Category: Inter Miami

Friday roundup: Oakland Coliseum redevelopment moves ahead (maybe), DeSantis writes $8m taxpayer check to Inter Miami stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

In case you’re wondering why sports team owners keep on releasing incredibly amateurish vaportecture stadium renderings that are just going to subject them to ridicule, check out these headlines from just the last two days: “Browns players share thoughts on Brook Park stadium renderings,” “Cleveland Browns stadium saga: Fans react to renderings of Brook Park proposal,” “Cavaliers Star Donovan Mitchell Chimes In On Browns New Stadium Proposal.” Pretty pictures, or even doofy-looking ones, are red meat to click-starved news outlets, and so long as they keep getting coverage that is more “ooh, shiny” than “who’s going to pay for this exactly?” the CAD mills are going to be kept busy.

And speaking of busy, let’s see what else happened this week:

  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher has agreed to sell his half of the Oakland Coliseum property to developers African American Sports & Entertainment Group for $125 million, which is $20 million more than the city of Oakland got for its half. Now AASEG will convert it into a “$5 billion megaproject that could include a new convention center, restaurant, hotel, youth amphitheater and restaurants,” and maybe a soccer stadium — or could, you know, not, depending on how the economic winds blow. That the group’s private equity partner says the money will come from “investors” isn’t exactly reassuring, but at least a Coliseum development might pencil out as a better investment than the plan that Fisher is trying to sell.
  • One thing to breathe easy about with Inter Miami‘s much-delayed new stadium is that at least it’s not getting any public money, and … wait, why is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holding a giant $8 million check made out to the stadium? He can just do that? (Answer: Yes, it’s from an infrastructure slush fund he controls.) Technically the money is going toward traffic improvements around the stadium, but still, handing over $8 million to support a stadium that’s going to happen whether or not you spend the taxpayer dollars on it and then declaring “we just don’t believe that we give money to build sports stadiums” is a nice trick if you can pull it off.
  • And speaking of privately funded soccer stadiums getting public funding, how about Kansas City spending upwards of $30 million in cash and tax breaks for a parking garage for the KC Current‘s newly opened stadium? The deal isn’t final yet, so no publicity photos of oversized checks for now.
  • Signal Cleveland speculates that the proposed $2.4 billion Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park could use tax increment financing to cover some of its bills, with the $740,000 a year in property taxes the site currently generates continuing to go to local schools while anything above that number would be kicked back to help pay for the stadium. Except if you believe transit blogger and Browns dome enthusiast Ken Prendergast, the newly developed land would “generate millions more in property taxes or payments in lieu of taxes for Brook Park schools than it does now,” and both things can’t be right. We’ll just have to wait and see what’s actually in the financial plan, which the Browns owners seem perfectly content not to reveal anytime soon, not when they can get Donovan Mitchell making headlines by tweeting that a new stadium is “gonna be fire.”
  • The new Worcester Red Sox stadium has “put the Canal District’s emergence on overdrive,” according to a Boston Globe article citing … some bars that opened nearby? Not mentioned: What the numbers show about the city’s bang for its 150 million bucks, despite there being local economists who could have easily told the Globe the answer.
  • In Anaheim, meanwhile, the presence of the Los Angeles Angels has spawned a group of about 40 hot dog vendors who’ve set up outside the stadium, and Angels execs hate it because that’s money that’s not going into team pockets — no, of course not, they’re just concerned about someone “getting severely sick or even dying due to food poisoning,” because we know how devoted the Angels organization is to ensuring people get quality food.
  • Thomas Tresser, not the DC Comics villain but the author of a book on the successful campaign to defeat Chicago’s Olympic bid, has launched a petition to demand that the city of Chicago not provide any public money or land for sports stadiums, feel free to sign if you’re the petition-signing type.
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When will Inter Miami open their Miami stadium already? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

With the book finally closed on the Tampa Bay Rays stadium saga, the longest-running stadium campaign in Florida is now likely that of Inter Miami, which goes back 11 years, to a time before the team even existed. After innumerable twists and turns, team owners David Beckham and Jorge Mas finally got approval in 2018 to build a privately funded stadium on a public golf course, then a year later went and built a temporary stadium in Fort Lauderdale to play in in the interim.

All of which brings us to this week, when team execs announced that the Miami stadium, set to open next year, will not actually open next year, which will instead be the “final season” in Fort Lauderdale. In fact, construction hasn’t even yet begun:

In 2023, Inter Miami Managing Owner Jorge Mas said, “I can’t wait to welcome our fans to our state-of-the-art stadium and hear the chants as Messi and your Inter Miami players take the pitch for the first time in 2025.” However, despite Mas’ promise to fast-track the project, construction crews are still working on clearing the land, and the building of the stadium structure has not yet begun…

After reviewing the progress made to date, stadium expert Denys Schwartz, who worked on the Maracana Stadium project, said, “Based on previous experience, I believe it might take from 24 to 30 months to reach project completion if the construction progress is accelerated.”

