Category: (Sacramento) Athletics

Friday roundup: Goodell meets with IL leaders on Bears, KC okays public vote it says won’t apply to Royals

access_time personNeil deMause

Slow news week, busy Friday roundup, as the saying goes. (I didn’t say it was an old saying.)

  • Roger Goodell and a Chicago Bears minority owner met this week with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and state legislative officials, and if you want to take that as a sign that the league and team want a better option than moving to Indiana, go for it. If you want to take it as a sign that they’re trying to create leverage on Indiana counties to approve all the requested tax subsidies, that works too. Could be both! It’s always important to have a backup plan.
  • The Kansas City council has scheduled an April ballot measure on whether future sports stadiums and arena funding will subsequently require ballot measures, prompting an immediate debate on what “future” and “subsequently” will mean for the Royals stadium plans. Missouri Workers Power says a yes vote would apply to a Royals project, Mayor Quinton Lucas says nuh-uh, this seems destined to be resolved by the robot lawyers.
  • Buffalo Bills execs say they’re listening to fan complaints about obstructed views and not being allowed to bring in water bottles to refill at their new taxpayer-funded stadium. “We anticipated it would be a bit of a learning process,” said Bills president of business operations Pete Guelli, who never could have expected fans would want to see the game or drink water, these kids today are so coddled.
  • Athletics owner John Fisher still hasn’t tapped the $380 million in state money he’s been promised for a Las Vegas stadium, after spending $700 million of his own money and money borrowed from Goldman Sachs and with $1.4 billion still to go. Why? Fisher hasn’t said, but it doesn’t really matter whose dollars get spent first, unless bond rates keep soaring and Nevada ends up having to finance the more expensive part of the stadium debt, that’d be bad.
  • MLB is looking at building a temporary stadium in a national park oh never mind they’re not now.
  • Sedgwick County, Kansas has run out of sales tax surcharge money to pay for upkeep of Wichita’s arena, leading local officials to try to find other money to avoid dipping into property tax revenues that would otherwise go to the general fund. (The county does collect some arena profits and naming rights money, but not enough to cover maintenance costs.) And since any money that the county spends on the arena is money that could have gone into the general fund, the current plan appears to be hitting up the city for the cash, on the grounds that the county “built the arena as a favor to Wichita,” sure, sure.
  • “Cities keep shelling out taxpayer money for sports stadiums, yet the economics almost never makes sense.” Accurate! Most of the Conversation essay by University of Tampa economic professors Abigail Hall and Aaron D. Wood will be familiar to regular readers of this site, but it’s worth bookmarking, if only for all the useful links to studies it contains on everything from how little positive economic impact sports venues have to how most sports spending is by local residents who would spend that money elsewhere nearby anyway.
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Friday roundup: Blazers arena staredown escalates, haggling continues in Rays stadium standoff

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! There’s nothing in the latest batch of stadium and arena news that can quite compete with the European and North/Central American soccer federations vowing to start boycotting FIFA events as soon as this September if FIFA sells operating rights to the World Cup to Jared Kushner’s brother, but it was still a pretty eventful week:

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Friday roundup: Tampa council slams brakes on Rays stadium approvals, A’s find an investor (maybe sorta)

access_time personNeil deMause

Lots of other news this week while we were off on Portland Trail Blazers watch:

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Friday roundup: NC may earmark $700m for stadium for imaginary MLB team, Steelers could seek upgrade on “expiring” 25-year-old home

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to this week’s news roundup, some old business from last week: I shamefully forgot to give a shoutout to John Mozena for his outstanding liveblog of the stadium-related papers at University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s annual sports economics conference after I was unable to attend. Please check out John’s work at the Center for Economic Accountability and throw some coin his way if you like, or at the very least get some of his free “Pay For Your Own Damn Stadium” stickers.

