Category: FC Cincinnati

Friday roundup: Bills $1B subsidy not finalized yet, amid ridicule from pretty much every economist everywhere

access_time personNeil deMause

This was quite a week, bringing with it New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposal of $1 billion (at least) in public money for a Buffalo Bills stadium and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s proposal of $500 million (at least) in public money for a Tennessee Titans stadium and Kansas City Chiefs president Mark Donovan’s floating of a possible bidding war between Missouri and Kansas to give umpteen gazlllion dollars (at least) to his team for a new stadium. For readers who are visiting this site for the first time as a result, first of all, welcome, and second, this is our weekly rundown of all the other news that happened while we were goggling at the even bigger news. Please breathe deeply, and we shall begin:

  • Speaking of that Bills stadium, it probably isn’t getting passed by today’s budget deadline, as legislators are still debating both that proposed expenditure and scaling back bail reform. State Assembly Republican Leader Will Barclay decried the “Democrats’ dysfunction [that] has resulted in little more than needless gridlock,” which, good work, criticizing members of the opposing party for actually wanting to discuss things before voting on them is definitely a way to reduce dysfunction.
  • Also speaking of that Bills stadium, USA Today checked in with a couple more sports economists who weren’t part of Tuesday’s press conference, and got some choice quotes: Kennesaw State’s J.C. Bradbury said, “I think it just goes to show that policy decisions don’t seem to be tied to actual knowledge,” while University of San Francisco’s Nola Agha said, “It’s like saying the bakery down the street receives $100,000 a year from the city government, just so they can bake croissants every morning.” Add in Smith College’s Andy Zimbalist’s New York Daily News op-ed saying, “If the people of Erie County and New York State … believe that retaining the Bills will provide hefty economic benefits, then buyer beware,” and West Virginia University’s Brad Humphreys’ retweets, and it’s pretty much a clean sweep of every single economist who’s studied these things.
  • And also also speaking of the Bills stadium, Hochul’s proposed memorandum of understanding is out, and it includes an item that the announced “ironclad” deal to keep the team in Buffalo for 30 years would actually allow the team owners to skip town for lower and lower penalties starting in year 15. They really don’t make iron cladding like they used to.
  • Okay, moving on from the Bills: Arena developer Oak View Group says it wants to build a new $1 billion arena in Las Vegas that could host an NBA expansion team, because none of Vegas’ six other arenas could possibly be used for that. No public funding has been mentioned so far, so it’s possible this is just part of a land rush to grab prominence in the Vegas arena market; though given that another Vegas arena project announced its groundbreaking in 2014 and still hasn’t actually been built, it’s also possible this is just hot air.
  • Despite the New Orleans Pelicans‘ lease on their 23-year-old arena expiring in 2024, definitely aren’t looking for a new arena until “the future,” says owner Gayle Benson, adding, “I don’t want anyone to think we’re using that as any type of leverage over the state of Louisiana.” She definitely doesn’t want state legislators thinking that, who would do a thing like that?
  • Cincinnati USA Convention and Visitors Bureau chair Jeff Berding says, “It’s time we have a modern arena in Cincinnati.” Berding is also co-CEO of F.C. Cincinnati, who already got a giant pile of public money for their own new stadium, maybe it’s not such a big mystery why these things keep happening.
  • Wait, Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk died? Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk died! Now it will be up to his college-age daughters, Anna and Olivia Melnyk, our sympathies to them, to decide whether to carry forward with his never-ending arena subsidy demands, our sympathies to them on that as well.
  • A Virginia state senator told WUSA-TV anonymously that legislation to spend as much as a billion dollars on a Washington Commanders stadium is moving slowly because “public reaction to this project has been underwhelming” and “the team lacks gravity,” and mostly it makes me wonder what about the Virginia legislature requires members to demand anonymity so they can “speak freely.” Anyway, team owner/accused toxic workplace enabler Dan Snyder has turned over direct control of the team to his wife, Tanya Snyder, that should take care of everything.
  • The Toronto Blue Jays are moving ahead with a “significant renovation” of the SkyDome or whatever it’s called these days, promising to “modernize the fan experience.” No public money request was attached to the announcement, or price tag on the renovations at all, but team president Mark Shapiro did say that the renovations are “probably for the next 10 or 15 years but we’ll probably still have a stadium issue,” so this ain’t over by any means.
  • A Nebraska bill would increase the amount on sales tax kickbacks to the state’s arenas and convention centers because, and I swear this is not an April Fools joke, they have hosted such important economic and cultural events as “a recent concert by the legendary Elton John, the U.S. Olympic Swim Trials and the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meetings.” No economists were consulted by the Omaha World-Herald for this story, though it’s always possible they were laughing too hard to comment coherently.
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Friday roundup: Rays revive Ybor City plan from dead, A’s set $1B price tag on Vegas stadium, and other self-serving rumors

