florida already has a sports slush fund that draws on state sales tax dollars, and Hillsborough County and the city of Tampa could always offer tax breaks as well.

The MOU has already been unanimously approved by Hillsborough College’s board of trustees and has the backing of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has a long history with Zalupski, appointing him to the University of Florida’s board of trustees after Zalupski gave $250,000 to his Super PAC. DeSantis said yesterday that while he wouldn’t help fund the stadium itself, he would consider spending to move a juvenile jail currently on the site and, in the words of the Tampa Bay Times, “help pay for roads and sewers to prevent traffic jams,” which suggests some innovative mass transit solutions.

So, what are we talking about in terms of public cost? It’s hard to say until we see the final lease agreement, but Propheter does provide a figure for the value of the land itself: $250 million if the college were to sell it, between $582 million and $1.7 billion (in present value) if they leased it. Add in whatever Zalupski would get in tax breaks (Propheter can’t estimate those yet because he doesn’t know how much the stadium and development would be appraised at), state road and sewer spending, and any “economic incentives,” and it all seems very likely to exceed the $1 billion that Sternberg rejected one year ago. All this has to get approved by the state and likely Hillsborough County and the city of Tampa as well, of course, but never bet against team owners finding a greater fool.

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Friday roundup: Rays target stadium site, Bears seek Indiana stadium authority, Chiefs pursue local tax money

access_time personNeil deMause

Sorry for the late post today — I think all the images of people getting shot in the face and pulled screaming from their cars are starting to interfere with my sleep schedule. No matter what else is going on, though, the stadium and arena shakedowns continue, so let’s get to the news that we didn’t already cover this week:

  • Tampa Bay Rays owner and Gov. Ron DeSantis pal Patrick Zalupski is reportedly in advanced talks to buy the state-owned Hillsborough College’s Dale Mabry Campus in Tampa for the site of a new stadium and surrounding development. (The college’s 20,000 students would possibly get a new campus elsewhere as part of a “land swap” for something or other.) How the money for any of this would work is as yet a mystery — the Hillsborough board of trustees will meet on Tuesday to discuss the plan, at which point we’ll learn a bit more, maybe.
  • The Indiana state senate is considering a bill to create a stadium authority in Northwest Indiana to lure the Chicago Bears, which would have precisely the same effect as me opening a bank account to use to buy a yacht: nothing at all, until somebody puts some money in it. (The bill language would give the authority bonding capacity, but no set revenue streams to pay off any bonds.) Bears officials nonetheless called it a “significant milestone” in their talks of getting a stadium in Indiana, guess you gotta celebrate your achievements where you can find them, especially if you want to maintain your leverage.
  • There’s been talk before that Kansas’s $4 billion subsidy offer to the Kansas City Chiefs for a new stadium in Kansas City, Kansas (their current stadium is in Kansas City, Missouri) could involve kicking in future city and county sales tax revenues as well as state sales taxes, and now it’s an official ask: Both Wyandotte County, where Kansas City, Kansas is located, and the city of Olathe, where the Chiefs’ new training facility would be built, are being asked to chip in their share of any rise in sales tax receipts to help pay the Chiefs’ construction bill. (I don’t think this changes the overall public price tag, just displaces some of the money the state might otherwise struggle to come up with.) Why the local governments would want to commit their own tax revenue to pay for something the state otherwise plans to build with its own funds, who knows, but Olathe councilmembers did call the training camp a “wonderful transformational project for us” and “a very exciting announcement,” so maybe the hope is local lawmakers will be so excited they’ll contribute to the project’s GoFundMe.
  • Unite Here Local 49 has estimated that those billboards the city of Sacramento is erecting and giving the revenue from to the Sacramento Republic F.C. owners could end up costing the city $115 million over 34 years — which would be worth less in present value, but also it looks like the union didn’t account for future inflation in billboard rates, so maybe not less in present value? Maybe we’ll find out in the year 2060, if man is still alive.
  • There are new renderings of the planned Washington Commanders stadium on the old RFK Stadium site, and they look kind of like a plus-sized version of the Saddledome, surrounded by a whole lot of garages and buildings strategically shown so all you can see are their green roofs. (No fireworks or entourage at all, Josh Harris isn’t blowing any of that $6.6 billion on the clip art budget.) One thing they don’t show: Any of the homes in the nearby neighborhood, or the grocery stores and other small businesses that residents say they would like to see built there, but aren’t hopeful anyone will be able to afford to once the stadium opens.
  • The Houston Texans just hired a chief revenue officer who last worked on the Buffalo Bills stadium project, guess we’re going to start hearing again about Texans owner Cal McNair’s desires for a new or upgraded stadium.
  • $50 million in public bonds for a cricket stadium? In Oswego? It’s all supposed to be covered by stadium revenue, but I can’t find confirmation in the (checks notes) Fox River Valley press. Anyway, I’m done, have a good holiday weekend, see you back here on Tuesday, if woman can survive.
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Do record-breaking Commanders and Chiefs deals mean other cities need to pay more for stadiums? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