Back in the present, you’re stuck with me, and I’m stuck with this week’s avalanche of news items:

  • The North Carolina legislature is debating whether to set aside unspecified hundreds of millions of dollars in its final budget for a stadium for a potential future MLB expansion team “in or near Wake County,” which would mean the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill “Triangle” area, as distinct from the Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point “Triad” area that voted down paying for a stadium to lure the Minnesota Twins back in 1998. The state has a $700 million Economic Development Project Reserve that it can designate for “high-yield” development projects, and while sports stadiums are nobody’s idea of high-yield in terms of actual measurable impact, there’s got to be somebody somewhere willing to write a consulting report claiming otherwise.
  • Former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Charlie Batch says team ownership is ready to get back on line for a new or renovated stadium now that their current home is 25 whole years old: “Thirty years is the expiration date. Guess what Acrisure Stadium is? Twenty-five years. So I promise you, conversations are happening behind the scenes to figure out kind of what the next move is as the Rooneys are looking for an upgrade in their stadium.” The next move, apparently, is to send your former-players-turned-YouTube-creators out to talk up how stadiums just straight-up become obsolete after 30 years and somebody has to build you a new one and see if that flies.
  • Illinois’ efforts to retain the Chicago Bears in the wake of team execs’ announcement that they’re absolutely, definitely (maybe) moving to Indiana remain very much undead, with Gov. JB Pritzker saying his state is ready to act but first needs “the Bears to focus on what they want,” adding, “they have not been clear about what is the bill that they need, and how do they need to look, and then, can they get the votes necessary to get it done in the House and the Senate.” State house stadium bill sponsor Kam Buckner noted that both that body and the state senate have passed competing bills — there’s also now a third one, filed by State Rep. Martin McLaughlin despite the legislature not even being in session, that would raise the size thresholds on a “megaprojects” bill to where it would only apply to an Arlington Heights stadium — and “the Bears have to decide what makes most sense for them, which one of those bills is the bill they can get behind and wrap their arms around that can help them remain here in the state of Illinois,” adding, “We cannot have a special session until we have a deal. You don’t call a special session to draw up a flight plan. You call a special session to land the plane.” The hope here seems to be that if Bears officials pick a favorite tax break bill and declare that it’ll be enough to get them to stay in Illinois, that’ll get legislators in both houses to vote for it, which is absolutely the kind of bootstrapping your own momentum thing that you try to do when you’re pushing legislation that just got nowhere.
  • Building a stadium district in Denver’s Burnham Yard railyards may be easier said than done for Broncos ownership, given little details like the land is mostly zoned only for industrial use. This is Broncos owner Greg Penner’s problem, of course, except that, as the lengthy Denver Post article on this only reveals down in its 28th paragraph, Penner could end up asking for TIF property tax breaks to pay for his larger development. “The track record for delivering on these promises by teams in development,” noted University of Colorado Denver economist Geoffrey Propheter, “is shaky. And that’s being super generous.” (Credit where credit is due to the Post: “The naked man, in retrospect, was the least of Sean Herman’s worries” is an excellent teaser lede, though still not quite up there with “The freighter captain, the cop, the guy from the private security firm, the Swiss Army major, and the reporter never saw the pirates coming.”)
  • Athletics owner John Fisher now says his mistake in announcing a stadium plan in Las Vegas was not talking to the media himself enough about it: “Not hearing from me, I think, led to frustration from, frankly, the media. Like, who is this guy? Is he hiding? Who’s the real John Fisher?” He then went on to tell The Athletic absolutely nothing about how he plans to make a $2 billion stadium (with $600 million in public subsidies) in what would be MLB’s smallest market work out, especially when his development partner Bally’s may bail on its part and leave Fisher to fund such additional amenities as a $100 million parking structure. Hearing from John Fisher, it turns out, also leads to frustration, who’da thunk it?
  • San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones would like Spurs minority owner Michael Dell (net worth: $246 billion) to pay for some or all of her city’s $489 million share of a downtown arena. Dell hasn’t responded to her request, and Stanford University Roger Noll says that’s likely because the multibillionaire knows spending your own money on new sports venues is a dumb idea — “the incremental benefits of having a new arena are not as big as the cost” — which is why it’s only worth it if you can stick taxpayers with the bill.
  • The Minnesota Vikings‘ 10-year-old stadium needs a new roof because it got damaged by hail three years ago, but insurance should cover it, or at least the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority does not believe “substantial use of public funds” will be required, which is slightly less reassuring than “insurance should cover it.” Anyway, it’ll probably never hail this bad in Minneapolis again, right?
  • The first of the Buffalo Bills‘ family of stainless steel buffalo statues has arrived, and fans are excitedly pointing out that bisons don’t really look like that! They’re not even usually made of steel!
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Friday roundup: Rays stadium could get vote in July maybe, Sacramento offers $1B in tax money for MLB expansion team

