Category: Indy Eleven

Friday roundup: Voters hate stadium subsidies, business leaders love ’em, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle

access_time personNeil deMause

Thanks for sticking around to the end of the week! As a reward, you get more news items to stick around through! This is the information economy you signed up for, sorry, no refunds!

  • The folks at No Home Run in Tampa Bay have commissioned a poll on the Rays stadium plans, and say it shows that while 51% of voters supported them initially, that figure fell to 38% after respondents heard “key financial details.” This turns out to be: that Rays owner Stu Sternberg would get stadium land at a price that appears to be below market value, that he wouldn’t pay property taxes, that the city would be on the hook for $494 million (including interest) while Sternberg would keep all revenues from the stadium including non-baseball revenue, and that he would not share profits on the sale of the team with the city, all of which are undeniably accurate — all polls are hot garbage, it’s true, but this one seems as legit as any.
  • What do people in Charlotte think of the plan to spend $650 million in public money on Carolina Panthers stadium upgrades? “Leaders say” that it’s necessary for Charlotte to remain a “big-league city,” according to the Charlotte Observer, at least if by “leaders” you mean the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, that’s how representative democracy works, right, the only important people are the ones who own businesses? When not reporting on what the bosses think, the Observer also asked, “Could the Panthers leave Charlotte if they don’t get $650 million from the city?”, answering its own question by saying that sure, “the Panthers don’t appear to be interested in moving” and team owner David Tepper has made “no outward statements about wanting to relocate,” but they could, and other NFL teams have, are you $650 million worth of scared yet, huh, huh?
  • The Jacksonville city council seems prepared to rubber-stamp the city’s plan to spend $775 million in public money on Jaguars stadium renovations, with no councilmembers at a Wednesday workshop expressing major misgivings about the deal. There will be a single public hearing on June 17 for Jacksonville residents to weigh in — it remains to be seen how many councilmembers will show up for that, and how many will listen as opposed to just playing with their phones.
  • The Indianapolis City-County Council on Monday approved Mayor Joe Hogsett’s plan to create a TIF district to kick back taxes for a new MLS team and dissolve the one previously approved for the USL’s Indy Eleven. Indy Eleven fans are displeased, and some councilmembers questioned whether dedicating tax money to a team and ownership group that don’t even exist yet is the best move, but Hogsett countered that the Eleven plans were too financially risky and also the stadium was going to be built on a damn African-American graveyard, so good points on both sides, really!
  • Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch has become the latest state official to tell the Chicago Bears and White Sox owners to pound sand on their subsidy requests: “Even after the election, I just think it’s, things we have to focus on: the kitchen table issues. People want to make sure their groceries are affordable, their rent is affordable, you know, that they have a roof over their head. The last thing they want us to be talking about is stadiums for sports teams. … As we’ve said to the Bears over and over again, to the White Sox, and also to the Chicago Red Stars, there’s just no appetite to use taxpayer funding to fund stadiums for billionaires.”
  • The Chicago Reader, meanwhile, has a good article on Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s weird obsession with building the Bears a new stadium with tax money, which is even better since they fixed the part where the coining of the term “vaportecture” was credited to my old Deadspin editor Barry Petchesky. (It’s not the Reader’s fault — the new Deadspin owners broke a bunch of bylines when they did a site redesign, though they’re fixing them now.) I get quoted some in the piece, but the best line, as is often the case, goes to University of Chicago sports economist Allen Sanderson: “There’s a better chance of Brandon Johnson being drafted number one by the Bears than that stadium making a dollar.”
  • Janet Marie Smith, who worked on the design of the Baltimore Orioles‘ Camden Yards but is not involved with its current renovation, was asked by the Baltimore Banner to comment on what the O’s owners could possibly be spending $600 million or more of public money on, and mentioned various things that reflect a “more fluid way of watching a game,” including more standing room and bar areas, which is certainly one way of describing giving fans fewer places to sit.
  • The NFL is ramping up lobbying efforts to protect the use of federally tax-exempt bonds for stadiums, holding a briefing for Congressional aides during the draft in April. None of the recent attempts to rein in this practice went beyond a committee hearing, but since it saves sports team owners about $230 million a year in taxes for absolutely no benefit to the U.S. as a whole, may as well throw a few lobbyists at making sure no one even thinks about touching it, that’s the sports league way.
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Friday roundup: Rays promise “intimate” stadium with ginormous upper deck, Cleveland running out of tax money to pay for Cavs and Guardians upgrades

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy end of the week! Surely some other news of note happened in recent days, but you chose to come to this website, so you’re looking for different news, maybe some bleak Utah minor-league baseball renderings? And that is but the beginning of the smorgasbord of stadium and arena items on tap! (Yes, you can have a smorgasbord on tap, I’m a professional wordsmith, you’ll just have to trust me on this one.)

