Category: (Sacramento) Athletics

Friday roundup: Bears offer Illinois dimes on the dollar toward stadium, Browns considering $150k-a-seat PSLs

access_time personNeil deMause

Apologies for this week’s late roundup — I had to retrieve my now-repaired laptop from the shop and get settled back in before writing this. On the bright side (for you, the information-craving consumer of sports subsidy news, surely not for me, the lowly scribe of such reports), even more stuff happened while I was at the store, so you get to enjoy bonus material as a result!

  • The Chicago Bears owners responded to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s demand that before getting any state help with a new stadium, the team must pay off the state’s $350-500 million in remaining debt on Soldier Field: How about $25 million instead? The response from legislators has been mostly LOLBears: State Rep. Kam Buckner called the offer “inadequate” and “disrespectful,” while Pritzker deadpanned, “I’m not sure what it’s tied to, what they’re asking for in return for it. I think if they’re donating $25 million to support the people of Chicago or the people of Illinois, that’s always a good thing.”
  • Did the Cleveland Browns owners forget to mention that as part of their new stadium in Brook Park, they’re considering charging personal seat license fees of as much as $149,300? Must have slipped their mind, along with how much of those fees would apply to the Haslams’ share of stadium costs and how much to the public’s $600 million and up cost. (Pretty sure the answers are “all” and “none,” respectively, since that’s how it always works.)
  • Also on the Browns front, the Crain’s Cleveland Business editorial board writes that Mayor Justin Bibb’s proposed deal to get $80 million worth of payments in exchange for letting the team move to Brook Park “leaves a bit of a bitter taste” but may be the best Cleveland can get given that “team owners hold the leverage in an environment where cities are desperate to retain their teams.” Or, at least, they do when the state legislature hands out $600 million to the team to help it move from one part of the state to another. Fixed that for you!
  • The Seattle Sounders owners are seeking outside investors to buy a minority share of the team, with the proceeds possibly being used toward building a new soccer-only stadium, possibly at its Longacres training site in nearby Renton. That’s a lot of possiblys, for sure, but Sportico values the Sounders at $825 million and soccer-specific stadiums generally go for less than half that, so … possibly.
  • CT United F.C. will begin play in MLS NEXT Pro next year playing home games at venues scattered across Connecticut, while it waits for a new stadium to be built in Bridgeport — which is to say, while it waits for the state to decide to give it $127 million to build one. “On the merits of the actual math, the jobs, the housing, the economic impact and aligning with what the priorities have been stated for this administration, it aligns perfectly,” said CT United owner Andre Swanston, take his word for it, he’s just a disinterested hundred-millionaire.
  • “Will the College Football Playoff title game bring economic boost to the Tampa Bay area?” WTSP-TV actually looked at the results the last time it hosted the CFP championship in 2017, and nope: A promised $250-350 million economic impact turned out to be just $720,000 in added sales tax receipts, while hotel tax receipts actually went down. “If that were the case, why is every major city and community bidding on these major events?” asked Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan. Because you’re all idiots?
  • No, the “sky stadium” Saudi Arabia plans to build for the 2034 World Cup doesn’t look like this, it looks like this. The former is AI generated, the latter, honestly, is probably AI generated at well, but maybe AI generated on purpose by the people who actually plan to build it? With more than half of the internet now AI slop, it’s arguably bigger news when something isn’t a fake, no?
  • And finally, if you’ve worn out the entertainment value of the yule log, we now have the Athletics Las Vegas stadium construction camera. You’re welcome.
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Friday roundup: Spurs owner wants arena subsidies so he can be “scrappy,” A’s owner gets closer to unlocking county stadium cash

access_time personNeil deMause

Some weeks, when all the work of this website feels like an endless repetition of the same stories over and over and over again, I try to remind myself that while the general shape of the stadium swindle has remained the same over the last 30 years — boy meets stadium dream, boy uses standard playbook to demand that someone else to pay for stadium dream, elected officials cough up the dough to boy — there have been some discoveries and innovations along the way: The Casino Night Fallacy. The grift that keeps on giving. The kitchen sink gambit. Reusable entourage. Sure, it would be nice for whatever showrunner is in charge of this accursed timeline to quit reusing the same plotlines — helicopter registration fraud was a surprise season-ending twist, but that was three years ago already — but if nothing else we’re getting a deeper understanding of the intricacies of how sports billionaires funnel taxpayer money into their own pockets, and who can put a price on that? Other than the literal price of “billions of dollars of tax money a year,” obviously, but enlightenment doesn’t come cheap.