Sooooo, 24-30 months from now puts us at somewhere between August 2026 and February 2027, which would mean that next season would decidedly not be the final season in Fort Lauderdale. (It could be the final full season there, maybe, if Inter moved to its new stadium mid-2026.)

But more important, is this thing even getting built at all? From this video from two weeks ago, it looks like a bit more has been done than land clearance: There’s some compacting of the soil being done, plus what looks like some rebar in the ground to serve as the foundation for the stadium. So it’s in progress, albeit in the very, very early stages, which makes a 24-30 month timeline pretty reasonable.

Inter Miami fans, meanwhile, are steamed that they were suckered into buying season tickets on the promise that they would get to watch Lionel Messi in “the inaugural season at Miami Freedom Park,” which now will not happen unless Messi signs a contract extension for 2026, when he will turn 39 years old, which is very old for a soccer player, even arguably the greatest one of all time playing in a league that is not at all the greatest of all time. Could Mas and Beckham pull this same trick again, staying put in Fort Lauderdale for all or most of the 2026 season, while forcing fans to keep their season tickets active in order to get first dibs on seats at the new stadium in 2027? There’s no way to tell for sure, but given past history, yeah, probably.

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Inter Miami owners threatened with arrest for adding seats for Messi without a permit

access_time personNeil deMause

As you may have heard, soccer Greatest Of All Time Lionel Messi is joining MLS team Inter Miami next month because reasons, which should get a lot more people interested in watching MLS and particularly Inter Miami games. Inter Miami, as you may also recall, is co-owned by construction baron Jorge Mas and former GOAT David Beckham and currently plays in a temporary 18,000-seat stadium in Fort Lauderdale, while a permanent stadium on the Melreese Golf Course site in Miami still hasn’t begun construction after years of turmoil, and the owners are eager to cash in on the Messi mania that has tickets for his debut getting resold for more than $14,000. And here the hilarity begins:

On Monday, Inter Miami owner Jorge Mas told reporters he’d already contracted to add 3,000 seats to the stadium to meet the Messi-mania demand.

On Wednesday, Fort Lauderdale threatened to issue a stop-work order, claiming workers were installing new seats without a permit. A terse note from City Hall was sent at 4:42 p.m. to Inter Miami lobbyist Stephanie Toothaker telling her the city was in the process of red-tagging the stadium.

“Just so we are clear, continuing to work once a stop-work order has been issued can be an arrestable offense,” Assistant City Attorney Rhonda Hasan wrote. “We are requiring that Inter Miami follow the laws of the state and the city.”

A team lobbyist/spokesperson sent a text to the South Florida Sun Sentinel saying that no construction is underway, so hold your handcuffs. A local news station spotted “a crane lifting metal pieces” at the site yesterday, which does sound like construction, though it’s always possible Lofty was just visiting to try to build his confidence.

The backstory here is that Beckham and Mas want their fans to keep being able to park on a city-owned lot near the stadium, while the city of Fort Lauderdale wants to get paid what it says are three-years-overdue permit fees for demolishing the old stadium that sat on the site. The team owners have also promised to build a park on the site, something they’ve also been stalling on for years, most recently complaining that it’s the city’s fault for changing the park design to add a pickleball court.

The two sides are currently in mediation over the dispute, which it’s probably fair to say isn’t going well. For now, it’s just more LOLBeckham, which is nearly as entertaining as watching Messi play, so glass half-full?

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Friday roundup: Coyotes suing Phoenix over arena suit, Bills agree to CBA with no oversight, and other adventures in fine print

access_time personNeil deMause

Lots going on this week, so let’s get right to it:

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Friday roundup: When a pretend seagull on Twitter is the voice of stadium reason, you know it’s been a week

access_time personNeil deMause

And so we come to another Friday, when it is time to take stock of all the crap that happened while we were busy paying attention to other things. Was this a week where Oakland A’s president Dave Kaval continued his mission to get publicity for his team’s stadium demands in any way possible by launching a Twitter war over attendance with a pretend San Francisco seagull? You bet it was! And while I’m tempted to just stop there, allow you all to boggle appreciatively, and wish you a happy weekend, there’s other stuff that happened that is worthy of note:

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Friday roundup: David Beckham still cursed, Calgary arena plans still undead, but baseball has giant bases now, don’t say nothing ever changes

access_time personNeil deMause

So, the baseball lockout is over. A bunch of things changed (universal DH, two extra playoff teams, bigger bases and, apparently, thumbs), but most of the basic economics of the game like revenue-sharing didn’t, so there’s probably no major impact on stadium subsidy incentives. If I notice any exceptions, you’ll be the first to know.