  • Reporting live from Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg’s colon, the Tampa Bay Times’ Marc Topkin has a love letter to the Rays’ new stadium design, gushing about how much more “intimate” it will be thanks to only having 30,000 seats and “70% of the seats in the lower two of three seating levels.” Getting rid of the worst seats doesn’t actually make the view from the remaining seats any better — getting rid of intervening luxury seating might accomplish that, but there’s no indication Sternberg plans to do that — and having 30% of the seats in a third deck actually sounds like a lot for a 30,000-seat stadium (the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ stadium holds 38,000 and doesn’t have a third deck at all), but team officials blurted all this stuff out and Topkin wrote it down and printed it verbatim, that’s the job of a journalist, right? (UPDATE: FoS reader Andrew Ross points out that the Times actually squeezed this story onto its front page alongside the other notable news of the day.)
  • Cleveland’s stadium agency is on the hook for nearly all upkeep of the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, and the alcohol and cigarette taxes that are supposed to pay for them are running dry, so someone is going to need to find more money to spend on the teams. (Right now Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is fronting his team’s arena costs, and the city and county will have to pay him back.) Some of the work includes upgraded elevators and escalators for the Cavs, kitchen equipment upgrades and new in-stadium TV screens for the Guardians, and a special film on the new glass wall at the Cavs arena to keep birds from flying into it which will have to be replaced every five years, not all of which really seem like “capital repairs” to me, but from the sound of things whoever negotiated these leases on behalf of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County did an absolutely horrible job that is allowing the team owners to bill the public for any and all upgrades, can lawyers be found guilty of malpractice? Make a note to check into that.
  • Speaking of malpractice, the Baltimore Banner managed to write about the Ravens‘ new stadium upgrades with only the briefest of mentions that state taxpayers are picking up the entire $430 million tab, and not mentioning at all that Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti can avail himself of another $170 million or much more after that. The headline the Banner chose to roll with: “M&T Bank Stadium’s premium areas will soon reach new level of luxury.” Turns out corporate-run nonprofit journalism isn’t necessarily any better than corporate-run for-profit journalism, maybe we need a better model?
  • I’ve been sadly neglecting the throwdown in Indianapolis between Indy Eleven owner Ersal Ozdemir, who was planning to build a new stadium for his USL-but-wants-to-be-MLS team with $112 million in state money, and Mayor Joe Hogsett, who now wants to use the money for a different soccer stadium on a different site for a different wannabe MLS ownership group. The City-County Council is set to vote on authorizing legislation for a new “professional sports development area” (read: super-TIF district) on June 3; if it’s approved, it would then go to the state legislature for a final vote.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen’s plan to build a casino in his stadium parking lot, despite it being public parkland, is likely dead after state senator Jessica Ramos said she won’t support any casino project in her district when 75% of residents say they don’t want one. The state legislature could still pass casino authorizing legislation over the local representative’s objections, but that rarely happens, and anyway the state casino location board is unlikely to hand out a casino license to a project on such shaky ground, so probably New Yorkers will get to gamble somewhere other than the Mets parking lots, which Cohen is vowing will remain parking lots until the sun burns out, because it’s the prerogative of a sports team owner to throw a hissy fit.
  • A stairway flooded during heavy rains at the St. Louis Cardinals stadium, time to build them a new one, that’s how it works, I don’t make the rules!
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Friday roundup: More Bears $2.6B stadium subsidy fallout, plus Indianapolis switches soccer horses

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the news: I hope that those of you who enjoy using dark mode are enjoying the new dark mode plugin I installed this week (DarkMySite, if anyone cares), which seems, unlike the old one, to actually mostly work. If you haven’t tried it out and want to, click the little moon symbol at bottom right and take a load off your eyes!

Also, a special shoutout to a couple of FoS readers (unnamed, but you know who you are) who either sent in a large lump sum of cash or upped their monthly Patreon pledge for no reason at all in the last week. As I forget if I explicitly mentioned, I quit my previous day job last month, which should give me more time to devote to this site; and while I do have a new regular gig that seems promising, every step towards making this site self-sustaining is hugely helpful, so a huge thanks to all you supporters, at any level. (And for those who haven’t yet taken the plunge: There are still about a dozen more Vaportecture art prints, get ’em before they’re gone!)