access_time personNeil deMause

The news has been coming hot and heavy this week, especially if you count self-generated rumors by the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays management teams to be “news.” Let’s make an attempt at corralling all of it, shall we?

  • After St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman declared that he wouldn’t engage in stadium talks with Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg while he’s being sued by his minority owners, Rays president Brian Auld met with selected Hillsborough County commissioners this week to discuss the possibility of reviving the idea for a stadium in the Ybor City area of Tampa that died in 2018 because nobody wanted to pay for it. There’s no sign that that funding situation has changed, but since it appears Auld made sure to meet with commissioners who he could trust to go straight to the media to say the parts he wanted (Ybor City is alive!) and not the parts he didn’t (anybody got $900 million to spare?), this qualifies as leverage, I guess. Kriseman is out of office next January, anyway, so maybe it’ll work on his successor.
  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher is reportedly seeking a $1 billion stadium in order to move to Las Vegas, according to an unnamed Las Vegas Review-Journal source. Also that “the A’s are interested in pursuing a public-private partnership, similar to what the Raiders received when they relocated to Las Vegas from Oakland,” which ended up with Clark County on the hook for $750 million; and that “there is little desire from the county to offer much, if any, public funding to build a possible MLB stadium.” Of course, if Fisher is mostly using Vegas as a stalking horse to shake loose more stadium money from Oakland, it doesn’t matter much how much money he can or can’t get in Nevada, but expect to see lots more talk about this ghost stadium in the near future, eventually undoubtedly including renderings, because just showing pictures of other cities’ stadiums really doesn’t cut it.
  • Speaking of that Las Vegas Raiders $2 billion stadium with the $750 million in public subsidies, Clark County is pulling $11.7 million from a reserve fund to make its next debt payment on the building, after dipping into the fund for a similar amount last November, to cover for hotel taxes, which were anticipated as the funding source, falling short thanks to the pandemic. Boondoggle’s Pat Garofalo calls this a sign that “long arrangements between a particular business and the government are always going to be risky for taxpayers,” which I’m not quite so sure — this was just hotel tax money that Clark County otherwise could have used to spend on other things, so really there are two separate questions here: 1) Is the pandemic crushing tourism revenues in the nation’s tourist capital? and 2) did Clark County blow $750 million on a stadium for the Raiders that it will never see again? It’s hotel taxes that are risky, in other words; stadium spending, unless it can somehow generate three-quarter-billion dollars in new hotel tax receipts just from eight NFL games a year, is a sure terrible bet.
  • The USL’s chief operating officer and real estate officer Justin Papadakis — yes, a soccer league has a “real estate officer” — was asked by Forbes how his league has been able to put together so many stadium deals during the pandemic, and answered, um, something about millennials and multi-use facilities, that oughta hold the little bastards. Papadakis also said that the league is currently exploring 35 different expansion targets, so maybe its secret is more about offering a team to every podunk town in the country if they build a stadium and seeing who bites?
  • The Washington Spirit NWSL team moved its home opener to Houston after complaining that its home stadium in Virginia “is not compliant with NWSL stadium requirements.” My first thought here was, whoa, women’s soccer is getting into the “we need upgraded facilities or else we’ll take our team elsewhere” game, but then I noticed that 1) Segra Field, home to the USL’s Loudoun United F.C., was only opened in 2019, and 2) the “upgraded facilities” the Spirit are seeking mostly come down to having showers in the locker rooms, so clearly this is something different. (Also, the USL lets its teams play in stadiums with no running water? I guess that’s one way to get to 35 expansion teams!)
  • “The White Sox took an area named for a beloved stadium worker and renamed it for Tony La Russa” is really pretty much all you need to know about this story, but Defector includes the tidbit that the Chicago White Sox also threw out the old sign honoring Loretta Micele rather than giving it to her family, plus offers another recent article on what a horrible person and baseball manager Tony La Russa is, so see those for further context.
  • F.C. Cincinnati using its new stadium as a giant ad board for Old Spice? F.C. Cincinnati using its new stadium as a giant ad board for Old Spice.
  • Saskatoon’s mayor says he doesn’t want to “lose the race to Regina” to be the first to build a new arena. That’s it, that’s a perfect sentence about the state of politics in North America in 2021, have a good long (in the U.S., not Canada) weekend everybody!
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Friday roundup: Newspapers love stadium propaganda, like really love it, like would marry it if they could

