Category: New England Revolution

Friday roundup: How fast is the A’s Vegas stadium going nowhere, and other questions

access_time personNeil deMause

Another week down! Have you been enjoying the Olympics so far? Did you even remember the Olympics were happening, other than to make sure you weren’t going anywhere near Paris during them? I, for one, cannot wait for the 2028 flag football competition.

Meanwhile, here’s what’s been happening:

  • Until now Oakland A’s owner John Fisher’s lack of any options for funding a Las Vegas stadium has just been widespread conjecture, but now a research note by JMP Securities analyst Mitch Germain confirms it: “The Oakland A’s new stadium currently remains in a holding pattern. The last piece of the puzzle was private financing obtained by the owner for the remaining cost of the stadium. Chatter suggests this may have hit a roadblock.” Oh wait, “chatter” could just mean Germain is reading the same conjecture? We can upgrade it to extremely widespread conjecture, at least.
  • Oakland has officially signed a deal to sell its half of the Oakland Coliseum site to the African American Sports & Entertainment Group for $105 million, paid out between now and June 2026. If AASEG fails to make the payments, then … that part didn’t make it into the San Francisco Chronicle story, it’s okay, they had bigger fish to fry.
  • The Massachusetts legislature adjourned this week without rezoning industrial land in Everett for a new New England Revolution stadium, and team owner Robert Kraft said he’s “deeply disappointed,” then threw some passive-aggressive shade by adding, “Massachusetts’ political landscape is one of the only places where creating opportunities in environmental justice communities and rehabilitation is dictated by the needs and bargaining of political leaders with outside influences.” Outside influences, eh? Were they … agitators?
  • Cleveland councilmembers want the Cleveland Browns to keep playing in Cleveland, not so sure about the whole “giving them hundreds of millions of dollars” thing, film at 11.
  • There are two competing proposals to put a sales tax increase back on the ballot to raise money for a Kansas City Chiefs stadiums, and the Jackson County legislature just voted down the one for a 0.125% hike over 25 years but is still working on the one for a 0.375% hike for 40 years.
  • Chicago Bears president/CEO Kevin Warren says he still prefers a new stadium on the Chicago lakefront that would come with billions of dollars in public money, but if that doesn’t work, Arlington Heights is nice, too.
  • Turns out someone did do a more robust analysis than the one by the Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office of the number of hotel room stays attributable to Philadelphia Phillies fans, and the finding was “not statistically significant.” I know Springer books are pricey, but the fiscal office really couldn’t afford $180?
  • The Atlanta Braves owners’ decision to build their stadium in the middle of the woods in the suburbs has prompted much debate, but until now it didn’t have its own Tracey Ullman parody song.
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Friday roundup: Fresh A’s vaportecture incoming, OKC readies for $850m arena vote, Revolution stadium hits snag

access_time personNeil deMause

I don’t even know where to start with this week, but suffice to say that this keeps rolling on, with no end in sight. At least, for the second consecutive day, Henry Kissinger remains dead.

And, like death and union-busting, the great stadium swindle shows no signs of going away anytime soon:

  • New Las Vegas stadium renderings for the Oakland A’s are due to be released on Monday, and A’s owner John Fisher is even scheduled to show up. (Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz notes that “Fisher is known for not interacting with fans and making public appearances to discuss his baseball team,” which is a polite way of saying that he don’t like people.) Ha ha, the Las Vegas Sun illustrated its article on this with the June stadium renderings that Fisher’s honchos immediately declared to not actually be what the stadium will look like — LOLSun, go read Snel’s coverage instead, if only for his awesome photo filenames. Meanwhile, Nevada Independent sports business reporter Howard Stutz warned that Fisher still has a lot of hoops to jump through before he can move the team — the referendum, the lawsuit, the finding another billion dollars — and “we’re not going to see much other than public meetings and different announcements over the next year,” so enjoy the dogs and ponies for now.
  • Elsewhere in A’s news, Fisher hasn’t officially notified Oakland that he plans to leave town, in order to postpone a $45 million payment to Alameda County for purchasing half of the Oakland Coliseum property. San Jose Mercury News columnist Daniel Borenstein notes that “county supervisors never bothered to require that the team stay in Oakland as a condition for acquiring the rights to the Coliseum property,” whoops, that would have been an idea, somebody make a note of that for next time.
  • The Oklahoma County Democratic Party held a panel discussion in anticipation of next week’s voter referendum on spending $850 million on a new Thunder stadium while team owners spend $50 million. Party affirmative action officer Nabilah Rawdah said the funding mechanism would be “a regressive sales tax,” which, yup, all sales taxes are regressive, and would cost city residents “around $1,200 per person,” which, yup, math. Central Oklahoma Federation of Labor president Tim O’Connor countered, “JOBS!!1!,” because he got an agreement that the project will use union labor. (Yes, it is possible to hate union-busting and to accept that actually existing unions are maybe not their most perfect selves right now.)
  • Plans for a New England Revolution stadium in Everett, just north of Boston, hit a speed bump in the Massachusetts state legislature when the plan was removed from a state budget bill in conference committee. The Boston Globe notes that the stadium would cost $600 million and “no public money is being sought — for now,” which is maybe not the most reassuring; the memorandum of understanding is only seven pages long and doesn’t provide any details on the project finances, more like a memorandum of misunderstanding, amirite?
  • They’re still talking about that damn Dodger Stadium gondola five years later — LOLgondola, don’t make me send Alissa Walker in there.
  • Baltimore Orioles owner John Angelos may now sign a new lease and work out the details of his insanely lucrative 99-year development rights agreement later, after insisting he wouldn’t sign one without the other, wut? Guess he’s convinced now that the state is happy to give him everything he wants and he doesn’t want figuring out what he wants to get in the way of having a stadium to play in next year, guess the state had leverage after all, somebody make a note of that for next time.
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Friday roundup: 76ers’ “privately funded” arena would require 30-year tax break and maybe state cash, this is why we can’t have nice things