Okay, enough of that, time’s a-wasting and there’s a whole week of news remainders to dig through:

  • The fallout continues from the Chicago Bears owners’ $2.6 billion stadium subsidy demand (see the updates for the math behind the updated figure), with so much more today that we’re going to have to break out the second level of bullet points:
    • Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson says it’s no contradiction that he said during his mayoral race that the city shouldn’t spend billions of dollars on a Bears stadium when there were “dozens of other urgent needs” and now thinks this is a great idea, on the grounds that he, a “middle child” from a “working-class family,” got to talk to billionaires and make sure they put some “skin in the game” and also the stadium will be “transformational” and “the Bears are staying in Chicago” and “the type of economic development this project brings” and “14 more acres of space for our children in the city of Chicago to benefit from.” Is all that the best use of $2.6 billion? I’m sorry, we’re out of time for questions, thank you for coming.
    • The Chicago Sun-Times editorial board did get a chance to ask Bears CEO Kevin Warren what would happen if the team got its $1.225 billion in taxpayer money for the stadium and nobody came up with another $1.175 billion to build new underground garages and park space, and Warren replied: “I’m not going to think negatively about that now. … If that’s the conclusion that … you want to reach now, then you can say that. I’m being positive about it … and being very transparent as far as what we need from the different three phases with this stadium project.” So, optional when projecting the city’s costs, not optional in the sense that you don’t want to go there in terms of what happens if the city doesn’t come up with another billion-plus dollars, got it.
    • Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker reiterated yesterday that he’s agin’ the whole kit and kaboodle, saying: “I’m skeptical of the proposal that was put forward and I’m even more skeptical of the ability to get enough votes for it in the General Assembly.”
    • Chicago Sun-Times columnist David Roeder suggests that if the Bears (and White Sox) want public money, they should give the public a cut of ownership of the team, though some stick-in-the-mud (okay, it’s me) points out that sports leagues love nothing more than to head off the possibility of public ownership, even blocking one-time San Diego Padres owner Joan Kroc from gifting her team to the city of San Diego on the grounds that that just isn’t done.
  • Way back in 2019, the Indiana state legislature approved giving $112 million toward a new soccer stadium for the Indy Eleven soccer team, provided owner Ersal Ozdemir got his team promoted from the USL to MLS. At the time, this seemed like an easy enough lift, since all the other kids were doing it, but it hasn’t happened yet, and now apparently Indianapolis mayor Joe Hogsett has gotten tired of waiting, announcing that he’s putting in a bid with another ownership group to get an MLS expansion team, using the same tax kickbacks that Ozdemir was looking to get. Ozdemir, who already broke ground on his stadium site last year, though it’s unclear if he’s actually started construction, is naturally enough extremely unhappy with this latest news, accusing Hogsett of “preparing to walk away” from “years of good-faith negotiations” and instead give the public money to some other soccer guy instead of him. Will there be lawsuits? Stay tuned!
  • A “hotel entrepreneur and former longtime Kansas City resident” got space on the Kansas City Star op-ed page to argue that Kansas Citians who voted against a tax subsidy for Royals and Chiefs stadiums missed an opportunity to become like Denver, where “the Coors Field development inspired a stunning downtown renaissance” where “dozens of restaurants, bars and clubs opened to serve crowds before and after the 81 hometown games each year.” I once again wish that I still had a copy of the chart someone once showed me that indicated that most of the development starts in Denver’s LoDo district actually preceded the construction of the Rockies stadium; if I can dig it up, I’ll post it here as an update.
  • The Arizona state senate is considering a bill to allow the state to approve “theme park districts” like the one Alex Meruelo wants for a Coyotes 2.0 arena, without city governments weighing in. (It did so by virtue of hollowing out an already-state-house-approved bill to give first responders access to treatment for PTSD and inserting theme park district language instead, which Arizona calls a “strike everything amendment” but “zombie bill” is a much better name.) This could make it easier for Meruelo to have the state levy a sales tax surcharge in his arena district that would be kicked back to him for construction costs; we’ll have to wait and see what the state senate thinks of it.
  • Buffalo Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula may sell up to a quarter of their team to help raise money for their share of a new stadium, after construction costs have soared by a reported $600 million. In case you needed more evidence that many if not most stadiums are money losers that are only built so that team owners can cash subsidy checks, here’s your Exhibit A.
  • Arlington, Texas is spending $4.2 million to upgrade the Texas Rangers‘ old stadium, which the team moved out of after 2019 into a new publicly funded one, because, according to Arlington Mayor Jim Ross, “it’s a regional injection of all economic development.” The stadium is currently home to the XFL Arlington Renegades and occasional concerts.
  • What more could happen to Montreal’s Olympic Stadium after costing $1 billion to build and hundreds of millions more to fix the roof on and now $870 million to fix the roof on again? How about catching fire and needing $40 million to fix the damage? You gotta wonder if the Big Owe is just trying to put itself out of its misery at this point, but Montreal officials aren’t getting the message.
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Friday roundup: If you hate giving public money to sports billionaires, 2023 really sucked