access_time personNeil deMause

One thing that both cheers and puzzles me is all the comments that surely elected officials are about to start saying no to stadium and arena shakedowns, even as they keep on saying yes. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s a dedication to optimism or a commitment to burn down the system and start anew, but I’ll just say what I’ve been saying in this situation for 20-odd years now: I hope you’re right and I’m wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.

And now that I’ve put the Neil back in nihilism, on with the news:

  • Two guys in Oregon want to build a Major League Baseball stadium in the Portland suburb or Gresham, and build it entirely out of wood, and I’m sorry, I kind of stopped reading after “iconic all-wood stadium,” but I did see there’s a rendering of people petting dogs and roller blading outside a stadium, because who doesn’t like dogs and roller blading?
  • Sports columnist Mike DiMauro of The Day, which I know is a newspaper in Connecticut but which always just makes me think of this, has written one of those “What’s taking so long to throw public money at a sports project, dagnabit?” columns, complaining of the “tediousness” of inaction on renovating Hartford’s arena, which is “creaky” and “squeaky,” and that the problem is the “fundamental moral outrage” of the “Chorus Of Aggrieved Taxpayers” that is leaving renovations “moving forward with the acceleration of an arthritic snail.” (Snails, of course, are invertebrates, so wouldn’t be affected by arthritis. Lucky snails!) Asks DiMauro, “What other Hartford-area project is of more benefit to a wider range of people than a bustling downtown arena?” Try not to answer all at once.
  • Construction of F.C. Cincinnati‘s new stadium is complete, and the team’s press release includes a photo of it empty that is a bit drab with no lens flare or people pointing at the sky, but makes up for that with some impressively purple prose about such things as how “the back shelving of the club’s bar was inspired by the jaw-dropping five-story stacks of the Old Cincinnati Library. If that’s not worth $97 million in taxpayer money, what is? (Try not to answer all at once.)
  • Still not random enough stadium cheerleading for you? How about a local TV news exclusive video of St. Louis stadium construction workers doing stretches in unison?
  • The Palm Springs Desert Sun reports that Oak View Group wants its proposed $250 million arena in Palm Desert to be powered by solar energy and entirely carbon neutral, but complains it’s being stymied by the local power company, which is … sorry, no room for a comment from the power company, need to leave space for the note about the Desert Sun’s upcoming “informational webinar series” in partnership with Oak View Group about its new arena, something that is no doubt entirely unrelated to the four different OVG execs and architects quoted in the story.
  • The Calgary Flames arena project may require chopping down a 125-year-old elm tree, but it’s okay because someone took a 3D photo of it first.
  • Two Arlington Heights–area state lawmakers say they wouldn’t want to use public funds for a new Chicago Bears stadium in the suburban city, while one says he “probably” would. Given that “no public funds” can be defined pretty much however elected officials like these days, not to mention that no one is actually proposing to build a stadium in Arlington Heights, this maybe seems like a waste of a reporter’s time, but … oh, never mind, they just let the intern whose Twitter bio brags about their “bad sports opinions” write it, it’s all good.
  • And finally, we have the Sacramento Bee’s report that Sacramento Republic FC is showing it’s serious about moving up to MLS by … changing the name of its stadium from one corporation to another? That’s what it says in the team’s press release, anyway, gotta get that right into print, that’s what journalism is all about!
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Thursday roundup: NBA mulls expansion to raise quick cash, 60-year-old community-owned team sold to local rich dude, Crew may seek more tax breaks somehow