Other news outlets are starting to pick up on what a crazy year this was for sports stadium deals: Just in the last couple of days we’ve had headlines reading “Sports stadium deals hand even more taxpayer money to billionaires” and “Public subsidies for stadiums are exploding.” The lessons that writers are taking from the eye-popping subsidy deals for the Washington Commanders and Kansas City Chiefs, though, are, uh, interesting.

Let’s start out with that first article, which ran on the nonprofit-owned Stateline news service. It noted the record-breaking numbers for the Commanders and Chiefs stadiums, then quoted sports economist Geoffrey Propheter as saying that these deals will end up doing a favor to other team owners seeking their own stadium deals, because “now teams can look at the Kansas deal and say, ‘Hey, what we’re asking for is not nearly as bad or as crazy or stupid as what Kansas is offering.’” It also quotes another stadium expert (that’d be me) as noting that in both cases, the elected officials who landed the stadium deals had been “negotiating against themselves,” since nobody else was offering the many billions of dollars that Kansas and D.C. ultimately came up with — and “the more they get away with that, the more their fellow owners are going to be emboldened to ask for the same thing.”

So far, so good: Because sports team owners often successfully employ the “all the other kids are doing it” argument, the Chiefs and Commanders deals are likely to lead to more multibillion-dollar stadium subsidy demands. But this brings us to article #2, by Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano, which takes that conclusion to some unlikely places.

Romano is a weird one in the stadium coverage landscape: He’s been critical of Tampa Bay Rays ownership for demanding too much in stadium talks, but has also been an advocate for Rays stadium subsidies so long as they’re kept to a half billion dollars or so. Here, he takes the record-breaking stadium subsidies and runs with them, predicting that it could lead to a higher public price tag for a new Rays deal:

For the typical taxpayer on Main Street USA, the real culprit is your crazy neighbor in Kansas. Or Washington D.C. Or any number of other desperate municipalities.

We’re not talking about the actual cost of construction — which is significant and rising daily by itself — but the public funds/enticements that are being tossed around so towns can either lure or retain baseball, football, hockey and basketball teams.

The Chiefs and Commanders deals — and, for some reason, the Atlanta Braves deal with Cobb County, which Romano also throws into the mix — raise the prospect that “municipalities could recoup their initial investment with funds from property taxes on new construction, liquor taxes in new bars and restaurants, and a variety of other fees and taxes that would not otherwise exist without the project,” something Romano terms an “intriguing idea” before immediately noting that economists consider it “a load of hooey.” Still, there are “intangible” benefits from hosting a sports team, says Romano! Though “critics suggest that concept is also vastly overrated”! The answer must lie somewhere in the middle, or at least in just dumping the two arguments into a Word document and letting readers figure it out for themselves!

If Romano column is disappointingly bothsidesy when it comes to evaluating the alleged benefits of stadium deals, the headline it ran under put its finger definitively on the scale: The full hed is “Public subsidies for stadiums are exploding. Can Tampa Bay keep up?” That’s a very different question than whether “keeping up” is even worth it, and it makes it sound like the challenge here for elected officials is to find a way to meet the new stadium subsidy thresholds, regardless of whether they make any economic sense. After all, as Romano argues in his conclusion, it’s really all about what the guy next door is offering:

As history has shown, it only takes one desperate community armed with municipal bonds to completely change the landscape — and the zip code — of a baseball or football team.

Yeah, if Tampa Bay doesn’t come up with three or four or six billion dollars, the Chiefs and Commanders deals show that the Rays might … move to the next city over? Which would also be in Tampa Bay? “Cities are bidding more and more billions of dollars to secure stadium deals” is pretty obvious; “cities need to bid more and more billions of dollars to secure stadium deals” is a very different thing, especially when they’re bidding against themselves.