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! Hope you enjoyed the last 24 hours of hoping that the Philadelphia 76ers‘ $1.3 billion all-privately-financed arena plan didn’t have any hidden catches, because sorry to tell you, but:

  • Buried in a Philadelphia Inquirer article about what Philly locals think of the 76ers arena plan — some are tentatively optimistic, councilmember Helen Gym opposes it like the last 76ers arena plan and a Phillies stadium plan 20 years ago, Chinatown leaders are worried about parking and traffic impacts as you would expect they would be — is this news: “the arena’s developer has also said that the plan involves inheriting a 30-year property tax break for the parcel that Council gave to the current property owners.” Since that tax break is tax increment financing — all property taxes above a certain level are getting kicked back to the developers of the mall that was built on that site — the value of that tax break will presumably increase beyond the $127.5 million already committed once there’s a pricey new arena on the property rather than just a mall, but the Inquirer didn’t provide details. Oh, plus: “the team has also opened the door to receiving state funding.” Again, no details, but all this stuff will have to be approved by the city council, if not the state legislature as well, so we should have more info eventually. For now, though, the Sixers owners’ claims of “no public money” need to come with a nine-figure asterisk.
  • “It almost seems like the NBA’s like, holding our city hostage, like, ‘if you don’t give us this, that the taxpayers don’t give us this arena, you know, like we’re going to move the team somewhere else,’” Oklahoma City resident Alex Coleman told KFOR-TV this week about Thunder owner Clay Bennett’s demands for a new arena. It’s not like that, Alex, it is that, though with the caveat that the gun the NBA is holding to the dog’s head may not even be loaded, but savvy negotiators and all.
  • Without a floor vote or any debate, the Massachusetts House approved fast-tracking a New England Revolution stadium last Thursday, exempting a likely MLS stadium site on the Everett-Boston border from a slew of environmental regulations. If it passes the state senate as well, Revolution owner Robert Kraft would have three years to come up with money to build the thing.
  • Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee, who last month announced his desire to bail out Pawtucket’s planned USL soccer stadium by diverting an extra $20 million in infrastructure funding into stadium construction instead, uh, still wants to do that. First he needs to convince the board of the state Commerce Corporation, and board members have been reticent to do so, noting that, as the Providence Journal puts it, “by agreeing to put all of the incentives toward the stadium, the state will then have to fork out an unknown amount of money in the future if it wants the rest of the project built.” This is surprisingly level-headed for the board of a state development agency, but: Yup, it sure would! Another meeting of the Commerce Corporation board is scheduled for Monday.
  • Regina, Saskatchewan is exploring building a minor-league baseball stadium despite not having a pro team (it has the Regina Red Sox, an amateur college summer team), and Jersey Village, Texas is exploring building a minor-league baseball stadium despite the region already being chock full of minor-league teams. Somebody needs to explain to them how increasing demand while the supply of teams is reduced is a good way to drive the price of teams up, but given that Jersey Village hired CSL to do its feasibility study, they may not be interested in hearing how money actually works.
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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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Friday roundup: Another Islanders arena delay, Wisconsin to wrap up Brewers stadium spending but not really, Italy wins (?) 2026 Olympics

access_time personNeil deMause

My endorsement of Hmm Daily last month was so successful that this week the site announced it’s shutting down. I am now officially afraid to tell you people to give money to any other particular site, lest I bestow the kiss of death on them as well, but you should give money to someone you like, because journalism is in bad shape, with dire effects on, among other things, the public’s ability to hold elected officials accountable.