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy pre-Christmas, everybody! (That’s the name for today, right? I really should Google that.) Here’s the stray news for the short holiday week:

  • NBA commissioner Adam Silver has called expansion the league’s “manifest destiny” and said that “it’s caused us to maybe dust off some of the analyses on the economic and competitive impacts of expansion” (what “it”? shh, don’t ask questions, the important man is talking) but “not to the point that expansion is on the front burner.” The implication is after losing like $1.5 billion in revenue, some quick cash from expansion fees sounds real good about now, but Silver’s not going to be the one to say that out loud, not when it might make him look desperate, not when it’s expansion cities and prospective owners that should be begging him to expand, that’s just how this is supposed to work, you know.
  • The Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, since 1958 run by a community-owned non-profit, have been sold to a local rich guy because, um, something about Covid. Also the non-profit’s chair, Tom Lehr, said “100% of the profits from the sale of the team to Third Base Ventures will be invested back into the team,” according to the Appleton Post-Crescent, which, what? This guy gets to buy the team, and also use the money he paid for it on the team as well? What is even happening.
  • The Columbus Crew‘s old stadium, which is set to become the team’s training ground plus public soccer fields, still belongs to the team while the land under it belongs to the state, and the team has to make $210,000 in payments in lieu of property taxes each year under a 2007 court settlement, but they’re working on a long-term lease now and a term sheet proposed by the team mentions “Ownership of existing MAPFRE Stadium to be discussed and examined in connection with real estate tax and other considerations,” and all this is a red flag but no one’s quite sure of what exactly. Maybe something that should have been considered before giving the Crew $98 million toward a new stadium? Ennnnh, that seems like a lot of work.
  • This year’s Rose Bowl is going to be played in Texas because that California has one of the nation’s worst coronavirus surges (Texas isn’t far behind, but Texas’s governor doesn’t care), and also this year’s Pro Bowl is going to be played on Madden, which warms my heart that our glorious future may finally arrive soon. If you’re wondering if the Pro Bowl had to be moved because its home stadium in Honolulu is on the verge of being condemned, nope, it was going to be in Las Vegas this year anyway, but, you know, Covid. Also, Honolulu’s outgoing mayor Kirk Caldwell warns that the city’s indoor arena is even older than the stadium and even though it’s getting a $43.6 million upgrade, “at some point you run out of life” and okay, yes, Caldwell’s plan for a $700 million replacement arena was already rejected and also he’s only mayor for another week, sorry, I don’t know why we’re actually talking about him.
  • There’s now an online petition against “any taxpayer funding being used to finance, construct, acquire, renovate, equip, enlarge, or operate a new baseball stadium within the City of Knoxville or Knox County.” Allow the debates over what counts as “taxpayer funding” to commence now!
  • If you want to work at F.C. Cincinnati‘s new stadium, they’re hiring! What about all the people who worked at the team’s old stadium, which actually averaged more fans per game than the new one will hold? Sorry, no room in the article for that!
  • The owners of the New York Yankees have agreed to provide ten $5,000 grants to local businesses suffering amid the pandemic — wait, seriously, $50,000? That’s roughly how much the Yankees pay Gerrit Cole for each batter he faces. “We are extremely appreciative of this support from the Yankees,” local bar owner Joe Bastone said, according to a statement issued by the Yankees, which ended up getting a bunch of media coverage out of it, all of it positive. Until now.
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Friday roundup: Titans seek overhaul of 21-year-old stadium, FC Cincy subsidy nears $100m, plus: bored sportswriters go rogue!

access_time personNeil deMause

A quick programming note: The next two Friday roundups will be on Thursdays, since the next two Fridays are Christmas and New Year’s. Not that I’ll be doing much special those days — I’ve done pretty much nothing since March other than sit and stare at my laptop screen — but I’m doing this anyway as a courtesy to readers who may feel the need to go out and infect extended family members with a deadly disease or something.