access_time personNeil deMause

Lots of state legislative sessions are wrapping up this week, but it’s been oddly quiet around actual stadium news, leaving room for lots of spin doctoring and other questionable takes:

  • Turns out today’s conclusion of the Florida legislature’s special budget session won’t be a deadline for a Tampa Bay Rays stadium deal, as everything appears to be getting pushed off to even specialer sessions. Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that though there’s only $50 million in the state budget for relocating Hillsborough College buildings to make way for a stadium district on what’s now its Dale Mabry campus, there could be more state money later sometime: “We can do more on the infrastructure,” said the governor, adding, “I think maybe over time you would do more to spruce up the campus because I think it could be something meaningful. And I’m happy to support it.” (Ed. note: Yes, DeSantis leaves office in January. Yes, presumably he knows this.) Hillsborough County Commission chair Ken Hagan, meanwhile, said his “goal” is to hold county and city votes on a binding deal by a scheduled July 15 board meeting, “or maybe have to call a special meeting right around there,” which gives him around seven weeks to flip one of the four “no” votes on the Tampa city council. Rays owner Patrick Zalupski has remained silent on the current stadium stalemate, but DeSantis stepped in to levy a threat on his behalf, declaring: “Maybe if they don’t want to do it, I know Orlando’s ready, willing and able. I think you have Raleigh-Durham, Nashville, and those are great cities, but I’d hate to see us fumble a team and have it end up in some of those other areas.” Now that’s what friends and/or campaign donation recipients are for!
  • Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty and West Sacramento Mayor Martha Guerrero say they want an MLB expansion team once the Athletics leave town for Las Vegas, and West Sacramento is set to provide $1 billion in money for a new stadium from property tax kickbacks, hotel taxes, and “additional sources.” The city could spend $1 billion and it “would not impact the City’s general fund or require a taxpayer vote,” explained a joint press release, because it would “be generated solely by activity in the ballpark district,” citing a figure that over 40 years, a ballpark district “is projected to lead to $1.77 billion in new tax revenue.” Citation extremely needed, but also even $1.77 billion over 40 years wouldn’t be enough to pay for $1 billion in stadium costs up front, why can’t our elected leaders math?
  • Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon will “do everything in his power” to move the team if he doesn’t get the full $600 million in public arena renovation money he wants, according to (checks notes) a sports talk radio host who runs public relations and crisis counseling firms. And other NBA owners would allow it, he claims, because “if he does relocate, there’s a relocation fee attached to that.” No, don’t ask why Dundon would readily agree to forgo the $365 million already approved by the state of Oregon and also pay an expansion fee to move someplace that isn’t offering a newer arena even after saying he has no intention of moving the team, PR isn’t about answering your questions.
  • Nothing new on the Chicago Bears stadium bill as of this morning, but bettors have Arlington Heights, Illinois a 58-40% favorite over Hammond, Indiana to be the team’s new home, for whatever that’s worth. (Very possibly nothing.)
  • The Seattle Seahawks are for sale, which means it’s time to ask if a new owner will want a new stadium, apparently. Answer (courtesy of me as quoted in the Puget Sound Business Journal): A new Seahawks owner would be dumb to pay to build one themselves when they have a perfectly good old one, but “if somebody else is going to buy you a new car, you’re not going to say no.”
  • Nashville officials say spending $60 million on hosting the Super Bowl after spending $1.2 billion to build a new Tennessee Titans stadium so it could host the Super Bowl will pay off; economists say LOL, just like always.
  • The Oakland Arena, abandoned by the Golden State Warriors, is doing so well hosting music now that it doesn’t have to work around the NBA schedule that it’s drawing bigger concerts than its newer rival in San Francisco. Just in time for private equity to buy it and presumably ruin it.
  • Spending $600 million to help move the Cleveland Browns from one part of the state to another was a pretty bold move by Ohio, but saying it was giving the state’s data centers $136 million in tax breaks in 2025 alone and having it turn out to actually be $1.6 billion in tax breaks is even more impressive, way to go, Ohio.
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Friday roundup: Rays stadium gets a yes vote that’s actually a no, Bears tax break talks get weird

