Category: Chicago Fire

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 still haggling over stadium permit, Fire stadium could include TIF-funded parking garage

access_time personNeil deMause

We’ve somehow ended up again at the last Friday in August, and if history is any guide, none of you are actually reading this, as you’re all headed out of town for the long weekend (as am I). So I could write about anything, really — maybe, okay, that’s too depressing. No, not that, either. How about we stay away from the current U.S. administration and … eeeagh! Fine, sports stadium news it is!

  • Cleveland Browns officials and representatives of the Ohio Department of Transportation are “in discussions” on the height of the Browns’ proposed stadium that ODOT ruled could interfere with flights into nearby Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, but “it remains unclear whether those talks could lead to a compromise,” reports Cleveland.com. The only wiggle room appears to be either digging the stadium lower into the ground (unlikely, since it’s already set to be 80 feet below ground level) or move it farther from the airport (maybe, though if you go too far you run into I-71). If they can’t negotiate an accommodation by Tuesday, the team’s owners can still file an appeal of ODOT’s ruling in state court.
  • Chicago Fire owner Joe Mansueto quietly removed a bunch of plans for a new park and transit and bike path improvements to accompany his proposed new soccer stadium, and advocates for parks, transit, and bike paths are steamed! The new plan also includes a parking garage that could potentially be funded by property taxes from the site (i.e., a TIF), which one steamed Chicagoan told Streetsblog Chicago may not be “even permissible under existing regulations.” Expect lots of shouting at the next Zoom meeting on the project’s transit plan, scheduled for September 9.
  • Wannabe Orlando MLB expansion team owner Jim Schnorf says he’s “confident we will be awarded a Major League franchise in the next decade,” citing the fact that Orlando is bigger than other prospective expansion markets (true) and that it has made more progress on stadium funding (not really so much true). Orlando is also very close to Tampa Bay, which already has the Rays (for now, at least), and MLB expansion looks to be on hold for now while the Rays and Athletics stadium situations get resolved so those team owners have lots of cities available to use as move threats, but “confidence” is nice!
  • Boston city councilor Julia Mejia and the Boston NAACP have proposed a scaled-back rebuild of White Stadium just for school sports that would cut the city’s costs to an estimated $64.6 million from the $100 million-$172 million it would cost for the city’s share of a stadium for the NWSL’s Boston Legacy F.C. That would leave Legacy without a stadium, which was originally the whole point of this exercise, but would also create possibly $100 million in savings that Mejia and the NAACP say should be put toward “unmet student needs” in public schools. Mejia tried to introduce this as a bill on Wednesday but the council ruled it out of order since it already voted for the NWSL stadium version; Mejia says she’ll find other ways to raise it.
  • Houston Astros owner Jim Crane is suing Harris County to keep being allowed to not pay property tax even though Harris County officials say they have no intention of trying to charge the Astros property tax. So long as nobody who owns a sports team has to pay property tax, that’s the important thing, no matter what those crazy judges in New Jersey think.
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Behold, the future of soccer stadiums, Chicago Fire vaportecture edition

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a long, dismal spring of record-breaking stadium subsidies making their way through state legislatures (not to mention other even more dismal stuff), so let’s have some fresh vaportecture as a respite from all the horror! And it’s for the proposed Chicago Fire stadium, which will allegedly be built entirely with the team owner’s own money. (The overall development itself will get a ton of tax kickbacks, but we won’t think about that right now.) Roll it!

Okay, sure, that’s fine enough. The stadium looks like a stadium, the sun is actually setting in the west at game time, nobody spelled the city’s name wrong. I do have some questions about what appears to be a practice (or youth?) field next to the stadium and whether all those tents and people walking on it before the game won’t destroy the turf and make it unplayable, but as these things go, that’s a minor quibble.