access_time personNeil deMause

Welp, that’s another year in the books. In 2023 we saw the Baltimore Orioles and Ravens owners finalizing more than $600 million each in renovation subsidies, with the O’s on track to get hundreds of millions more in development subsidies; the Milwaukee Brewers pushing $435 million in renovation subsidies through the state legisltature; Nashville approving a record $1.26 billion subsidy for a new Tennessee Titans stadium; Alexandria, Virginia and St. Petersburg, Florida each proposing to break that record with new sports venues that could come with $1.5 billion public price tags for the Washington Capitals and Wizards and Tampa Bay Rays respectively; Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman kicking the tires on every possible location across two states to see who’s most likely to cough up tax dollars for a new stadium; the Chicago Bears owners kicking even more tires in even more places; Tempe, Arizona overwhelmingly voting down $500 million for a new Arizona Coyotes arena while Oklahoma City overwhelmingly voted in favor of $850 million for a new Thunder arena; and, of course, the Oakland A’s announcing their move to Las Vegas in exchange for $600 million in tax money, unless the Nevada teachers union wins its lawsuit or referendum or A’s owner John Fisher decides paying for even two-thirds of a stadium is too rich for his blood.

That’s not a great year, there, at least not if you were hoping that this site could celebrate its 25th anniversary with any signs of the great stadium swindle slowing down. Oh, we got to poke fun at Jeremy Aguero for being a lobbyist in economist’s clothing, but pointing and laughing gets unsatisfying after a while. Here’s hoping for a 2024 that involves delivering fewer sacks of tax money to billionaires, though I wouldn’t get your hopes up all that much. And hey, Field of Schemes supports dark mode now (click the little crescent moon at bottom right to try it out), and there’s a new set of fridge magnets for subscribers — sometimes you’ve just got to celebrate the one amazing victory but as often as not not.

Here’s a smattering of year-end news for everyone, thanks as always for reading and donating:

  • Everyone was talking for a minute about that Associated Press article about how there’s lots of public money going into stadiums and arenas for private sports teams, but honestly it was kind of scattershot and not anything you didn’t already know if you regularly read this website, or honestly even if you read that first paragraph above. There are some nice enough quotes from economist Rob Baade (“It’s not as if the concrete is falling down and people are in grave danger if they attend a game”) and J.C. Bradbury (“When you ask economists should we fund sports stadiums, they can’t say ‘no’ fast enough”), but if you want to skip the entire thing, you have my permission.
  • The British Columbia “crown corporation” (what they call quasi-public government agencies in Canada) that owns B.C. Place says it needs upgrades to host the 2026 men’s World Cup after getting $514 million in upgrades to host the women’s World Cup in 2015. No price tag yet, but the stadium owner warned that without renovations Vancouver “wouldn’t have been able to attract Taylor Swift” — hey, that’s Montreal’s line!
  • It’s now been 25 days since the A’s owners canceled a planned reveal of new stadium designs on the grounds that two Nevada state troopers had been shot several days earlier, I’m sure it will no longer be too soon any year now.
  • Indy Eleven‘s stadium is being built on a literal graveyard, this should go well.
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Friday roundup: No public ballot for Rays stadium, more questions about A’s Vegas move

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the week’s stadium and arena news, let’s pause to appreciate that New York’s nutso mayor Eric Adams‘ campaign staff have been revealed to be under investigation for illegally accepting donations from the government of Turkey. Which I guess sort of qualifies as stadium news given Adams’ boosterism of that NYC F.C. stadium that could cost city taxpayers $800 million in infrastructure spending and tax breaks, but mostly: Yes, Turkey. Also his chief fundraiser and campaign consultant who is at the heart of the investigation is apparently 25 years old? This is going to make a great Netflix documentary in a couple of years.

But enough about my city, how’s yours doing?