access_time personNeil deMause

If any of you were wondering what happened to this year’s sports economics conference at University of Maryland Baltimore County, it moved from April to June, so it hasn’t happened yet. I just booked my trip, so FoS readers can expect a liveblog on the day of stadium-related papers, at least. And if you’ll be at the conference on Tuesday, June 9, please find me and say hi.

Before June we still need to get through May, which remains jam-packed with the exciting denouement to several team owners’ push for stadium and arena deals this legislative session, while (some) legislators resist demands for ever-higher public subsidies. How that’s currently going:

  • The Tampa city council followed in the steps of the Hillsborough County commission, voting 4-3 yesterday to approve the Tampa Bay Rays‘ nonbinding MOU for a Tampa stadium project. All eyes, though, are on the swing vote that secured passage, Bill Carlson, who said he’s only for it before being against it: Carlson said he voted yes on the MOU to “help the Rays get the state money” but would “definitely vote no” on a binding MOU because “I don’t believe in private sector subsidies.” Given that state legislators have said they’ll only approve state money for the Rays if the city and county are committed to their share of spending, Carlson may yet regret saying the quiet part loud here — it’ll be very interesting to see what happens when the legislature next takes up the state funding bill, which needs to happen in the next week as Florida wraps up its special budget session.
  • The Chicago Bears stadium tussle took a weird turn this week, as Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson pitched a plan to keep the team in the city by giving Chicago more control over the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, which Gov. JB Pritzker (pretty reasonably) declared to be “no plan at all.” Johnson then declared that city lawyers had met with Bears officials about a possible new lakefront stadium, which led the Bears to issue a statement that while team lawyers met with city lawyers, the Bears “have exhausted every opportunity to stay in Chicago.” All this would be a mere media sideshow, if not for the fact that some Chicago-area state legislators are reportedly holding off on approving tax breaks for an Arlington Heights stadium in hopes that the team can be kept in Chicago — though that’s according to state Sen, Bill Cunningham, the main sponsor of the tax break bill, so for all we know he has his own motivations for blaming the bill stalling on people with unwarranted dreams of the team staying put. On the third hand, Cunningham also said some legislators have expressed distaste for the size of the tax breaks themselves, as well as impatience that the Bears are demanding infrastructure money as well but haven’t put forward a traffic study for what would actually be needed. At this point there’s going to be no way for Bears officials to know just what they’ll be in line to get from Illinois by the end of this legislative session, which is going to make it very interesting to see what they decide about Indiana’s stadium subsidy offer, or if they’ll somehow try to put off Indiana for a few more months until they see just what Illinois is putting on the table.
  • Not to be left out of all the media shouting, Arlington Heights Mayor Jim Tinaglia says that an Indiana stadium is no good because it would be near a toxic waste site, while Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. says not to worry because “the Bears know far more about environmental concerns in that area than any of us, because they’re spending millions of dollars on it.” Is that how that works? Pretty sure that’s not how that works.
  • Athletics vice chair Sandy Dean says the team has a contingency plan for still building a Las Vegas stadium even if Bally’s doesn’t move ahead with its proposed surrounding development, which could be tricky given that the Bally’s section was supposed to provide some of the entrance plazas to the A’s stadium. Dean says the team might try to replicate something similar to its Championship Plaza in Oakland, with food trucks and outdoor games, which sounds really hot for Vegas, but maybe. A’s owner John Fisher has still only spent about the first $400 million on the $2 billion project, meaning we still don’t know what will happen once he has burned through public funds and needs to come up with the rest from his family money.
  • Cuyahoga County will not be quadrupling its “sin tax” on alcohol and cigarettes to raise an estimated $56 million a year for additional upgrades for the Cleveland Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, after state legislators said they wouldn’t approve such a hike. The county could increase ticket taxes instead or add a 0.25% sales tax surcharge; it could also just stop funneling money to the teams and dare them to break their sweetheart leases, but nobody is putting that on the table for now.
  • Wondering how on earth the Philadelphia Phillies are finding $205 million worth of upgrades to their spring training facility, funded with the help of $115 million in city and county money, in addition to the previously mentioned addition of “batting cages with floor scales that track a player’s weight distribution through an entire swing”? This interview with Phillies Florida operations director John Timberlake won’t explain it, but you will learn that yes, he is Justin’s uncle.
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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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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: Blazers threatened councilmembers’ careers if they didn’t subsidize arena, Rays stadium tax vote planned for April 1