Likewise, let’s look at everything the interior image got right: There are 11 players on each team, and no one is reacting to the exciting play on the pitch by standing up and holding a scarf to face the back rows. And what exciting play it is: A Fire player looks to have just dribbled an opposing defender so ferociously that the defender just straight-up face-planted on the pitch, leaving the Fire player open for a likely goal. Too bad so many of the photographers lining the field seem to be looking in the wrong direction to get any good photos of the play, but you can’t have everything.

Okay, now you’re talking! What on earth kind of act is this that involves one guitar player and one dancer (?) while a sparsely arranged crowd generally pays no attention to the stage, despite it being lit by multiple spotlights? Is this what future stadium shows will look like now that currently popular artists are all canceling stadium gigs because they can’t sell enough tickets?

Anything else? Overblown quotes from team officials, perhaps?

Fire president Dave Baldwin told the Sun-Times the team wanted the design to harken back to “the City of Broad Shoulders” and its “rich industrial manufacturing heritage.”

“It has that Chicago warehouse feel, but also has a little bit of an enduring elegance to it — the brick facade, the steel, the glass, those are all things that were really important to Joe as we designed this,” Baldwin said. “Whether it’s opening day in 2028, or you fast forward 50 years and you come back to the stadium, it should still feel relevant to Chicago.”

Sure, brick, glass, steel, all things that scream “Chicago.” Or, you know, Baltimore. It probably would be too much to expect a stadium incorporating deep-dish pizza or sausages made of dead rats into its façade, but we’ll have to take what we can get.

As Baldwin noted, the projected opening date is 2028. That’s pretty aggressive given that it’s already halfway through 2025 and Chicago isn’t exactly known for its balmy winters and all-year construction schedules, but we can’t entirely rule it out.

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Amid Bears subsidy opposition, Fire owner vows to pay for own Chicago stadium (maybe, sorta)

access_time personNeil deMause

So much going on of late with the Chicago Bears stadium plans! If, that is, by “so much” you mean team execs getting multiple doors slammed in their face by the state legislature, which adjourned over the weekend without taking action on any of three bills that the team wanted to help fund a new stadium, either in Arlington Heights or somewhere. The three bills would have: 1) allowed local government to freeze property taxes on “megadevelopment” projects, effectively providing massive tax breaks to developers; 2 and 3) some two other things, none of the news reporters bothered to mention what these were, they got places to be, man.

(Meanwhile, the Chicago Sun-Times article on all this described the legislative session as expiring “without the Chicago Bears breaking the line of scrimmage in Springfield” after the failure of legislation that “could’ve thrown the team a block in their rush to the former Arlington International Racecourse,” Bears lobbyists being “left on the Capitol sideline,” because of course it did. This is becoming less a Sun-Times tic than a journalistic cry for help.)

The Bears stadium push will now have to wait for the fall legislative session, when possible language allowing a weighted vote of all affected local taxing bodies to approve tax breaks is expected to push it across the goal line into the end zone like Walter Payton playing the game the way it was supposed to be played or something:

“We were super close and just ran out of time,” state Rep. Mary Beth Canty, a Democrat who represents the northwest suburb [of Arlington Heights] and surrounding areas, said Sunday.

Or, alternatively, the Bears bills are still somewhere deep in their own half, trying desperately to get a first down before having to give up and punt:

[Gov. JB Pritzker’s chief of staff Anne] Caprara sent a message that Pritzker has no plans to support funding for the stadium unless Illinois receives something “substantial” in return.

“Back on here briefly to respond to this bc it’s absurd,” Caprara posted on X. “No one in the Gov’s office or in state government is an expert in NFL finances. The governor has been clear that he’s not going to support state funding for a new stadium unless the state got something substantial in return.”