  • The St. Petersburg city council voted 5-3 yesterday to hold a public referendum on spending about $600 million on a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium — which means the referendum won’t happen, because the motion required a two-thirds supermajority. Also it would have been only advisory, anyway. Council chair Brandi Gabbard, who opposed the public ballot measure, said she was afraid it wouldn’t be possible to explain the stadium deal in the 75 words available, which is certainly a novel line of reasoning.
  • Former Miami Marlins president David Samson says there is still “a deal to be done to keep the A’s in Oakland” because Las Vegas has “several issues that are not worked out yet” like whether A’s owner John Fisher actually has the money for his share of the project. Meanwhile, former Oakland A’s VP Andy Dolich says it would be a mistake for MLB to approve the relocation of the team from a large market to what would be baseball’s smallest. Not that either of them holds clout with the current crop of MLB owners, or they would still have jobs with them, but it’s keeping hope alive in Oakland, anyway, in advance of a likely vote by owners on relocation sometime this month.
  • Here’s an article about how a special tax district for Indy Eleven‘s new $1 billion stadium wouldn’t really cost taxpayers anything because it would just be a “special tax” that will be levied on soccer fans. And here’s an article explaining that the district would actually divert existing sales and income tax revenues from a large swath of downtown toward the USL team. The city-county council is set to vote on the tax district later this month; let’s hope they’re reading all the news coverage first and not just WRTV’s.
  • The Arizona Diamondbacks just got blown out in the World Series, and former team owner Jerry Colangelo thinks this makes it an excellent time to build them a new or renovated stadium, because “there’s a good vibe.” Gotta capitalize on vibes like this!
  • The Oklahoma City Thunder arena has been “the centerpiece of OKC’s innovative self-help effort, producing energy and economic impact that academic studies cannot predict, but 30 years of OKC success prove,” according to some downtown business development dude who was given a “guest column” in the Oklahoman to make this case. He adds that tearing it down and building a newer one would “create new and currently unimaginable opportunities,” which, that’s certainly an interesting choice of adjectives there.
  • Kansas City Chiefs CEO Clark Hunt says he’s waiting to see what the Royals decide about a new stadium before deciding what to ask for in terms of a new or renovated stadium for his team. “If the Royals do decide to stay in Jackson County, that’s going to be an issue that we’ve got to resolve,” Hunt said, which is maybe a hint that he’s hoping they’ll move to the county next door so he can get all of the future sales tax proceeds? That would have been a good followup question, if the reporters covering this had asked any, oh well.
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Friday roundup: D-Backs threaten to move (somewhere nearby), and why MSG probably won’t be evicted

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday, everybody! Or happy for everyone except Arizona Diamondbacks fans, who are going to be stuck buying souvenir jerseys with an extremely ugly shoulder patch for the foreseeable future after MLB decided to start selling ad space on players’ shoulders for the upcoming season. (Some other teams’ are not so bad, though the Houston Astros‘ might be even worse.) Or maybe, given the design of a stark black square, this is actually a memorial patch for an electronics company that tragically passed away during the offseason? R.I.P., Avnet.

And now for some other ways sports team owners are making life demonstrably worse for all concerned:

  • Speaking of the Diamondbacks, team CEO Derrick Hall spoke to the media this week about plans for a new or renovated stadium, which he didn’t actually say anything concrete about, though he did say “we’re still looking at what other options might be in Maricopa County, not outside of Maricopa County, and there’s been some interested parties.” Oh, do tell, some other cities in the Phoenix area want to build the D-Backs a new stadium? This isn’t going to be a Canadian girlfriend thing, is it? Hall also said “we’re prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, we’re not looking for a handout,” which is amusing coming after the team lobbied the state to let it use a sales-tax surcharge for stadium improvements.
  • Madison Square Garden’s special operating permit expires on July 24, but even if that happens without a renewal by then, the New York Knicks and Rangers probably won’t be evicted, since the city would likely let the arena keep operating during a review process, reports The City. (Sorry to those of you who were getting your hopes up for the city parking a zamboni on center ice.) There was a public community board hearing on Wednesday on the operating permit, which according to AMNY’s report was dominated by sports fans shouting that they love their teams and rail station fans shouting that they’d love to see MSG gone so they could have a new Penn Station. There are probably better and even more democratic ways of solving policy debates than having people shout into microphones while power brokers largely ignore them and do what they want regardless, but that doesn’t seem the direction we’re headed.
  • St. Petersburg is spending $250,000 to hire an outside law firm to negotiate a term sheet for a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium, and know what, this probably isn’t a bad use of tax dollars: City lawyers are so historically awful at writing sports contract language that hired guns who know what they’re doing might actually earn back their pay and more. Unless city officials tell them to just get a deal done and not worry about the fine print, that could always happen, but as a glass-half-full kind of person I prefer not to think about what could go wrong — okay, my motto is actually “prepare for the worst, adjust if your expectations are exceeded” and it’s never steered me wrong, but sometimes things have to work out better than expected, it’s just the law of averages, right? Anyway, St. Petersburg is talking about building a billion-dollar stadium, at least it’s not cheaping out on lawyers to determine who pays for it, that’s better than nothing.
  • No, WIBC-FM, “Indy Eleven Owner, Ersal Ozdemir, Speaks on the New Indy Eleven Stadium” is not actually a news story, especially not when Ozdemir’s entire quote is “We do not need to go to the MLS to build a stadium the project should self-generate enough, we’re making a transformational impact to this area (downtown).” (“Transformational”! Everybody drink!) And no, Indianapolis Business Journal, it’s not any better when you give space to Ozdemir to say he would love to own an MLS franchise if someone gave him one, jeez, journalism people, are we going to start reporting on rich guys’ drink orders next? (Answer: You don’t want to know.)
  • The fight against the Philadelphia 76ers owners’ plan to build a new arena bordering the city’s Chinatown has reached the Miley Cyrus parody lyrics phase.
  • Sick of me always harping on about what a bad deal stadium and arena subsidies are without talking about all the other dumb things elected officials spend money on? Then you will enjoy my recent article for Hell Gate investigating what kind of bang for the buck New York state is getting for its film tax credits that Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to see increased. (Answer: Not a very good one!) Unless you are one of the commenters who works in the film industry and wonders why I didn’t focus on tax breaks for jet fuel for the airline industry instead — sigh, wait here, I guess I’ll be back in a couple thousand words’ time…
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Friday roundup: Bears buy stadium land but won’t promise to build stadium on it, and other confusing news of the week