access_time personNeil deMause

Would love to have a witty introduction for you here, but it’s late enough already and this week’s bullet points are far too juicy to wait any longer!

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A’s spending on $2B Vegas stadium passes $300m mark, is Fisher’s folly really happening?

access_time personNeil deMause

Athletics owner John Fisher says he has now spent $300 million on a new Las Vegas stadium, and construction on the upper deck is set to begin soon on the $2 billion project. Next up, he can tap both a $300 million private construction loan from Goldman Sachs and $380 million in public bonds, which will get him to around $1 billion, with about another billion to go.

Is this a sign that Fisher is prepared to spend whatever it takes of his own family fortune — probably around $3 billion, mostly in Gap stock, I tried to find an updated figure but couldn’t get past this awesome AI-generated article that describes him as “one of the prominent figures behind the San Francisco Giants” — to get a stadium built in Vegas? Or that he’s still hoping to build enough momentum to lure in new investors — so far he’s pre-sold concessions rights and a minority share of the team to Aramark for $175 million and reportedly has another $70 million coming from a Korean investment fund, plus there’s whatever he can scrape together from “limited” seat license fees — in hopes of not having to raid his family’s savings?

Either remains possible, and either would betray a certain stupidity on Fisher’s part. There’s almost no way the A’s owner can hope to earn back $1.6 billion in personal outlay (more like $1.4 billion after additional tax breaks, but still) just from the proceeds of running an MLB team in the league’s smallest market; it’s possible he’s hoping the Vegas move will increase the value of the team, but even if you start with the team’s pre-move estimated value of $1.2 billion, the A’s would have to become worth as much as the Los Angeles Angels for Fisher just to break even, and that ain’t happening. On the other hand, if he’s hoping to fob the cost off on investors, that would come at the expense of diluting his share of the team and dedicating future stadium revenue streams to repay his new partners, which again will almost certainly leave Fisher in the red.

That said, it’s a billionaire’s prerogative to spend their money on really stupid shit, so just because it’s a dumb idea doesn’t mean Fisher isn’t prepared to do it. It’s unlikely his fellow MLB owners are going to step in — they just voted Fisher onto their executive committee, so they’re not preparing to push him out — and if his family members are planning to pull the plug once his spending hits a certain point, they’ve been really good at remaining mum. While I have zero inside information, at this point I’m tentatively ready to shift my bet from “John Fisher will never move the A’s to Las Vegas” to “John Fisher will eventually move the A’s the Las Vegas and it’ll be a beautiful train wreck,” though I’d still prefer if you gave me favorable odds.

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