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Friday roundup: Trail Blazers, Lightning owners join Devils in asking states to fund their arena upgrades because reasons

access_time personNeil deMause

The way this week has gone, you can be forgiven if you just want to avoid the news entirely. If you’ve come here to be cheered up by some less depressing news … that’s never a good idea, but there are maybe some amusing bits, and nobody has gotten killed (so far), so I guess those are pluses!

Feel free to try to find the glass half full in these items:

  • The Portland Trail Blazers owners are about to ask that Oregon hand over all state income taxes paid by home and road players and staff to help fund a $600 million renovation of their 30-year-old arena. (The cost is estimated at $20 million a year, which if salaries rise enough could easily end up amounting to $600 million worth of future taxes.) The Oregonian notes: “Team employees, notably players who earn millions, have been paying into the state’s general fund for decades, dating back to the franchise’s founding in 1970. Will lawmakers have the stomach to divert those funds from essential services to rebuild an arena that is home to a team that will soon be owned by a Texas billionaire?” Then it says that “the income tax dollars the general fund would lose in this proposal will vanish anyway if the Blazers relocate,” which, no they wouldn’t, not if Portlanders spent their basketball ticket dollars elsewhere locally, which the numbers show is what would mostly happen. Securing approval of the tax money before Tom Dundon (the aforementioned billionaire) officially steps in as owner, one source told the Oregonian, “guarantees the Blazers’ future,” though they didn’t say what kind of lease extension Dundon would agree to in exchange, so it’s always possible it would only guarantee the Blazers’ future until it’s time to ask for more tax money again.
  • Hillsborough County is discussing paying for $250 million in renovations to the Tampa Bay Lightning‘s arena in exchange for a six-year lease extension until 2043, which has some Tampa Sports Authority officials worried the Buccaneers and Rays owners may make similar demands if the arena project is approved. Also that would be $41.7 million per year of lease extension, which would be close to the record for most expensive ever.
  • New Jersey’s proposed $300 million Devils arena subsidy only has a few days left of the legislative session for approval, and “some lawmakers,” per New Jersey Digest, have “raised concerns” that rushing a major tax break through in a lame-deck session with a lame-duck governor might not be the best of ideas. Not that state legislatures don’t do it all the time, but not the best of ideas does check out if you’re a fan of transparency and due diligence and all the other democracy things that are out of fashion right now.
  • Kansas officials want to make clear that the state could still build a Kansas City Royals stadium, just not with STAR bonds since the deadline for those expired at the end of 2025, so they’re just for the Chiefs and for Barbie/Hot Wheels theme parks. And the state doesn’t really have many other good revenue sources, says house speaker Dan Hawkins: “It would be tough to use those and develop enough money to really support a stadium, and so, I just can’t see that happening.”
  • The Ohio judge who issued a 14-day temporary restraining order against the use of unclaimed private funds to pay $600 million toward a new Cleveland Browns stadium has extended it indefinitely while he hears arguments on whether to issue a permanent injunction.
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Royals suitors dropping like flies, Kansas Chiefs stadium still faces bond questions

access_time personNeil deMause

If Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman was hoping that the Chiefs announcing a move across the border to the state of Kansas in exchange for around $4 billion in subsidies would spark a bidding war for his own team, well, not so much, it appears. Kansas house speaker Dan Hawkins declared this week that the December 31 deadline for the Royals to pursue state-backed STAR bonds was set in stone, and the offer is now off the table. (Though with the legislature set to consider expanded STAR bonds beyond 2026, it’s always possible to put it back on the table.) On the Missouri side of the border, meanwhile, potential Royals suitors are getting cold feet as well:

On Wednesday, Clay County Commissioner Jason Withington said that he was done negotiating with the team.

“Like Kansas, I’m done negotiating with the Kansas City Royals,” he wrote on Facebook….

“As the August deadline approached, we were then told they wanted to move to the April 2026 ballot at the earliest. Tomorrow was the deadline we gave the team to meet that timeline. They’ve now told us they aren’t ready for that either. At some point, you stop negotiating–and start being honest about what’s actually happening.”

One would think that this leaves Sherman with only the option of Jackson County and downtown Kansas City, Missouri, which should put local officials there in the driver’s seat to limit taxpayer subsidies, especially after Jackson County voters made their feelings clear in April 2024. Or one would hope, anyway — after all, Chiefs owner Clark Hunt didn’t have anyone else offering him $4 billion before Kansas put its deal on the table, but that didn’t stop that state from seizing the winner’s curse with both hands.