access_time personNeil deMause

We have made it to the end of another week, or will soon, anyway. Why not celebrate with a round of bullet points about ways in which pro sports team owners are seeking to extract money from the public purse to use to pad their own profits? No, no, that was a rhetorical question, I’m sure you have many good reasons why not, but you’re here now and it’s too late to go back. so:

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Friday roundup: More Coyotes follies, plus the race for Worst Stadium Article Ever

access_time personNeil deMause

If you missed my debut appearance on Twitter Spaces last night, you missed a whole lot of host Justin Hayes saying “we’ll just make one more try at getting Neil on the chat” while I figured out that I needed to update my iPhone app. You can relive the excitement, and the eventual conversation on the subject of “Why Isn’t There More Opposition to Taxpayer Handouts to Sports Teams?” that resulted between Justin, economist J.C. Bradbury, development subsidy researcher Michael Farren, Center Square reporter Jon Styf, and myself, by clicking here.

And now, on with the leftover news of the week:

  • The $20 million in renovations Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo is paying to add to Arizona State University’s arena in time for the 2022-23 NHL season … will not be ready in time for the 2022-23 NHL season. They should be ready by December, which means the team will either have to ask league permission to play in a substandard arena for a couple of months or will have to start the year on one hell of a road trip, either of which is hilarious if you’re not a Coyotes fan, which is to say for most everyone reading this.
  • Worst Stadium Article Ever is a tough title to compete for, but this Tennessean piece on the Titans‘ proposed $1.2 billion stadium subsidy has a strong case, thanks to sentences like “Cooper’s spearheading a financing strategy that doesn’t require any taxpayer investment, with generous contributions from state leaders and the National Football League.” Does … does Tennessean reporter Sandy Mazza think that “state leaders” have money to spend that doesn’t come from taxpayers? Has she just given up under the strain of writing for a Gannett paper, and that’s why she got that master’s in film studies to prepare for a career change? I’m right there with her if so, the journalism industry is a death ride to nowhere, good thing it’s not the only thing standing between us and the collapse of what remains of democracy!
  • Then again, “Olympics Could Provide Billion-Dollar Boost to LA’s Infrastructure” when a more accurate headline would be “Olympics Will Require Spending Billion Dollars to Upgrade LA’s Infrastructure” is pretty bad too, yes I’m talking to you, Front Office Sports. Are we doomed? We’re probably doomed.
  • A CBC article that quotes a “communications and media management” professor as saying that even if companies that buy stadium naming rights don’t see their finances improve at all, it’s worth it for “brand awareness”? Most weeks a strong contender, maybe, but not nearly stupid enough in the new normal.
  • Indy Eleven‘s three-years-dormant stadium plans may finally be moving forward, now that team owner Ersal Ozdemir has bought a plot of land for $7.6 million. (Ozdemir actually bought it last October, but just announced it now.) The USL team owner already has $112 million in state money signed off on, so now all he needs is the other $38 million for stadium costs, plus up to $1 billion to build a mixed-use district around the stadium, which could come from tax increment financing, aka, kicking back city property taxes on the development. Indianapolis really is dead-set on retaining its crown as king of the sports subsidy cities, no matter how many checks it has to write.
  • Speaking of long-running sagas, the Ottawa Senators owners have finally won approval to build an arena at LeBreton Flats, which would be paid for by, uh, “Thursday’s announcement did not included details of the financing of the arena project or a timeline for when it would be completed,” okay, will check back once somebody has actual money to spend.
  • And speaking of even more long-running sagas, NYC F.C. may now be looking at a temporary home in a soccer/track stadium in a public park on an island that is virtually impossible to get to without a car in a city where most people don’t drive, this is going to go just great!
  • Four New York state residents are suing the state over its $1 billion Buffalo Bills subsidy on the grounds that the state constitution doesn’t allow public spending for the benefit of private corporations, which, nice try, but that ship has long sailed, that’s pretty much all the state does now.
  • Anaheim is going to have to repay Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno $5 million in prep costs he spent on stadium planning before his deal fell apart because the city’s mayor was caught soliciting bribes in exchange for approving it, probably. Because of course it is, what did you expect, a happy ending?
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Friday roundup: NFL to shop for overseas host cities, plus the attack of the no-good, terrible stadium names