Meanwhile, back in the same old, same old:

  • A vote of the Miami City Commission on Inter Miami’s stadium plan at Melreese golf course has been delayed for the third time in a month, ostensibly because of issues with placing a public notice in the newspaper, but more likely because it doesn’t have the needed four out of five votes. As a reminder, the Inter Miami soccer stadium plan wouldn’t require any public money but would require selling public parkland, and also is cursed, probably because David Beckham once opened a mummy’s tomb or something.
  • The Calgary city council responded to the rising cost overruns that caused the Flames owners to walk away from their arena subsidy deal by appointing a committee to try to find a third party to try to find a fourth party to come up with the missing money, in exchange for the people’s ovation and fame forever, or something. “I think it is not if the event centre gets built, it is when the event centre gets built,” said councillor Sonya Sharp, which has a famous last words feel about it, yes, but also it seems like the Calgary council is determined to find a way to give the Flames $300 million, so we may be here a while.
  • Oh, here’s some relevant baseball lockout news, sort of: It’s been reported that the Tampa Bay Rays, famed payroll cheapskates (and successful at winning in spite of it), made a contract offer to top free agent Freddie Freeman before the lockout began. Is this a sign that the Rays aren’t in as dire financial shape as team owner Stuart Sternberg insists? That Sternberg figures a marquee player will help their campaign to get massive stadium subsidies from Tampa or St. Petersburg? Or, given that the report is from never-met-an-owner-he-didn’t-like baseball reporter Jon Heyman, that Sternberg figures it’ll help their stadium campaign for people to think he was thinking of signing Freeman, whether he was or not? Now that the lockout is over and spring training about to start, Freeman could sign somewhere any minute now, so we’ll see how real that rumor was, maybe.
  • Buffalo’s Investigative Post has sued Erie County to get hold of that engineering study of the Bills‘ current stadium that shows how much it would actually cost to maintain it instead of building a $1.4 billion new one, and which the county refuses to make public because “safety” something something. Odds that the study is made public before the state legislature has to vote on a stadium funding bill later this month: pretty much zero, but if nothing else we may have some fodder for I-told-you-sos.
  • Jacksonville Jaguars president Mark Lamping says he’ll be watching the Bills talks carefully, as his team is seeking renovation money for its 26-year-old stadium: “It’ll be very interesting to see what happens with the Bills’ stadium. Certainly, when you think of Buffalo and Jacksonville, the comparisons are valid in terms of the emotional ties the NFL franchises have to their city and region.” Anchoring!
  • Rock Hill, South Carolina’s plan to sell $225 million in bonds to fund a practice facility for the Carolina Panthers has apparently hit a snag — can’t imagine why, given that the start of this sentence isn’t completely insane at all — and York County may have to step in to borrow the money instead. I wonder what I said back when this was first announced two years ago, let’s see: “it’s tough to come up with new ways to laugh to keep from crying.” Yep, still valid!
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Friday roundup: Tempe arena could depend on election, Bears land buy in limbo, Inter Miami stadium maybe finally not?

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! I have a fresh shipment of fridge magnets set to arrive this weekend, so if you’re a new or re-upped Field of Schemes subscriber waiting for yours, you shouldn’t have to wait long. And if you’re just waiting for the week’s roundup of stadium and arena news, you don’t have to wait at all, just to the end of this sentence, I swear we’ll get there soon, here we go:

  • Hopefuls for Tempe’s city council were asked about the proposed Arizona Coyotes arena with potentially more than $200 million in tax subsidies at a candidate forum last night, and their answers were: “good deal,” tax subsidies are bad, economic development is good but tax subsidies are maybe bad, economic development is good but traffic is bad, Tempe should “evaluate everything very carefully,” development is good but only if it doesn’t cost too much, and jobs are good but tax subsidies are bad. There’s no real way of reading tea leaves there to tell who would vote which way on an arena, but with three new councilmembers set to be seated in July, it certainly could tip the fragile balance that is currently running slightly anti-arena, maybe, if unnamed sources are to be believed.
  • Glendale, meanwhile, is about to embark on a $40 million renovation of the Coyotes’ old arena to optimize it for concerts, which, sure, at that relatively modest price tag it might actually pay for itself. Plus if there aren’t enough concerts, there’s always professional bull riding.
  • The Chicago Bears owners still haven’t bought the Arlington Racecourse site as they say they want to, and may not until 2023, and even then will only “decide whether it’s financially feasible to try to develop it further,” according to team president Ted Phillips. From the outside, the answer to that appears to be “nope, doesn’t look like it, but hey it’s your $2 billion,” but as it’s still possible the team may ask for public money, it’s worth keeping an eye on even if you’re not a Bears fan concerned about where you’ll have to be spending your Sundays starting in 2027 or something.
  • This actually happened last week, but Miami Mayor Francis Suarez and Inter Miami owner Jorge Mas say they’ve finally reached an agreement on a new stadium at Melreese golf course, with the city commission to vote on it maybe as soon as the end of the month. The Miami Herald is skeptical, as anyone should be given how long Mas and his co-owner David Beckham have been trying to work out a Miami stadium deal, but I guess stay tuned both for whether a vote takes place and for what exactly the details will be of what they’re voting on.
  • You people keep asking me about this article in the Buffalo Chronicle claiming that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to build a new Madison Square Garden in a public park where my son’s high school soccer team used to practice, and my response is that not only does it cite no named sources (just “an official with Empire State Development”), and my answer is that the Buffalo Chronicle seems to be not a real news outlet, but rather a site run by a PR consultant for “Native American financiers” who runs whatever stories he wants in order to “shape the public discourse.” Also both Hochul’s office and Empire State Development say the story is made up, so please let’s not waste more time and energy debating whether this non-plan would make any sense.
  • I know it’s not technically stadium news, but if you’d like to read about how legalized sports gambling isn’t likely to produce the tax windfall that states are hoping for, I wrote an article about this for my old Vice Sports editor Patrick Hruby at Global Sport Matters, go check it out.
  • And I also know I spend a lot of time picking on understaffed news sites for terrible reporting and worse copy editing, but you gotta admit it’s pretty hilarious that WYRK-FM in Buffalo has has a headline up for two days reading “Here’s What the New Bills Stadium Should Like.” I sincerely hope it’s strawberry ice cream.
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Beckham to Fort Lauderdale: About that public park I said I’d build, how about another soccer stadium instead?

access_time personNeil deMause

When David Beckham’s Inter Miami won approval back in 2018 to build a temporary stadium in Fort Lauderdale so they could finally launch their laughably bad soccer team, one of the things he and his fellow owners promised was that they would build a public park on part of the city land he was being given for the stadium. This wasn’t a new promise — they had also promised to build a park on the Miami golf course where they wanted to build a permanent stadium — but whereas that Miami stadium seems forever away from ever being built, the Fort Lauderdale stadium now exists, so the park must, too, right?

Not so much, it turns out:

The deal, sealed with a commission vote in 2019, says the park needs to be built by July 2022. Work has not even begun. On game day, the entire span of the grassy parcel is being used as an overflow parking lot…

During the commission’s summer break, [Vice Mayor Heather] Moraitis said, Beckham United presented a surprise proposal that would siphon more land away from the park.

Toothaker said Inter Miami officials are in talks to bring a national women’s soccer league to Fort Lauderdale, describing the development as a gift that fell out of the sky. The team would play under the Inter Miami name and share the 18,000-seat stadium with the men’s team.

With no space left on the 40 acres, the new training facility and practice field would have to be built on a portion of the 20 acres to the south reserved for the public park, Toothaker said.

Moraitis punctuated her point by posing for a photo standing on the erstwhile parkland with a handwritten sign reading “Standing on Empty Promises,” which was a nice touch. However Instagram-savvy the vice mayor is, however, she is only one vote, and three commissioners are all it would take for Beckham to get his way. And it looks like he has the votes, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, including commissioner Steve Glassman, who said a women’s soccer stadium could be used for soccer even after the men’s soccer team moved out from the stadium next door — yeah, look, I’m just reporting what he said here, not trying to make sense of it — and added, “This is not an area that screams out neighborhood park. And you can quote me on that.”

So, okay, since you’re giving Beckham 20 acres of free land that he was supposed to turn over to public use, you’re going to ask him for some more money for that, or some land elsewhere where you’d rather have a park, or something, right? Right, Mayor Dean Trantalis?

“We didn’t give them anything,” he said. “We own the stadium. They have a license to use the stadium for 50 years. They made a $160 million investment in the city. And we own the whole thing. I think that’s a pretty sweet deal for the city.”

Yep, the city of Fort Lauderdale owns the stadium, and Inter Miami is committed to use it for for 50 years and pay (checks notes) zero rent. Pretty sweet deal for the city!

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Friday roundup: How to tell a dump of a stadium from a marvel, and why “stupid infrastructure” should become a term of art

access_time personNeil deMause

I have nothing introductory to say this week other than that I’m wondering if you kind FoS supporters would give me $2 million in 24 hours if I made more robots out of lacrosse masks. So on to the news:

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Friday roundup: Phoenix to get USL stadium with giant disappearing soccer ball, plus more fallout from MLB slashing minor league teams

access_time personNeil deMause

Too much going on this week to have time for more than a brief intro, but I do want to note that “’Company announces advertising campaign’ is not a story, no matter how easily that campaign can be metabolized by the publications it’s aimed at” is something that should be tattooed on the foreheads of all journalists, even if it is a quote from an article about Pantone colors.

And now, how sports team owners and their friends are trying to rip you off this week:

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