And on to this week’s news remainders:

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Friday roundup: What if a stadium tax break fell in the forest and there were no journalists around to hear?

access_time personNeil deMause

Sorry if the posts were a bit light this week, but, one, it’s August (checks — yep, August, holy crap) and local governments are mostly out of session so it’s usually a slow month for stadium news even during what we used to call normal times, and two, I’ve been spending some time working on an FoS-related project that hopefully you will all enjoy the benefits of down the road a bit. (I also took a brief break to write about how Melbourne, Australia has declared a “state of disaster” and imposed strict new lockdown measures for virus rates that in the U.S. wouldn’t even get states to ban house parties.) If you were really missing me chiming in on the latest in baseball not shutting down just yet and instead adding a billion doubleheaders, maybe I’ll get around to a longer post on it next week.

For now, a quick tour through some of the news items that didn’t make the full-item cut this week:

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Friday roundup: New Rangers stadium scam movie, Nevada arena petitions rejected over technicality, and many many dumb ideas for getting you (or cardboard cutouts of you) into stadiums this year

access_time personNeil deMause

Welcome to the end of another crazy week, which seems redundant to say, since that’s all of them lately. I spent a bunch of it working on this article on what science (but not necessarily your local newspaper) can tell us about not just whether reopening after lockdowns is a good idea, but what kinds of reopening are safe enough to consider. And important enough to consider, since as one infectious disease expert told me, “It’s not ‘open’ or ‘shut’—there’s a whole spectrum in between. We need to be thinking about what are the high-priority things that we need to reopen from a functioning point of view, and not an enjoyment point of view.”

And with that cheery thought, on to other cheery thoughts:

  • If you’re a fan of either sports stadium shenanigans or calamitous public-policy train wrecks in general — and I know you are, or why would you be reading this site — you should absolutely check out “Throw A Billion Dollars From The Helicopter,” a new documentary about the Texas Rangers‘ successful campaign to extract half a billion dollars from the city of Arlington so they could play in air-conditioning. It’s a story that has everything: a mayor who was elected as a stadium-subsidy critic then turned around to approve the biggest stadium subsidy in local history, George W. Bush grubbing for public money and failing to do basic math, grassroots anti-red-light camera activists getting dragged into stadium politics, a trip back to the Washington Senators’ final home game before moving to Texas which they had to forfeit because fans ran on the field and walked off with the bases, footage of that 1994 Canadian TV news story I always cite about how video-rental stores comedy clubs in Toronto were so happy with extra business during the baseball strike that they wished hockey would go on strike too, plus interviews with stadium experts like Roger Noll, Rod Fort, Victor Matheson, Allen Sanderson (the man whose line about more effective ways than building a stadium for boosting your city’s economy gave the documentary its title), and me. Rent it here on Vimeo if you want some substitute fireworks this weekend.
  • Opponents of the publicly funded minor-league hockey arena for the Henderson Silver Knights got enough signatures to put a recall on the November ballot, but have had their petitions invalidated for not including a detailed enough description of their objections on every page. This will almost certainly result in lawsuits, which is how pretty much every battle for public oversight of sports subsidy deals ends — that, and “in tears.”
  • The San Diego city council approved the $86.2 million sale of the site of the Chargers‘ former stadium to San Diego State University, which plans to build a new $310 million football stadium there. Whether this is a good deal for the public is especially tricky, because not only do you have to figure the land value of a 135-acre site in the middle of an economic meltdown, but also San Diego State is a public university, so really this is one public agency selling land to another. It’s all more than I can manage this morning, so instead let’s look at this rendering of a proposed park for the site that features bicyclists riding diagonally across a bike path to avoid a woman who stands in their way with arms akimbo, while birds with bizarre forked tails wheel overhead.
  • You know what would be a terrible idea in the middle of a pandemic that has closed stadiums to fans because gathering in one place is a great way to spread virus? An article telling fans what public spaces they can gather in to catch a glimpse of game action in closed stadiums, and Axios has you covered there! And so does the Associated Press!
  • Sure, hundreds of thousands of people have died and there could be hundreds of thousands more to go, but won’t anyone think of the impact on TV network profits if there’s no football to show in the fall?
  • And speaking of keeping an eye strictly on the bottom line, the NFL is considering requiring fans (if there are any) who attend NFL games this fall (if there are any) to sign a waiver promising not to sue if they contract Covid as a result. But can I still sue if someone goes to a football game, contracts Covid, and then infects me? I’m not actually sure how easily one could sue in either case — since you can never be sure where you were infected with the virus, it would be like suing over getting cancer from secondhand smoke — but I always like the idea of suing the NFL, so thanks for the idea, guys!
  • New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner says he wants to see fans at Yankee Stadium “in the 20-30 percent range,” a number and prediction he failed to indicate he pulled from anywhere other than his own butt. Meanwhile, the Chicago Cubs are reportedly planning to open rooftops around Wrigley Field at 25% capacity for watching games this year, something that might actually be legal since while would mean about 800 fans in attendance, they wouldn’t all be in attendance in the same place, so it could get around rules about large public gatherings.
  • If you want to spend $49 and up so a cardboard cutout of yourself can watch Oakland A’s games, you can now do that on the team’s website. If that sounds like a terrible deal, know that with each purchase you also get two free tickets to an exhibition game at the Coliseum in 2021 (if there are any), and if you pay $129 then you also get a foul ball mailed to you if it hits your cutout, all of which still sounds like a terrible deal but significantly more hilarious.
  • If you were hoping to make one last trip to Pawtucket’s 74-year-old McCoy Stadium to see Pawtucket Red Sox baseball before the team relocates to Worcester after this season — it was on my now-deleted summer calendar — you’ll have to settle for eating dinner on the field, because the PawSox season, along with the rest of the minor-league baseball season, has been officially called off. Also, the Boston Herald reports that the Lowell Spinners single-A team won’t be offering refunds to those who bought tickets for non-canceled games, only credits toward 2021 tickets — shouldn’t ticketholders be able to sue for not receiving the product they paid for? I want somebody to sue somebody, already! When will America’s true pastime be allowed to reopen?
  • Here’s a New York Times article on how new MLS stadiums are bucking past stadium trends by being “privately financed, with modest public support for modernizing infrastructure,” which is only true if you consider $98 million (Columbus) and $81 million and up (Cincinnati) to be “modest” figures.
  • I apologize for failing to report last week on the Anaheim Ducks‘ proposed development around their hockey arena, less because it’s super interesting or there is amusing vaportecture than because it’s supposed to be called “ocV!BE,” which is the best name ever, so long as you want to live in a freshly built condo in what sounds like either a randomly generated password or an Aughts rock band.
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Friday roundup: Ohio could cut stadium funds, A’s could delay stadium plans, sports could return, world could end, anything’s possible