Yet Hunt may still have a chance to seize defeat from the jaws of victory. The city of Kansas City, Kansas and Wyandotte County still must sign off on the deal, and Mayor Christal Watson and other local officials are concerned that kicking in city and county sales taxes — as the state wants them to do to keep its costs to a dull roar — could force local governments to raise property taxes to compensate. And there are still questions about whether even the proposed giant 330-square-mile stadium sales tax increment district can generate enough funds to pay off the STAR bonds, or at least to convince bondholders that the bonds are safe. And that, University of Chicago bond expert Justin Marlowe tells the Kansas City Star, could lead the state to go back on its “no new taxes” pledge:

“Do we default on the bonds and hope that the bondholders are willing to take a haircut, which they won’t be. Which they never are,” Marlowe said. “If it goes to court and there needs to be some sort of negotiated settlement, it’s fair to say that at some point, everyone will look to the state to provide some kind of relief to prevent the Chiefs from leaving, to prevent this otherwise potentially successful development from failing before it has a chance to succeed.”

The discussions over how to draw the STAR bond district should be interesting indeed … or would be, if Kansas didn’t have a special state law allowing talks to be conducted in secret, only making a plan public once it’s been finalized. State officials won’t even reveal what non-disclosure agreements they’ve signed regarding the Chiefs deal, citing that same confidentiality clause that was approved as part of the expanded sports STAR bonds package in 2024 — refusing to disclose what you can’t disclose is some next-level stonewalling, excellent work, Kansas state obfuscatorians.

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A’s denied trademark on “Vegas Athletics” name, everybody LOL

access_time personNeil deMause

LOLAthletics social media has been lit up for the last 24 hours with the news  — actually first reported on Friday on an intellectual property blog, but hardly anyone noticed for a few days — that the United States Patent and Trademark Office denied A’s ownership a trademark on the names “Las Vegas Athletics” and “Vegas Athletics,” the presumed preferred names for the team once it presumably moves to its presumed new stadium in 2028, presumably. The reason given by the USPTO: “athletics” is a generic term, and while the MLB franchise has used it in four different cities now over the course of more than a century, attaching “Las Vegas” to it doesn’t make it a trademarkable term:

The name ‘Las Vegas Athletics’ describes a professional “athletics” organization located in Las Vegas. And, the team has not yet begun widespread commercial use of that name for many of the goods and services listed in its applications. Without that use, there is limited evidence the USPTO can rely on to find that the mark has acquired distinctiveness in the marketplace…

The real problem here is procedural timing. Because the team has not yet started operating as the Las Vegas Athletics, it cannot easily produce the kind of marketplace evidence, such as sales figures, advertising spend, media recognition, and consumer perception, that would normally overcome a descriptiveness refusal.

This adds one more element of hilarity to the A’s dumpster fire of a relocation process, but it doesn’t seem likely to be a major roadblock to the A’s moving to Vegas. IP lawyer Josh Gerben writes on his blog that he expects the franchise to eventually get its trademarks once it has real-life Vegas fans it can point to. And until then, the worst John Fisher will have to deal with is not being able to rein in bootleg “Vegas Athletics” t-shirt sellers, which is significantly smaller fry than paying for a $2 billion stadium; for that matter, there’s nothing stopping third parties from making their own “Athletics” shirts and selling them in Sacramento right now, if they thought anyone would buy them, but that hasn’t stopped the A’s from thriving (LOL) there.

Another option would be to change the A’s name once the team moves — when the former Arizona Coyotes absconded to Utah and couldn’t get a trademark on their preferred name (the Utah Yeti, LOL), they pivoted to Mammoth instead, though that’s also not going great, trademark-wise. There have been dumber complications to sports team relocations, and the A’s have already hit most of those, so may as well go for the full set!

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Friday roundup: The year that stadium subsidies went completely nuts

access_time personNeil deMause

One year ago today, this site ran an item headlined “Was the Carolina Panthers’ $650m renovation deal really the worst of 2024? An investimagation,” in response to the Center for Economic Accountability declaring Charlotte the winner of that dubious distinction. The conclusion: The Panthers deal was bad, but there were plenty of other contenders, like St. Petersburg’s attempt (eventually rejected) to give over $1 billion to the owners of the Tampa Bay Rays, the Washington Capitals and Wizards owner landing $515 million from D.C., plus non-sports megadeals for everything from an Eli Lilly drug plant in Indiana to expansion of film and TV production tax credits.