In the midst of all this (I am so sorry) Monday morning quarterbacking, Chicago Fire owner and investment fund billionaire Joe Mansueto announced plans for a $650 million soccer stadium to be built on the “The 78” property that had previously been targeted by White Sox billionaire owner Jerry Reinsdorf. But where Reinsdorf wanted around $1.7 billion in public money to make his stadium happen, Mansueto says he’ll build his stadium entirely with his own money — with the tiny exception of the $700 million in tax kickbacks already approved for the property in 2019:

There are railroad tracks that need to be relocated and a crumbling seawall that needs to be rebuilt. Water, sewer and power lines need to be installed, and parking garages and surface lots need to be built. So does the last leg of the Riverwalk between Lake Street and Ida B. Wells Drive that had an initial price tag of $140 million…

[Related Midwest CEO, Curt] Bailey said he was still working on what the final infrastructure plan will look like and how large of a TIF subsidy Mayor Brandon Johnson and the City Council will be asked to authorize amid the rising cost of construction materials tied to President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

So a Fire stadium is likely a ways off as well, even if Mansueto says he wants one open for 2028.

If you’re a fan of goal-line stands against stadium subsidies, all this is at least somewhat good news: Pritzker and the Illinois legislature are continuing to push back on even the kind of tax breaks that lawmakers are usually happy to throw at pro teams, and team owners are left having to scrape together whatever public money they can find around the edges, which is certainly a lot more taxpayer-friendly than what’s on the table in some other places. Tax kickbacks are real money, though, and it’ll be important to keep a close eye on what’s being proposed for both the Bears and Fire stadiums, lest the team owners pull off a trick play involving multiple laterals — okay, that’s enough for one morning, let’s blow the whistle on this now.

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After U of I pulls out, downtown Chicago developer suggests just building more stadiums

access_time personNeil deMause

The University of Illinois has backed out of plans to build a research and teaching facility at the proposed The 78 downtown development site, but don’t fret! This is actually good news, says site developer Related Midwest, because it means now they can build moar stadiumz:

“Given its proximity to downtown, adjacency to the river and flexibility to accommodate a wide range of uses, The 78 stands alone in its ability to house large institutions that want to plant their flag in the heart of Chicago,” their statement read, in part. “We are actively exploring the co-location of dual stadiums for the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Fire, two organizations whose presence at The 78 would align with our vision of creating Chicago’s next great neighborhood.”

That disturbing “plant a flag in the heart” image notwithstanding, the more alarming part here is that unlike a research and teaching facility, a soccer stadium for the Fire is unlikely to bring in enough new money to pay off its construction costs. (The Fire only bring in $45 million a year in gross revenue total, so relocating from Soldier Field to a new stadium isn’t likely to move the needle by more than a few million a year, which wouldn’t do the trick.) While Fire owner Joe Mansueto has said he doesn’t “believe in using Tax Dollars to fund these ANY such projects” (that’s the way he typed it, yes), it’s hard to picture a soccer stadium at the The 78 site without some public money, at least for infrastructure or tax breaks.

So we could be looking at additional public costs beyond $900 million in tax kickbacks for infrastructure plus $1.1 billion for a White Sox stadium. None of which anyone at any level of government has offered to step up to pay just yet. You can’t get if you don’t ask, sure, but tacking on a soccer stadium to an already aspirational project doesn’t seem likely to make the financing pencil out any better.

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Friday roundup: Browns officially want $1.2B for Brook Park dome, Chiefs will take whatever stadium money someone offers

access_time personNeil deMause

Thanks to those who’ve re-upped as FoS supporters in recent days without my reminding you. There are still a handful of numbered Vaportecture art prints left, so donate now if you think that’s the kind of thing you’d like, or if you don’t want that thing near your house at all but just want to support the work of this site.