Also, no one has taken away our god-given right to point and laugh (yet), so may as well enjoy it. And on that note, here’s some fresh meat for your inner Nelson Muntz:

  • San Antonio’s KSAT-TV asked Spurs owner Peter Holt why he can’t just pay for his own arena his damn self, and Holt said “it’s a great question” and San Antonio’s small market size has “pushed us to be scrappy” and “the underdog” and “we want to continue [our] partnership with the county and the city” and the arena project will use “visitor taxes that have no impact on our local citizens” and “there’s no extra fees.” That’s neither really an answer nor exactly true, but Holt is already off and not-answering whether the team would potentially move without a new arena: “You know, we’re not focused on this election not passing. I mean, I think our belief has always been, whether it’s on the court or off the court, we have excellence and we have winning in our DNA. And so we’re confident and optimistic that this will pass, and that’s our plan.” It’s easy to be confident when you’re spending $2 million on ad campaigns to convince voters to go your way, but just in case, may as well employ the “You don’t want to find out what’ll happen if you make Dad mad” strategy as well.
  • The Clark County Commission officially approved the Athletics‘ ballpark development agreement for Las Vegas(ish), which is mostly notable because it allows A’s owner John Fisher to finally tap into $380 million in public funds that was approved way back in June 2023. Or at least Fisher can get the money once he sets a guaranteed maximum price for the stadium and spend $100 million out of his own pocket first, maybe that’s what all the concrete pillars are about? Would Fisher really shell out $100 million of his own money in order to get $380 million in public money in hopes all that will somehow unlock another $1 billion or so of somebody else’s money? He’s done dumber things before, don’t put it past him!
  • Interim Jackson County Executive Kay Barnes says she doesn’t see herself as “taking on any kind of strong initiative” on major issues during her short time back in office, but that’s not stopping her from saying she wants to see stadium projects for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals move forward, she’s not made of stone, people.
  • The St. Petersburg city council is looking at ending the city’s Community Redevelopment Area (i.e., a TIF that kicks back property taxes to developers) for the Historic Gas Plant District now that the Tampa Bay Rays aren’t using it for a stadium development, probably. “I was very hesitant to do this,” said council chair Copley Gerdes. “More and more, I’m becoming open to it.” What’s next, hugging?
  • A couple of big-market MLB teams might be showing openness to increased revenue sharing to make MLB TV deals more like the NFL’s, which would reduce budget disparities between rich and even-richer teams but also make it easier for teams to threaten to move from big markets to smaller ones like in the NFL. Color me skeptical — big-market team owners have never willingly given up revenue before, and this could all just be openness to new kinds of TV deals while still trying to preserve the biggest slice for themselves, but we’ll see where things go once negotiations for the next collective bargaining agreement begin in earnest after next season.
  • Yes, the latest owner of the Ottawa Senators is still hoping to build a new arena at LeBreton Flats and still hoping for a taxpayer “investment” to help him along, let’s all check back in another decade or so and see if anything has changed.
  • Camden Yards’ public owners won’t get any money from the Los Angeles Rams renting out the stadium for practice before their game in London, just like they didn’t get any money when Paul McCartney played there, who needs money when you have a pro baseball team whose owner wants money more than you do?
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Friday roundup: D.C.NFL stadium comes with nine-figure Metro cost, Mets owner likely to win casino on city parking lots

access_time personNeil deMause

I had a nice talk yesterday with Chris Francis of Straight Arrow News (owned by the union-busting Joe Ricketts, sigh) about ballooning hidden public costs of sports stadiums and arenas, and the resulting article is up this morning. Key quote: “I think the team owners and the officials who work with them have realized that it sounds worse to give a check, a taxpayer check, to the team for the stadium than to say, okay, we’re not going to give you that, but we will give you money for infrastructure. We will give you tax breaks. We will give you a break on land costs.” We were talking about the Denver Broncos at the time, but really it goes for all modern sports subsidy deals: All the real costs come in the fine print.