access_time personNeil deMause

A little distracted this morning with a new work project and the usual pandemic stuff and the not-so-usual riots on TV, but there’s a passel of stadium and arena news I didn’t get to, so let’s get to ’em:

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Friday roundup: Another Canadian sports bailout request, and everyone pretends to know when things may or may not reopen

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy May, everybody! This crisis somehow both feels like it’s speeding into the future and making time crawl — as one friend remarked yesterday, it’s like we’ve all entered an alternate universe where nothing ever happens — and we have to hold on to the smallest glimmers of possible news and the tiniest drips of rewards to keep us going and remind us that today is not actually the same as yesterday. In particular, today is fee-free day on Bandcamp, when 100% of purchase prices goes to artists, and lots of musicians have released new albums and singles and video downloads for the occasion. Between that and historic baseball games on YouTube with no scores listed so you can be surprised at how they turn out, maybe we’ll get through the weekend, at least.

And speaking of week’s end, that’s where we are, and there’s plenty of dribs and drabs of news-like items from the week that just passed, so let’s catch up on what the sports world has been doing while not playing sports:

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Friday roundup: Cincy official wants soccer subsidies back, Hartford mayor wants arena spending now, and why billionaires are jealous of other billionaires

access_time personNeil deMause

Just how far have we fallen in the last few weeks? Far enough that I wrote an article on how New York City is managing to feed at least a few of its millions of suddenly hungry people, and I considered this a positive article. I promise we’ll get back to more analysis of how rich sports people are attempting to steal a few billions in taxpayer money in short order, but right now it’s a little hard to focus on run-of-the-mill horrors when there are so many new ones every day.