Speaking of work, there’s a whole lot of it today:

  • Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam have confirmed they are indeed focusing on a new domed stadium in suburban Brook Park, releasing a statement yesterday saying, “The transformative economic opportunities created by a dome far outweigh what a renovated stadium could produce with around 10 events per year.” The statement also said that “this stadium will not use existing taxpayer-funded streams that would divert resources from other more pressing needs,” which neatly obscures the fact that it would use $1.2 billion in new taxpayer-funded streams that would divert resources from other more pressing needs. And headlines like “It’s official: Cleveland Browns moving to Brook Park” remain premature, since nobody in state or local government has approved the $1.2 billion in tax money yet, so really we’re still just at “Browns owners’ #1 choice is someone giving them $1.2 billion,” and who wouldn’t want $1.2 billion? I bet you could roll around in it real nice.
  • Speaking of non-announcements, Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt says he might want to move to a new stadium in Kansas, or move to a new stadium in Missouri, or renovate his current stadium in Missouri, whatcha got? “I certainly don’t expect to have anything finalized by [next spring], but I’d like to know the direction that we’re heading in that time frame,” said Hunt, which isn’t even a fake deadline, come on, man, don’t you know you’re supposed to set a date and then move it later if necessary? Do I have to call you up and read Chapter 4 to you out loud?
  • In extremely unsurprising news, NFL owners unanimously approved Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s plan to accept $775 million in public money to pay for stadium upgrades. “The NFL believes in Jacksonville. I believe in Jacksonville, and I know our fans and the people throughout the community believe in Jacksonville,” Khan said after the vote from London, where his team will keep on playing one “home” game a year under the new deal because one can always believe in two places at once.
  • As if Chicago doesn’t have enough new stadium demands, Chicago Fire owner Joe Mansueto says he’s looking at building a soccer-specific stadium as well. Mansueto says it would be privately funded, but they all say that, so if he does settle on a location and a plan, it’s worth keeping an eye on the fine print.
  • For everyone writing up your “Where will the Tampa Bay Rays play in 2025?” articles, please cross Durham, North Carolina off the list, Bulls management says there’s no room there. Also if you’re wondering what is being done with the Rays stadium roof that was blown off last week, you can buy bits of it on eBay.
  • Green Bay Packers management says it wants to sign a 30-year lease extension on Lambeau Field and pay for all stadium upgrades in that time and just wants the city of Green Bay to freeze its rent in exchange. That’s probably not a terrible deal, but it would cost city taxpayers something — $30 million, according to city operations chief Joe Faulds — and the current lease runs through 2032 with a 10-year team extension option, so one can see why the city might not jump at the chance. Anyway, let this be a reminder that even fan-owned sports teams can demand public money, nonprofits got the profit motive too.
  • It took 27 years for this Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon to come true, but with cities like Tulsa offering cash payments for remote workers to relocate to their cities, you too can now be Ned Balter.
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Friday roundup: Bengals naming rights deal called “(XXX)” and other titillating stadium commentary

access_time personNeil deMause

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

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

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Saturday roundup: Moreno demands Angels land sale approval now now now, and other bribery news

access_time personNeil deMause

Told ya! And now an abbreviated (though extended by one day) look at the week’s other news:

  • Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno has responded to a judge granting a 60-day stay to his discounted purchase of stadium land thanks to the deal being caught up in a corruption and bribery scandal involving the city being run by an unelected cabal by decreeing that the city must approve the sale by June 14, or else … well, Moreno, or really Moreno’s lawyer, didn’t specify what would happen if the deal is delayed beyond that date, but you don’t want to find out what it’ll be, you hear? The Los Angeles Times speculates that the Anaheim city council could move forward with the sale despite the stay on its agreement with the state over selling the land without meeting state affordable housing laws, which would almost certainly lead the state to sue, which isn’t going to get the sale resolved by June 14, but maybe Moreno wants that for some reason? Anyway, here, thanks to reader Moose, are some photos of Mayor Harry Sidhu throwing Easter eggs from the private helicopter he’s accused of illegally registering in Arizona to save money, I know that’s what you really want.
  • Speaking of bribery scandals, the Cleveland city council is considering a resolution to demand that the electric utility FirstEnergy have its name removed from the Browns stadium after it was accused of bribing a state official. Browns officials replied that FirstEnergy is “committed to upholding a culture of integrity and accountability” going forward and also the council resolution is non-binding, which is another way of saying “Sorry, we own the naming rights to this publicly owned and paid-for stadium because that’s just how these things are done, we get to decide whose name goes on it, what part of that didn’t you understand?”
  • Tennessee Titans CEO Burke Nihill says it would cost $1.8 billion to renovate the team’s current stadium because it’s in such “disrepair,” citing … well, he didn’t actually cite any study or report or anything, but just trust him, okay? Better to just build a new stadium that would cost — oh, look, Nihill says the price tag is now $2.2 billion, while the team’s share remains at $700 million, meaning the city and state would have to come up with $1.5 billion? That totally makes sense, after all, the old place is 23 years old, it’s pretty much a given that all buildings that old get torn down, right, isn’t that just how engineering works?
  • And speaking of inflation, the Kansas City Current women’s soccer team’s stadium price tag has gone up from $70 million to $117 million, and the team’s owners are asking state taxpayers to cover $6 million of it through tax breaks. Councilmember Eric Bunch says this is fine because it would be “using state tax dollars indirectly to support a project that’s going to benefit Kansas Citians,” which seems to be a novel use of “indirectly” and also “benefit,” though I guess the team owners are technically Kansas Citians in addition to being hedge fund goons, so it would benefit two Kansas Citians, anyway.
  • And speaking of stadiums having the shelf life of mayflies, Palm Beach County is spending $111 million to renovate the spring training home of the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals; Cards VP Mike Whittle, asked if the 25-year-old Jupiter stadium’s facilities are outdated, replied, “They are. They are,” which should be good enough for you.
  • And speaking of naming rights (which we were doing a few bullet points ago, do try to keep up), the Chicago Fire owners are in hot water for allegedly trying to sell the naming rights to the Soldier Field field when they don’t actually own them, which should make for a fun lawsuit.
  • A Kentucky sports business professor says if the Cincinnati Bengals keep winning, they’ll be able to demand more publicly funded stadium upgrades, which doesn’t really make more sense, but maybe he really means “if the Bengals start losing again, no one will write their elected representatives to demand that the team owners be offered whatever they want in order to keep the team in town, which does check out.
  • Some guy wants to build a USL soccer stadium in downtown Milwaukee, which would cost an unknown amount of money and require an unknown amount of public subsidies. But look, here’s a rendering of it! True, there are no fireworks or people pointing at the sky, but you can imagine those things, no?
  • This is already more bullet points than I meant to write, let me leave you with pictures of the possum that has made its home in the Oakland Coliseum press box. Honestly, given what the A’s owners left of a team for local sportswriters to watch on the field this year with their player fire sale, this maybe should be considered a feature and not a bug.
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Friday roundup: Remembering Jim Bouton, and the latest in stadium shakedown absurdities

access_time personNeil deMause

One day maybe 16 or 17 years ago, I was sitting at my computer when my phone rang and a voice at the other end said, “Hi, this is Jim Bouton. Can I speak with Neil deMause?”

Once I’d picked my jaw up off the floor that the author of Ball Four (and winner of two games in the 1964 World Series) was calling me, we got down to business: Bouton was in the midst of writing a book about his attempts to save a nearly century-old minor-league baseball stadium in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and had some questions about how attempts to save old ballparks (and save the public’s money on building new ones) had gone in other cities. We soon fell to chatting amiably about the nuances and absurdities of the stadium game — I’m pretty sure Jim had only one setting with people he’d just met, which was “chatting amiably” — and eventually ended up having a few conversations about his book and his work as a short-term preservationist and ballclub operator. (The preservation part was successful — Wahconah Park is still in use today — but he was eventually forced out from team management.) I got to meet him in person for the first time a couple of years later when he came to Brooklyn to talk with local residents then fighting demolition of their buildings to make way for a new Brooklyn Nets arena, an issue he quickly became as passionate about as everything else that touched his sense of injustice; when I learned (at a Jim Bouton book talk, in fact) that the initial edition of Field of Schemes had gone out of print, he enthusiastically encouraged me and Joanna Cagan to find a publisher for a revised edition, as he had never been shy about doing for his own books, even when that meant publishing them himself.