Speaking of the fine print, let’s see what it holds this week:

  • When Washington, D.C. agreed to pay $1 billion in cash and $6 billion or so in future rent breaks to Commanders owner Josh Harris for a new stadium, did everyone forget to mention it would come with a major expansion of the Metro station near the stadium site and perhaps a new station nearby as well? That could cost “in the ballpark of hundreds of millions of dollars,” says councilmember Charles Allen, but “we cannot afford not to do it.” Remember when Allen was saying “D.C. has a responsibility to scrutinize the proposal & demand a better & fair deal” with a “billion-dollar industry”? Yeah, neither does he.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen is set to be awarded a casino license for the city-owned Citi Field parking lots he controls, after it turned out the state senator opposing it was the most disliked woman in Albany. There’s no public money involved, only public land, and that was effectively given away when then-mayor Mike Bloomberg gave Cohen a 99-year lease on the property as part of his stadium deal, but if you want to be annoyed at a multibillionaire sports team owner getting his way over community opposition, don’t let me stop you.
  • The main opposition group to next month’s referendum on giving the San Antonio Spurs around $150 million worth of future tax money toward a new arena is splitting its recommendations, urging a no vote on Prop B (which would provide the arena money) but remaining neutral on Prop A, which would devote tax money to redoing the area around the old arena to attract more rodeo events. COPS/Metro wants to see the county’s money from hotel and rental car taxes spent on “a range of community projects” guided by a citizen committee; it’s not entirely clear what happens to the arena plans if Prop A passes and Prop B does not, but that’s looking like a possibility.
  • The Cleveland Browns owners have started moving dirt at their new stadium site even before figuring out how it will all be paid for. All the kids are doing it!
  • The Athletics have filed for $523 million worth of construction permits in Las Vegas; getting those still won’t guarantee that the vaporarmadillo comes to pass, but it’s edging closer to decision time.
  • Heywood Sanders has elaborated on why the $2.6 billion plan to expand the Los Angeles Convention Center in advance of the 2028 Olympics is a terrible idea, saying in a Q&A with Torched’s Alissa Walker that other similar centers are seeing attendance drop even when they expand, and are having to offer discounted rates to lure a dwindling number of events. Key quote from Walker: “[Bangs head on desk].”
  • The organizers of the New York Marathon claim that it and other running events add almost a billion dollars a year to the city economy; it doesn’t look like they even bothered to hired a consultant to write a report justifying the number, but Crain’s New York Business published it anyway, this is fine.
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Friday roundup: Fire stadium wins Chicago approval, A’s set MLB record for alienating all their new fans already

access_time personNeil deMause

With all the ginormous stadium and arena wrassles like the Washington Commanders stadium and the San Antonio Spurs arena project and the never-ending Tampa Bay Rays saga, it’s sometimes easy to forget about all the other deals that are somewhere in the vicinity of the back burner. Let’s check in on some of those this week, along with some old favorites:

  • The Chicago city council voted yesterday to approve the Chicago Fire‘s plans for a new stadium at the The 78 site, which since Fire owner Joe Mansueto says he’ll build with his own money, so there should be no public funding involved. The Chicago Tribune, though, notes that “some details still need to be ironed out” for the larger redevelopment, including what to do about a new Red Line CTA station and relocating Metra train tracks after developer Related declared the original plan too costly. And what about the rumored parking garage that would, like the now-scrapped transit improvements, possibly use kicked-back property taxes via a TIF? Maybe it’s best to say there probably won’t be any public funding involved, fingers crossed, knock wood.
  • Sacramento Athletics fans are already fast on their way to being non-Athletics fans, reports ESPN, with one season ticket holder writing to the team: “Being a season ticket holder for the Athletics is embarrassing to the point that I regret telling my friends or coworkers. I cannot give away tickets, I cannot easily sell games I can’t make it to (at market rate-especially on SeatGeek), and I feel ignored by the team sales staff.” (The team responded by giving him a plastic bag of leftover giveaways that he already had.) SFGate, meanwhile, reports that an A’s fan this summer summed things up by declaring, “Fuck John Fisher. John Fisher’s a piece of shit,” while wearing a “Sacramento hates you too” cap. Things will surely improve once the team starts playing in Las Vegas in 2028, theoretically.
  • The San Francisco 49ers owners are supposed to cover the $6.4 million cost of hosting the 2026 Super Bowl, but the team’s nonprofit that is on the hook for the costs has no money, which is maybe a problem? Sports economist Geoffrey Propheter says he is “particularly concerned about the statement that the 49ers will reimburse the city for ‘approved expenses,’ with the 49ers seemingly being the judge of what is approved,” and sports economist Michael Leeds agrees, warning that “mega-events such as the Super Bowl almost invariably have costs that are higher than predicted and local impacts that are lower than predicted.”
  • A downtown site targeted for a possible new Kansas City Royals stadium was just sold to a Wichita developer, decreasing the chances that it will end up used for a ballpark. Not that Royals owner John Sherman has said much about where he might want to build a stadium as a December deadline approaches for accepting around $700 million in tax money from Kansas if he moves there, shh, he’s trying to get city or county money to go with his state money from either Kansas or Missouri, don’t bother daddy while he’s trying to concentrate.
  • Going with the headline “Brewers bolster ballpark after $500M deal” when $471 million of the money is coming from state taxpayers is a choice, Fox6 Milwaukee.
  • Marc Normandin has a good rundown on MLB commissioners Rob Manfred’s conflicting missions of doing what team owners want and doing what’s best for baseball, especially when owners themselves can’t agree on what they want: Some owners want to force the players union into accepting a salary cap at all costs, while others are more concerned about the damage an extended lockout in 2027 would do to the league’s broadcast value when it’s time to renegotiate TV deals after 2028. Explains Normandin: “Basically, he has to use this time to convince them of what they should want, so that he can then enact it just like they want him to — otherwise, he’ll have to do what they want him to, even if he thinks it goes against their best interests, because he is beholden to them in the end.” Shaking down players and cities and TV networks for money all at once is no easy feat, you try it sometime!
  • Fine, here’s an update on the Commanders stadium deal as well: The mixed-use district around the stadium will need to go through normal zoning procedures rather than being fast-tracked under a last-minute amendment, meaning they may not be ready for years after the stadium’s planned 2030 opening. That’s bad if you want to live in the promised affordable housing, but does at least also make the development rights less valuable to team owner Josh Harris, meaning the public subsidy is now more likely to be closer to $6.6 billion than $25 billion, yay?
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Friday roundup: Browns stadium gets airport okay, San Antonio mayor seeks cut of Spurs’ arena revenues

access_time personNeil deMause

First things first: The Ohio Department of Transportation changed course yesterday and granted a building permit to the Cleveland Browns‘ proposed stadium in Brook Park, one month after declaring it would not do so because the stadium would “impact the airspace of the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.” What changed? An outside consultant hired by the department reported that “the proposed stadium would have no adverse effect on the safety and efficient use of the aeronautical environment,” so ODOT gave the go-ahead.

This leaves the Browns stadium facing only two lawsuits over whether the team’s move from Cleveland to Brook Park violates the state’s Modell Law (the state attorney general says nuh-uh), plus additional suits over whether it’s illegal for the state to use unclaimed property to fund the deal and whether negotiating a move violated the team’s lease, plus $600 million in proposed city and county spending that hasn’t yet been finalized. Details!

In other news this week:

  • San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones says she thinks if the city is putting up money for a new Spurs arena, taxpayers should get a cut of naming rights, concessions, and parking revenues as well. Which, sure, it worked for the Minneapolis Metrodome, so well that the public ended up recouping its entire $68 million contruction cost over time. Admittedly, the Twins and Vikings hated this deal so much that they immediately started lobbying for new stadiums where they would keep all the revenues and eventually got them, but it’s nice to see some elected officials learn the lesson that so many sports team owners live by: You can’t get if you don’t ask.
  • USL Championship expansion team Buffalo Pro Soccer is still looking for a place to build a stadium so it can actually become an expansion team. “I think we could make the decision today if we chose to,” said team president Peter Marlette, “but we want to make sure we’re getting everything right and that we are considering every possible factor and whatever site we end up going with.” The team owners have said the stadium will be privately funded, but we’ve heard that before in other cities, let’s see how things look after any hidden costs like land subsidies or tax breaks are accounted for.
  • The libertarian Mackinac Center for Public Policy is suing to repeal Michigan state funding for stadiums for the minor-league Lansing Lugnuts and the Utica Unicorns, Eastside Diamond Hoppers, Westside Woolly Mammoths, Birmingham Bloomfield Beavers of the United Shore Professional Baseball League (which all share a stadium in Utica), on the grounds that “private or local” projects require a two-thirds vote of the state legislature, and these only got a simple majority. State court of claims judge Brock Swartzle said he’ll make a ruling on an injunction by the end of the year.
  • The Philadelphia Phillies want hotel tax money from Pinellas County to upgrade their spring training facility in Clearwater, more specifics to come when they’re good and ready.
  • The Athletics‘ stay in Sacramento may not be drawing many fans, but it’s apparently drawing enough to cut into attendance at Sacramento River Cats minor-league games, especially now that resale prices on A’s tickets are cheaper in many cases than River Cats prices.
  • Sports economists Dennis Coates (who organizes the annual sports economics conference in Baltimore County) and Brad Humphreys have had a research award named in their honor, here’s a nice article about them and it, see how many of the economists in the photo at top you can identify!
  • Columbus Fury pro volleyball team seeks $1 million in cash from the city of Columbus and Franklin County to keep playing in town next season, now I have officially seen everything.
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Friday roundup: Browns airport standoff continues, Spurs threaten voters with mascot appearance