But there was some news this week, not all of it pandemic-related! Enjoy, if enjoying is still a thing we do:

  • Cincinnati city councilmember Chris Seelbach says that in light of crashing city budgets in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, he plans to introduce a bill asking F.C. Cincinnati to return 25% of its $33 million public stadium subsidy, the same percentage that city social service agencies are being asked to cut. The bad news: City officials say it would be up to the team to voluntarily accept the funding reduction, so maybe don’t hold your breath on that.
  • Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin says it’s a great time for a $100 million renovation of his city’s XL Center since the arena is just sitting there right now doing nothing but losing money, so it’s a great time for construction! Connecticut is currently facing a projected $1.9 billion loss of tax revenues from the pandemic, in case you were wondering.
  • The New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, and Los Angeles Dodgers would each lose more than $300 million in revenues if no fans were allowed to attend games in 2020, according to Forbes’ Mike Ozanian, while other teams like the Miami Marlins would lose only $47 million, since nobody goes to Marlins games anyway. But Ozanian notes tha teams would also cut back on their revenue sharing expenses, and while he doesn’t do the math on this, we can: With revenue sharing running at about 48% of local revenues (actually slightly less since even the Yankees get back a small share of the overall cut), this means those teams’ bottom-line losses will only be about half what Forbes is reporting. In other words, coronavirus will likely be only slightly more of a disaster for the Yankees than signing Jacoby Ellsbury.
  • Delaying the Tokyo Olympics for a year is expected to cost organizers $2.8 billion for things like additional rental costs on private venues and the athletes’ village — which already has private buyers who were expecting to move in in September — and the International Olympic Committee isn’t exactly saying whether it will cover these costs or the Tokyo organizing committee will be stuck with them, though you can certainly guess, based on past IOC behavior. And that’s assuming that the 2020 Olympics can take place in 2021, which is still not a sure thing.
  • And speaking of coronavirus shutdowns possibly lasting into 2021, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has told city agencies that “large gatherings such as concerts and sporting events may not be approved in the city for at least 1 year.” That doesn’t rule out TV-only sports with no fans, and also it’s important to remember that memos like these are just contingency plans, and no one knows what things will look like this fall (or, for that matter, in fall of 2021). Maybe hold off on buying your 2020 NFL season tickets, though, just to be on the safe side.
  • Amazon is reportedly considering bidding for naming rights to Tottenham Hotspur‘s new stadium, which given that naming rights are mostly good for boosting brand recognition and Amazon is already the world’s biggest brand is kind of weird. Though given that the company is now making $11,000 in sales per second what with everyone trapped in their homes, maybe they can afford to blow some money on something stupid.
  • And speaking of Amazon, Bloomberg reports that Jeff Bezos only asked for billions of dollars in subsidies for a new second headquarters because he was jealous of Elon Musk getting billions of dollars from Nevada for a new Tesla plant. Which we pretty much knew was Bezos’s inspiration, but it’s still a worthwhile reminder that corporate barons are just as much driven by envy of the next corporate baron down the block as they are by any rational economic motivations.
  • Here are some photos of the early years of the original Yankee Stadium, which are being reported as a sign of the team’s impact on its surrounding Bronx neighborhood, which is probably wrong since it’s more likely the impact of the new elevated subway line that opened in 1918 (and helped inspired the Yankees to move to the Bronx). Though they do give a sense of how teams used to build stadiums in phases — expand by a few thousand seats, then once those sell out use the proceeds to add a few thousands more — to make them more affordable with private cash, something you usually only see now in European soccer stadiums, which is surely just coincidental to the fact that European soccer stadiums mostly don’t get huge public subsidies.
  • And speaking of European soccer stadiums, here are some photos from what is described as an “insane new video” of Real Madrid‘s proposed $625 million stadium renovation, which leads me to believe that SportsBible, whatever that is, has never seen a truly insane video.  I do like the news, though, that “the capacity of the iconic venue will be reduced by one to 80,242,” which leads me to believe that at least the stadium architects have a sense of humor.
  • Since we haven’t featured any dumb sports news articles yet this week, how about this one from the New York Post that claims the New York Islanders moving to Brooklyn worked out well because it kept the team from moving to Quebec? Asked and answered, people!
  • Superstar Los Angeles Angels outfielder Mike Trout has declared MLB’s Arizona biodome proposal to be “pretty crazy” since it would keep players away from their families for months, but the Arizona Republic’s editorial page editor says there are “scientific reasons” for doing it like “MLB players are already guinea pigs” and “there is always risk in life” and anyway baseballllllllllllll! More science to drop soon on this, I sorely hope.
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