All that seems like a million years ago. The year 2025 will be remembered for lots of things, but one is that it was the year where stadium subsidies blew way past the billion-dollar mark, with Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris landing a stadium-plus deal worth at least $6.6 billion in cash, land, and tax breaks, then Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt following that up with a preliminary agreement for around $4 billion in goodies for a stadium development in Kansas. Otherwise notable events of the past year like the state of Ohio gifting Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam $600 million (or more) to move from one part of the state to another and even San Antonio providing $1.3 billion for a new San Antonio Spurs arena project — easily an NBA record — feel like chump change by comparison.

And that’s the bigger concern here: While in a sane world, elected officials would sit down and figure out how much the presence of a sports team is worth compared to having money for public services, or at least how much they need to offer to outbid other prospective host cities, if any, in this timeline it’s more about what the next guy down the road has established as the going rate. It’s impossible to say, for example, how the Chicago Bears owners’ perpetual game of footsie with both Chicago and every suburb within driving distance will turn out, or if Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman will replicate the Chiefs’ tax windfall — but when owners can point to previous deals and argue that giving 99 years of free rent or all future sales tax increases from a 300-square-mile area is just the cost of doing business, it makes it easier for state, county, and city officials to say “sure, I guess, do we at least get a luxury box?”

And on that note, let’s wrap up the final news from 2025, and the early returns from 2026:

  • Kansas state senate president Ty Masterson said the “worst case scenario” for a Chiefs stadium is “nobody buys the bonds, the bonds don’t get sold, the project doesn’t happen,” but it seems far more likely that if nobody is interested in buying the bonds, the state would make its sales tax increment district even bigger than 300 square miles, which seems like it would be considerably worse. Or the state could have to sell bonds at an interest rate of as high as 8.5% to lure bond buyers, which would definitely be worse. Let only your imagination be your limit, Ty!
  • Count newly elected Kansas City, Kansas mayor Christal Watson, who is also CEO of Wyandotte County (counties got CEOs?), among those eager to look the Chiefs stadium deal in the mouth: “If the numbers aren’t there for us to maintain the services that are needed for the community, then we’ve got to reevaluate and renegotiate,” said Watson this week. It ain’t over until it’s over!
  • Meanwhile, Kansas speaker of the house Dan Hawkins says with the clock turning over to 2026, “time’s up” for the Royals to use STAR bonds that were approved last year. Though technically the legislature can still change its mind and approve new bonds until the end of June — if it can find some bits of eastern Kansas that aren’t already part of the Chiefs stadium tax district — this seems like a good opportunity for Missouri officials to recognize that they’re the only bidder for the Royals and drive a hard bargain, though vowing to do an end run around voters doesn’t seem like a great start.
  • The Minnesota Timberwolves owners are still dreaming of a new arena that will feature augmented reality, and Wild owner Craig Leipold wants to make sure he’s in line for arena upgrades too, because “in order to survive in the NHL” you “need to be in a really good building,” and his building is a whole 25 years old and the team is only turning $68 million a year in profits, this is clearly St. Paul’s problem to fix.
  • San Antonio mayor Gina Ortiz Jones says she’s not done trying to renegotiate that Spurs deal, on the grounds that “non-binding means non-binding.” She likely needs a majority of the city council to back her up there — San Antonio has a weak-mayor form of government — but props to her for knowing how to read a dictionary.
  • The New England Revolution owners reached an agreement this week to pay Boston $48 million over 15 years to compensate for traffic and transit problems caused by a planned new stadium in Everett, as well as $90 million over 20 years in parks and transit upgrades in Everett. With team owners the Kraft family covering the $500 million stadium construction cost, I’m tempted to say this is actually a pretty fair deal and a sign that at least some local politicians can still drive a hard bargain, though it’s equally like that this is mostly a sign that nobody in the U.S. cares as much about MLS as about the other football.
  • Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts is set to be torn down and replaced next year, which will come as a sad note to anyone who read Foul Ball, Jim Bouton’s book on how he helped temporarily save the old ballpark 20 years ago.
  • There’s another interview with me up about the Chiefs deal, which you can listen to here — there doesn’t appear to be a way to link to particular timestamps in a YouTube short, but enjoy the whole thing anyway, it may be the last thing on the platform that’s not AI-generated!
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Experts debate just how many billions of dollars Kansas will lose on Chiefs stadium deal