Speaking of which, here’s this week’s news about elected officials doing unaccountable things, and the rich dudes who want to keep it that way:

UPDATE: Just realized I forgot to link to my Deadspin article yesterday on Stuart Sternberg’s Tampontreal Ex-Rays threat, Richard Nixon, Kinder eggs, and bird evolution. And now I have done so, so go read it!

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Friday roundup: Nashville saves (?) $75m by giving Predators $103m, South Carolina offers to give $125m to Panthers practice facility (?!), Oakland A’s shipping cranes are multiplying (?!?)

access_time personNeil deMause

Since last week I went off-topic to discuss a review (kindly) poking fun at some of the ridiculousness of Marvel movies, I should note that there’s a TV series that manages to create a fun, exciting superhero universe while simultaneously poking fun at the entire genre in ways that expose not just its ridiculousness but also its fundamentally Manichean politics, and which has now been canceled by Amazon, a company that has been at the forefront of scheming to shake down cities for subsidies in exchange for building its own facilities. Coincidence?!?!?!? Well, okay, yes, almost certainly, but here’s hoping The Tick ends up picked up by a less ethically compromised corporate entertainment giant, if that’s even a thing.

Where was I? Oh right, stadiums, what’s up with those this week that we didn’t get to already?

  • The Nashville Predators have indeed agreed to a 30-year lease extension as first reported last week, and how good or bad a deal it is depends on your perspective: The team’s $8.4 million a year in tax kickbacks and operating subsidies will be reduced to just $4.9 million a year in tax kickbacks, which would be $75 million in taxpayer savings but on the other hand the tax kickbacks will be extended to 2049 now instead of 2028, so that’s $102.9 million in additional taxpayer costs. (Neither figure translated into present value.)
  • A South Carolina legislative conference committee has approved $115 million in tax breaks for a Carolina Panthers practice facility in Rock Hill. Yes, you read that right, a practice facility. State officials say that the 15-year tax kickbacks of all state income taxes will pay for themselves, a conclusion that state senator Dick Harpootlian determined was based on, in the words of the Associated Press, “every Panthers player and coach moving to South Carolina and spending their entire paychecks here and the team buying all the material for the new facility from companies in the state.”
  • Speaking of practice facilities, the Washington Wizards‘ new one is costing $1 million more a year for D.C. to run than anticipated, which is not good after the city already spent $50 million to build the thing for the team’s billionaire owner. D.C. officials recently booked three new concerts for the arena, but expects to lose money on each of them; an Events D.C. board member said they would let “people know that they have a place to go, that this is a fun place,” which I guess is another way of saying they’ll make it up in volume.
  • Omaha is spending $750,000 on hosting an Olympic swim meet, which on the one hand is a lot cheaper than $115 million for an NFL practice facility, and on the other is for a one-time Olympic swim meet.
  • Two unnamed sources tell The Athletic’s Sam Stejskal that New England Revolution owner Robert Kraft is “on the brink of securing a stadium site,” which tells us nothing about the state of the Revolution’s actual stadium plans since this could be a planted rumor to try to gain momentum, but does tell us lots about The Athletic’s poor grasp of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics policy on use of unnamed sources.
  • I wrote a thing for Gothamist about how the New York Mets banned backpacks because they have too many pockets to easily search, but not other bags with lots of pockets, pretty much on the grounds of “the light’s better over here.” The best argument either of the security experts could come up with for the policy is that fewer bags means faster lines which means less time queued up outside stadiums as a stationary target for any theoretical terrorists, which is frankly mostly an argument for staying home and watching on TV.
  • Journalist Taylor C. Noakes notes in an op-ed for CBC News that bringing back the Expos might be nice for Montreal baseball fans, but probably won’t do much for the Montreal economy since “the economic impact of a professional baseball team on a given city [is] roughly equivalent to that of a mid-sized department store,” which, yup.
  • The latest Oakland A’s renderings show it still oddly glowing amid a darkened rest of the city. Plus now there are shipping cranes on both corners of the site! I am about to start working on a theory that this entire stadium plan is just a dodge for John Fisher to build lots of shipping cranes.
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Boston Globe writes entire article about new $400m Revolution stadium based on fan’s tweet

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s not every day that you have a story about a team’s stadium price tag going up when there’s no actual plan of what stadium to build or where, but that’s what we had this weekend with the Boston Globe’s report that New England Revolution owner and famed massage parlor enthusiast Bob Kraft is now looking to spend $400 million on a stadium … somewhere:

During a fan event last weekend, Revs team president Brian Bilello offered some reassurance that the hunt remains very much alive. Snippets from the event emerged on Twitter, including the mention of a new price tag. A spokesman confirmed that the Kraft Group is now willing to invest as much as $400 million in a roughly 20,000-seat soccer stadium. The location? Sorry, everyone. That remains a mystery.