access_time personNeil deMause

How’s everyone doing out there? Did you, like me, spend much of yesterday watching baseball games and wondering why MLB bothers to have mask rules if half the fans are keeping their masks off at any given time, and then wondering if this is really the right thing to be concerned about rather than all the people who are leaving the game and going to indoor sports bars, and then wondering if disregard for mask rules is a reasonable proxy for being careless about going to bars as well? I hope not, because that is very much my job, and the mission of this site remains Thinking Too Hard About Things So You Don’t Have To.

Which is one nice thing about Fridays: No thinking too hard, because all the leftover news gets boiled down to a single bite-size bullet point, ideally with a quip at the end. It’s like pre-wrapped meals of stadium facts, and here’s this week’s assortment:

  • The NFL is adding a 17th game to its season, mostly so it can charge TV networks more for the extra game but also to create more games that can be played outside the U.S. to help increase the league’s international visibility, and the operators of Montreal’s Olympic Stadium and Vancouver’s B.C. Place have both said they’ll throw their hats in the rings. You can read my thoughts about Olympic Stadium here; suffice to say that it’s simultaneously perfectly serviceable and not at all what sports owners consider state-of-the-art at selling people things other than a seat to sit in. It’ll be very interesting to see whether the NFL makes its international game hosting decisions based on which markets it most wants to break into or which cities offer the snazziest stadiums. (Or which cities offer straight-up cash, that’s always a popular NFL move.)
  • Indy Eleven USL team owner Ersal Ozdemir got his approval from the Indiana state legislature this week to take more time on how to spend his $112 million in state stadium cash, and team officials replied that they will now take their own sweet to to “finalize the site” “in the coming months.” Given that Ozdemir at first asked for the cash so he could get promoted to MLS and then later decided, know what, maybe he’ll stay put in the USL and avoid all those expansion fees but still get the snazzy new digs, there is a non-zero chance that he decides to ask to use the money to build condos or a space laser or something.
  • The Henderson Silver Knights have sold naming rights to their publicly funded and owned under-construction arena (I know it doesn’t make any sense, this is just how naming rights are allowed to work in most of the U.S. with few exceptions) to the payday loan company Dollar Loan Center, which means the arena will now be called … also the Dollar Loan Center? Shouldn’t it at least be the Dollar Loan Center Arena? This seems like very confusing branding, among other things, though I guess it’ll at least be amusing when people use Google Maps to try to find places to get high-interest advances on their paychecks and end up at the Silver Knights ticket window.
  • Also in the terrible names department, we have the Miami Marlins cutting a deal with a mortgage loan company that starts with a lower-case letter, which is going to wreak havoc among sports department copy editors across the land. (Just kidding: All the sports departments have already fired all their copy editors, pUNCtuATE and spel tHiNgZ however U want!!1!)
  • Here’s some video of the under-construction Phoenix Rising F.C. soccer stadium, which when it was announced last December would be ready for 2021 I predicted would be “off-the-rack bleachers that can be installed quickly,” and which indeed looks exactly like that. No robot dog showrooms or giant soccer balls are visible, sadly, but the USL season doesn’t start for another three weeks, so there’s still time to find some off-the-rack robot dogs.
  • And finally, across the pond, Everton F.C. finally had its stadium plan approved by the Liverpool City Council, meaning the £500 million project can move ahead. The city is loaning a little over half that money to Everton’s billionaire owner Farhad Moshiri, but Moshiri is then supposed to repay it in actual cash with interest, so the only real concerns are why Liverpool needs to act as banker for a rich guy, and whether it’s a good idea to build an oceanfront stadium when the oceans are already starting to rise. Those other countries have such quaint problems compared to America’s!
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Friday roundup: Baseball ticket chaos, and the continuing endless rain of minor-league soccer stadium demands

access_time personNeil deMause

New York state announced yesterday that baseball stadiums will be open at 20% capacity to start the season, which, as things go, is not one of the stupidest reopenings announced by Gov. Gropey this week. As a Mets fan who will be fully vaccinated-plus-two-weeks by shortly after Opening Day, it has me weighing whether sitting three hours masked and distanced outdoors at a ballgame is low-risk enough to be worth considering or still terrible for society as a whole, which in turn had me checking out the Mets’ ticket sale policies:

All ticket management actions for tickets for impacted games [in April], including Ticket Forwarding, will be canceled. These tickets will be removed from your account and are no longer valid for admission.