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a whole 48 hours since the last Kansas City Chiefs stadium update — here’s what’s been happening:

  • After my back-of-the-envelope estimates on Monday that tax revenue from a Chiefs stadium wouldn’t come close to paying off Kansas’s $1.8 billion in stadium bonds — let alone the $3 billion in total bond costs including for an adjacent entertainment district, or the $4 billion counting tax breaks and future maintenance costs — I checked in with sports economist Geoffrey Propheter to see if he got the same results. His conclusion: Even if he uses the most generous figures for fan spending, assumes that no Kansas-dwelling Chiefs fans would take the place of Missouri residents following the move, and credits a stadium with six major concerts a year, “the average user (including kids) generates $41 in KS state sales tax revenue per game/event whereas the state needs each user to generate $122 per event to hold everyone else harmless.” Put another way, the stadium would see $693 million in annual taxable sales but would need $2 billion in sales for the state to break even. Put a third way: “Chiefs games and concerts, using the stupidest, most unreasonably generous assumptions I can’t justify without laughing, only gets the state to 33% of the way to the annual debt service needed under existing tax policy.” You could make the assumptions even more unreasonably generous — say, by figuring that new advances in cloning technology will allow for 10 Taylor Swift concerts a year — and this is still a question not of whether Kansas will lose tax money on this deal, but how many billions it will lose.
  • Patrick Tuohey of the Better Cities Project did his own math, this time assuming that the bonds will come with a higher interest rate of 6%, since they won’t be backed by the full state treasury. (Propheter, he notes, thinks this interest rate is likely a tad high, and used the 4.2% rate for state-backed bonds in order to make his projections as conservative as possible.) Tuohey’s conclusion: Total sales within the entire 300-square-mile stadium district would have to more than double just for the state to break even. There’s a possible workaround, but it would involve setting the baseline tax year to sometime last decade, allowing the state to use existing tax revenues to pay off the Chiefs stadium — exactly what Kansas leaders have been promising they won’t do, but without it, no one may be willing to buy the stadium bonds.
  • It’s worth noting that although Chiefs owner Clark Hunt will only be putting up 40% of the stadium cost, he’ll be keeping 100% of the stadium revenues without sharing any with taxpayers, so it’s good that people are noting that.
  • Tim Hamilton, a professor of economics at Johnson County Community College, said businesses in the stadium district will have to raise prices to make up for additional tax being charged — which would be true if there were additional sales tax being charged, but the tax rate will remain the same, it’s only increased tax revenue that will be siphoned off for stadium payments, so it seems like something got lost in translation here. What’s more likely to happen is that Kansas will raise taxes elsewhere to pay for all the stuff it won’t be able to count on using rising Wyandotte and Johnson county sales taxes for, and that could raise prices.
  • Is this all the most expensive sports stadium subsidy in human history? I say it’s in second place to the $6.6 billion (at least) Washington Commanders deal approved this summer; economist J.C. Bradbury notes that the Commanders deal includes subsidies for the surrounding development, and the $1.8 billion in state money for the Chiefs stadium itself is a new record. Fair enough, though Commanders owner Josh Harris no doubt isn’t picky about whether his $6.6 billion is coming via checks from the state or free land, it all ends up in the same place.
  • The Washington Post’s editorial board has chimed in for some reason, calling Gov. Laura Kelly’s arguments for the stadium subsidy “nonsense” and saying Kelly and the legislature “could show respect for taxpayers by stopping this deal before its final approval next year.” (The Post editors hated the Commanders deal, too, so props to them for consistency, even if that consistency is limited to “yay free markets” except for the guy who owns the paper.)
  • Chiefs fans are afraid that the team will use the new stadium as an excuse to require personal seat licenses and charge higher ticket prices, which seems likely given that all the other team owners are doing it.
  • Kansas City, Missouri Mayor Quinton Lucas is already out stumping for a new Royals stadium in his city’s downtown — estimated cost: who the hell knows — and said that he knows the public will support this because the nonprofit that owns the city’s train station lit it up blue this weekend, that’s how polling works, right?
  • Tuohey’s KCMO interview with me from a week ago today already feels like ancient history, but if you want to check it out, give a listen here.
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