This story was apparently entirely based on week-old tweets by Paul Foley, a “dad, oral care expert, soccer fan” and former contributor to a now-defunct sports talk radio show with a now-defunct Twitter account, who got to talk to Bilello (or at least transcribe his statements) at a pregame event. Foley responded on Twitter as one does:

I’m perfectly willing to believe that Bilello actually said “$400 million private investment supported by Krafts” as Foley says he did; what that means is another thing. Is Kraft really ready to build the most expensive MLS stadium in history on his own dime? How a new Revolution stadium would be paid for has been an official secret for even longer than where it might go — way back in 2015 he proposed paying for one with a ticket tax, which only would have worked with a ticket tax of around $40 — so you’d think Globe writer Jon Chesto would have asked the team for an official statement on this, but there’s no indication that he did beyond getting confirmation that Bilello used the $400 million figure. (Though he did get two sports economists, Victor Matheson and Andy Zimbalist, to say, in effect, “man, that sounds like a lot of money.”) As a Professional Editor of Journalism, I would have sent this back to the author with the note “needs comment from team on financial plan or indication that they refused to comment,” but I guess that’s not how the Globe rolls these days.

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Friday roundup: Potential Raiders homes for 2019, ranked (okay, actually not ranked)

access_time personNeil deMause

Man, who opened the stadium news floodgates this week? Here it is almost noon on Friday and I still haven’t gotten to the news roundup — okay, know what, less whining, let’s just get right to it:

  • The city of Oakland filed its antitrust suit against the Raiders as promised this week, which means it’s time for a list of places the Raiders could play next year if they are forced to leave Oakland in a huff. “Do a multi-week residency in London and play the rest of the season on the road” is one I hadn’t heard before, anyway.
  • New York’s Empire State Development Corporation approved its draft environmental report on a new New York Islanders arena at Belmont Park, and it basically comes down to “yeah, traffic is already bad and it’s going to get worse, we’ll try to figure something out but don’t hold your breath.” The state will also provide a whole two Long Island Rail Road trains to take fans to and from games, which will require new switches to deal with the massive mess that is that train interchange, for which “it is also expected that [the arena developers] will contribute to LIRR and MTA funding,” which isn’t exactly the same as saying the developers will pay for it.
  • Tottenham Hotspur‘s long-delayed stadium is still delayed, but at least now fans can enjoy drone footage of the place they’re not being allowed to set foot in.
  • The National Parks Conservation Association was “shocked” to learn that Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan wants to take 300 acres of federal parkland to use for a new Washington NFL team stadium. “I have talked to lower-level Park Service employees who are just as shocked as I am about this,” said the organization’s Chesapeake and Virginia programs director, Pam Goddard. “We are vehemently opposed.” Hogan has said that no public money would be used for the stadium plan, but public land and building out sewer and power lines into federal parkland, now that’s another story.
  • Residents of South Boston want the New England Revolution to stay offa their lawns with any stadium plans.
  • NBA commissioner Adam Silver wants more NBA-ready arenas in Latin America so the NBA can play occasional regular season games there, but didn’t offer to help pay for any, that’d be crazy, and does he look crazy?

 

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Friday roundup: Kraft tries to use World Cup to get new stadium, Roger Noll says Austin MLS subsidies are indeed subsidies, NC mulls new tax breaks for Panthers

access_time personNeil deMause

Posting this while watching the first World Cup match at the crazy stadium with the seats outside the stadium. (I haven’t honestly even noticed who the teams are yet, I’m just watching the architecture.) Anyhoo:

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Friday roundup: Spending on training facilities is a bad idea, Portland seeks MLB team, Jays game postponed after roof hit by falling ice

access_time personNeil deMause

I can’t believe none of you wrote in to ask why I hadn’t reported on a Toronto Blue Jays game getting postponed due to falling ice puncturing a hole in the stadium roof, but I guess you’re all acclimated to waiting for the Friday roundup now for that sort of thing. But wait no longer! (Well, wait a few bullet points for that one in particular.)

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