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the news, a quick note for any site supporters who are still waiting on swag: I haven’t forgotten you, I just have to restock on mailers and stamps, which I have penciled in for tomorrow morning. Thanks for your patience, and I assure you that your fridge magnets will still be timeless when they do arrive. (Because nothing ever changes in the world of stadium schemes, ha ha ha! Ha! Ha.)

But first, here’s the week’s remaining sports subsidy news to entertain and/or depress you:

  • The Ohio Department of Transportation has extended indefinitely its September 1 deadline for the Cleveland Browns owners to appeal their verdict that a new Brook Park stadium can’t be allowed as currently designed because it would infringe on airspace for a neighboring airport. Cleveland airport director Bryant Francis isn’t backing down on his insistence that the current design is a no-go, however, saying, “The FAA confirmed that the proposed height would intrude into protected airspace surfaces by 58 feet,” while adding, “We remain open to collaborating with all parties to find solutions that allow for growth while protecting the airport and the region it serves.” This is hardly the biggest problem with the Browns stadium project — that might just have to do with the at least $600 million in public money it would get from state checks that people haven’t cashed — but in America sometimes bad ideas get rejected because they’re bad, and sometimes they get snail dartered into submission.
  • The Browns’ proposed move is also now facing a second lawsuit charging that it would violate the Modell Law, with the law’s author, former mayor and state senator Dennis Kucinich, adding on to the lawsuit previously filed by the city. It’s actually the third lawsuit over the law, since the Browns owners are also suing the city to block the enforcement of the law, plus the state legislature moved to retroactively make the law not apply to in-state moves back in June, this is going to send a whole bunch of lawyers’ kids through college.
  • The San Antonio Spurs owners are holding a rally tomorrow in support of their campaign to be gifted around $750 million in city and county money for a new arena, and the key guest will be their mascot, who I’m just assuming will threaten to come to your house if you don’t vote for the subsidy.
  • Louisiana is planning to spend $7 million to bring a LIV golf event to New Orleans next summer. To put New Orleans on the tourist map. After spending tax money this year on a U.S. Bowling Congress Tournament, an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, the 2026 Southeastern Conference Gymnastics Championship, and the U.S. Gymnastics National Championships. “In a just world, politicians would have to come up with some reality-based justification for their desire to blow public money on what are effectively sports-adjacent parties,” notes Pat Garofalo in Boondoggle, almost wistfully.
  • The Athletics have submitted a development agreement for their under-construction (?) Las Vegas stadium while securing a permit to pour $87 million worth of concrete to support the lower seating bowl, tipping Schroedinger’s armadillo about 3% more into the “mostly not dead” category.
  • The Baltimore Ravens‘ $489 million stadium renovation, mostly funded by the first of a potentially bottomless pool of state tax money, is providing the team owners with more than a dozen event spaces that they can rent out for business meetings and the like. Will taxpayers get a cut of these new windfall profits, given that they’re paying for the bulk of the cost of building the event spaces? You must be new around here, kid, I’ve got some bad news about this timeline…
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A’s to play six games in Vegas next year, John Fisher hopes you’ll take this as a sign of something

access_time personNeil deMause

In the latest twist in the Athletics‘ maybe-move to Las Vegas, MLB has announced the team will play six home games next year at the home of the Las Vegas Aviators, Las Vegas Ballpark, which is not in Las Vegas but nearby Summerlin but has a naming rights deal with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, before the team’s planned 2028 move to a new stadium on the Las Vegas Strip, which is also not technically in Las Vegas — let me start again.