The last time I talked to Jim was in the spring of 2012, when he showed up at a screening of the documentary Knuckleball! (along with fellow knuckleball pitchers R.A. Dickey, Tim Wakefield, and Charlie Hough) to help teach kids how to throw the near-magical pitch. We only got to talk briefly, as he was kept busy chatting amiably with everyone else who wanted a moment with him. Soon after that, he had a stroke, and eventually developed vascular dementia, which on Wednesday took his life at age 80.

I’m eternally grateful to have had a chance to spend a little time with one of the nicest, smartest, funniest world-famous authors and ballplayers you could ever hope to meet, especially when we crossed paths on a topic that was so important to both of us. The image I’ll always retain of Jim, though, was of getting ice cream with him near his home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and him looking at my cup and exclaiming, “Sprinkles! That’s a great idea!” and then sprinting back into the shop to get some added to his as well. To the end, Jim Bouton remained boyishly intense about things that were truly important, whether fighting General Electric to save an old ballpark or eating ice cream, and that’s a rare and precious gift. My sympathies to his wife, Paula, and to all who loved him, which by this point I think was pretty much everybody.

And now, to the nuances and absurdities of this week’s stadium and arena news:

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Chicago Fire to pay $45m-plus to move from suburban soccer stadium to Soldier Field

access_time personNeil deMause

The Chicago Fire, who for the past 13 years have played in a soccer-specific stadium in suburban Bridgeview that has been somewhat of a disaster for all concerned — attendance is meh, and the village of Bridgeview has taken a bath on the lease — have agreed to pay $65.5 million as part of a buyout so they can move to the Bears‘ Soldier Field starting next season, according to the Desplaines Valley News, “a household name in the southwest suburbs since 1913”:

The breakup, which had been hinted at for several years, became official Tuesday afternoon when the village board unanimously approved a Memo Of Understanding between the Fire and Bridgeview. The next step is formally amending the lease, which is expected.

Under the terms of the memo, the team would pay the village $60.5 million to escape its lease. That includes a $10 million payment upfront with the balance paid over the next 15 years, the village’s financial advisor Dan Denys told the board…

The Fire would also pay the village $5 million for the next five years for using the Bridgeview facilities for practice, Denys said.

Okay, that’s not really a $65 million buyout: The $5 million is rent on using the stadium as a practice field, and since $50.5 million of the actual buyout would be spread over 15 years, that’s a present value total of more like $45 million. (Which is a lot less than the previous buyout estimate of $125 million, though of course that was just an estimate.) Though the Fire owners have also reportedly promised to “make whole” SeatGeek if the move harms the value of the company’s naming rights deal on the Bridgeview stadium, which could add millions more to their cost. Plus we still don’t know what the Fire will pay the Chicago parks department (who if I’m reading the Bears’ lease right control Soldier Field on non-NFL days) to play in their new home.

All of which is interesting in that it shows how desperate the Fire are to get into a stadium that their fans can actually get to, but more to the point: An MLS team is choosing to move from a soccer-specific stadium to become a renter in somebody else’s NFL stadium did Don Garber just keel over and die or what? It’s been MLS gospel for years now that soccer-specific stadiums are a must, with the only exceptions allowed being for teams that at least play in a multisport stadium that they control; the Fire will apparently now be an exception to that rule. To every would-be expansion city being asked to build a new stadium for soccer when it already has another stadium that could be used — which is to say, all of them — this should set an example that it isn’t actually necessary; it may be nice for a team and its fans, but that doesn’t mean cities should be on the hook for paying for them because they’re told it’s the only possible way to have a successful team.

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