Glad I didn’t buy tickets when I first noticed they were on sale a couple of weeks ago, because those are apparently now worthless. (Worthless for entry, anyway; you can still get a credit on your account for the purchase price.) Season ticket holders will get first dibs at buying the new blocks of tickets, at least for April; it’s unclear when the mad scramble for seats begins.

Then I checked the Yankees‘ site, and found this:

To be eligible, fans must have purchased their tickets through Ticketmaster and not have transferred, posted or resold them. If the tickets were transferred, the transferee or recipient of the ticket will need to transfer the tickets back to the original purchaser in order for the original purchaser to request a credit or refund. The credit request option is not available for tickets purchased via resale or the secondary market.

If you bought through Stubhub or the like, in other words, you are SOL, unless you can find the person you bought from and have them ask for a refund, then refund you.

I get why the teams are doing this — rather than figure out how to reassign already-purchased seats in distanced pods, it’s way simpler to just refund everybody and start fresh with new ticket sales. But it’s hard not to foresee a whole lot of lawsuits, or at least angry tweets, from people who bought or sold what are now worthless barcodes, and questions about whether pro sports are becoming the latest realm where buying a thing doesn’t mean you’re actually buying it.

Anyway, enough about that. On to the stadium and arena news, which I know you’ve been waiting for and which includes lots of good juicy schadenfreude, plus more minor-league soccer than you can shake a stick at:

  • I’ve been mostly steering clear of the debate over where to build a new high-school sports stadium in Spokane, because, frankly, high-school sports stadium in Spokane, and also the money ($31 million) has already been allocated, so it’s now just a question of where to build it. But if you want an explainer, here’s a good one, which I will now summarize even more briefly: Spokane residents want the stadium to be built where the current stadium is, but the USL says it’ll put a soccer team in Spokane if they move it to a site downtown, so now city officials are trying to decide who it’s more important to listen to, their constituents or the guys dangling a minor-league soccer franchise. Also local business advocates say that if the city doesn’t build a stadium downtown, the USL may look to build there anyway, and they already have $2 million in cash plus a promise of $1 million from an unidentified investor, and that’s only $28 million short! More news as events warrant, which I seriously hope is never.
  • Elsewhere in everybody-gets-a-pro-soccer-team, Grand Rapids may get a USL team if it can be determined how to fund a $40 million stadium. Nobody’s talking public money just yet, but a guy from Convention, Sports & Leisure — yes, those guys — has been hired to talk up how a stadium “has the ability to anchor development, serve as a destination but also kind of speed up and accelerate reinvestment into areas of the city, whether that’s in downtown or on the purview of downtown,” so it’s gotta be only a matter of time.
  • And the Indy Eleven, currently of the USL but maybe one day to be in MLS if you dream real hard, are still seeking their own $150 million stadium, saying it would be “more than a stadium, it is the opportunity to create a vibrant community that will attract individuals and families from near and far to live, work and play — creating jobs and improving quality of place far beyond game day.” Team owner Ersal Ozdemir already got $112 million in state money approved for the stadium last year, but then decided maybe he’d build a smaller stadium and give up on the plans to join MLS that were the whole reason for him getting the $112 million. The state legislature is currently deciding whether to give Ozdemir more time to figure out exactly which scam he wants to pull or to take back the money; “give him more rope” just unanimously passed the state house ways and means committee, so that’s not a great sign.
  • A Nevada state senator is proposing to create a state esports commission to lure major video-game tournaments to Nevada, because “economic development.” I’m still not entirely clear how many people actually travel to attend esports rather than just watching online — attendance figures are brutally hard to come by online, though apparently 45,000 turned out for one event in Beijing in 2017 — but this is one to keep an eye on, especially if esports organizers start choosing site based less on who has the most regulatory oversight (?) and more on who offers cold, hard cash.
  • And finally, circling back to questionable sports reopenings, the Texas Rangers decided to advertise their 100% capacity opening day by showing a fan flagrantly violating their own mask rules. This is all going to go just great!

 

 

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