When A’s owner John Fisher burned his bridges with Oakland last year, he settled on Sacramento as a temporary home for the team because, apparently, he knew the minor-league team owner there and was able to cut a deal to rent the stadium for three entire seasons. Now everyone in Sacramento hates him, though, and nobody believes he’s really moving to Las Vegas now that construction costs are through the armadillo, so, apparently, he’s decided to move up the timeline for playing games in Vegas(ish), but only for two series in June:

The games — three with the Milwaukee Brewers, June 8-10, followed by three with the Colorado Rockies, June 12-14 — will be played at Las Vegas Ballpark in Summerlin after approval by Major League Baseball on Tuesday.

Why June? The A’s didn’t say, and you’d think they’d want to go a bit earlier to get the games in before the temperatures get quite so sweltering. Fisher doesn’t appear to have made any public statements about the upcoming Vegas series, which was just dropped along with the rest of MLB’s 2026 schedule, so we can only speculate: Maybe it just slots in well with the MLB 2026 special events calendar, including celebrating (?) the 25th anniversary of 9/11? Your theories are welcome.

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Friday roundup: Reading the fine print on stadium and arena deals is a lost art

access_time personNeil deMause

A note to all of you Field of Schemes supporters who signed up to receive the daily posts in email — I’ve been made aware of a glitch that may have been keeping some new members from getting the emails. This should now be fixed, but if you think you should be receiving emails but still aren’t, please contact me; if you think you shouldn’t be receiving emails but are, then really contact me. (And if you’re not receiving emails because you haven’t become a monthly patron but would like to, just sign up!)

And with that business out of the way, let’s move on to the real excitement: the week’s leftover stadium and arena news!

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Is John Fisher actually building a Las Vegas A’s stadium or what?

access_time personNeil deMause

Ever since the state of Nevada approved $600 million in public money two years ago toward a new A’s stadium on the Las Vegas Strip, the project has existed in a state of quantum superposition: It is simultaneously both happening and not happening, depending on your perspective. On Friday, the stadium took another step forward, as workers poured the first concrete — prompting both headlines about construction hitting a “milestone” and also paragraphs like these from Sports Illustrated:

The true believers in this project will point to the groundbreaking, the concrete being poured, and John Fisher’s purchase of a house in Nevada last December as tent pole reasons for why this ballpark is happening.

The skeptics will point out that none of those factors are permanent. The groundbreaking was a show (which they all are), while concrete can easily be removed. Houses are sold all the time. You could argue that Fisher bought the house as a stunt for potential investors, and if he ends up having to sell the house for a slight loss, then oh well. But if it ends up securing funds for his ballpark plan, then it was all worth it.

Oh yes, the funds. Fisher told the Nevada Independent two weeks ago that the stadium price tag is now “up in the $2 billion range,” which is a whole hell of a lot more than the $600 million he has in hand (some of which are future tax breaks, so he doesn’t even have those in hand). Fisher has another $100 million in a prepaid concessions contract with Aramark and a $300 million loan deal with Goldman Sachs, but those are both just borrowing against the future; he’s also been trying to sell minority shares of the team at inflated prices, without much luck reported as of yet. He keeps insisting he can turn to his family for money if needed, and he also has the San Jose Earthquakes that he could sell all or part of, but so far an actual financing plan remains aspirational.

Which is fine for Fisher for now, as he doesn’t need a full financing plan to move dirt around and pour some concrete. Clark County is now considering the team’s permit applications for the next stages of construction; the first steel work and beginning of the building’s foundation isn’t set to be started on until 2026, so Fisher doesn’t have to start spending the bulk of that $2 billion for a while yet.

But would he even be starting on it if he didn’t have the money to finish it? You might think not, but consider the sad story of the Nou Mestalla, the future stadium of Valencia C.F. that started pouring concrete in 2007 and then, well, let’s let Wikipedia explain what happened:

Construction on the stadium was suspended in February 2009, due to the club struggling financially.Valencia CF announced in December 2011 that it had negotiated a deal with Bankia to complete the stadium and transfer the old Mestalla property to the bank, and that it expected to complete the stadium in approximately two years, but this deal later collapsed.

An updated redesign, by Fenwick Iribarren Architects, was put forward in November 2013. The capacity was to be reduced to 61,500, the underground car park reduced in size, and the original roof and elaborate façade to be scaled back, but no date was given for when construction would restart. Valencia CF began negotiations with Ayuntamiento of Valencia in October 2017 to renew and restart the project. Further design modifications were proposed, reducing to a capacity of 54,000 seats.

Eighteen years in, the Nou Mestalla currently looks like this. Construction work began again earlier this year, and Valencia now says it plans to move in for the 2027-28 season, but you know how quantum superpositions can be.

Could Fisher’s Armadillo still be sitting half-finished in the year 2043? We simply don’t know — and Fisher himself may not either. Big construction projects are by their nature leaps of faith, and the best way to build faith is to get other people to show faith, so the A’s owner badly needs some momentum on the fundraising end to convince investors that he’s actually ready to go through with this. The higher the price tag goes, the higher eyebrows will be raised: Spending around a billion dollars to build MLB’s smallest stadium in its smallest market and hoping you’ll earn it back seemed dubious from the start, and it’s only more so now that it’ll be more like a billion and a half and Vegas tourism is down amid tariff woes and international tourists being afraid of getting imprisoned.

With so many bad vibes about, it makes sense that Fisher would be hyping the pouring of some concrete, even if he hasn’t bought the next batch yet. And he might still! Or might not! There’s a very good chance it won’t be until 2026 before anyone opens the box to see if the cat is dead.

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Friday roundup: Commanders vote, Bengals lease, A’s stadium cost all up in the air at this time

access_time personNeil deMause

The D.C. council’s verdict on the $6.6-billion-plus Washington Commanders stadium subsidy still seems to be up in the air at this time: The council now plans to vote today, giving councilmembers a whole 24 hours to read the final stadium bill, which was just released yesterday, after the council had concluded hearings about it without most councilmembers themselves being present, as one does. Councilmember Robert White has already said he plans to vote against the bill and hopes he can get four others to go along with him and block the needed two-thirds majority; council chair Phil Mendelson seems confident that he has the votes to pass the thing, but we’ll all find out together in a few hours.

Meanwhile, let’s pass the time by taking a spin through the other stadium and arena news that unfolded, or didn’t, this week while we were all waiting for the denouement to Bowser‘s Folly:

  • The Cincinnati Bengals‘ new lease remains up in the air after Hamilton County commissioners yesterday approved it, but Bengals execs haven’t signed it yet because they’re still reading the final version. We’ll just have to wait and see whether team officials are willing to accept $700 million–plus in county stadium upgrade funding, or if they plan on asking for even more.
  • The Las Vegas A’s stadium cost is still up in the air, with estimates now around $2 billion, up from $1.75 billion, according to owner John Fisher. Does Fisher have the money to pay to do more than move some dirt around? Did he before? Only he and his accountants, and maybe Rob Manfred, know.
  • The legality of Missouri’s offer of state money for Kansas City Chiefs and Royals stadiums is up in the air, after two Republican Missouri state legislators and one citizen activist have sued to block it, arguing that it has too much stuff in it and is unconstitutionally targeted to benefit specific companies and is “a bribe” to keep the teams from moving to Kansas. Whether any of that is actually illegal, it’ll be up to the courts to decide.
  • Denver Broncos stadium plans are still up in the air, but Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said yesterday, “We’re working hard on a deal, and I think we’re close.” Where the stadium would go and who would pay how much for it remains up in the air.
  • The final city cost of repairing the Tampa Bay Rays‘ Tropicana Field is still up in the air, with current estimates standing at $59.7 million plus whatever it costs for new video production equipment, plus tariffs, plus any other sundries. Will the St. Petersburg city council keep approving additional costs? You already know the non-answer to that.
  • The economic impact of a new San Antonio Spurs arena development remains up in the air after consultants said it would be worth $18.7 billion over 30 years, then it turned out they were only clown consultants. Whatever fools the San Antonio Express-News is good enough for government work!
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