Category: MLS

Friday roundup: Browns still haggling over stadium permit, Fire stadium could include TIF-funded parking garage

access_time personNeil deMause

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

  • Cleveland Browns officials and representatives of the Ohio Department of Transportation are “in discussions” on the height of the Browns’ proposed stadium that ODOT ruled could interfere with flights into nearby Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, but “it remains unclear whether those talks could lead to a compromise,” reports Cleveland.com. The only wiggle room appears to be either digging the stadium lower into the ground (unlikely, since it’s already set to be 80 feet below ground level) or move it farther from the airport (maybe, though if you go too far you run into I-71). If they can’t negotiate an accommodation by Tuesday, the team’s owners can still file an appeal of ODOT’s ruling in state court.
  • Chicago Fire owner Joe Mansueto quietly removed a bunch of plans for a new park and transit and bike path improvements to accompany his proposed new soccer stadium, and advocates for parks, transit, and bike paths are steamed! The new plan also includes a parking garage that could potentially be funded by property taxes from the site (i.e., a TIF), which one steamed Chicagoan told Streetsblog Chicago may not be “even permissible under existing regulations.” Expect lots of shouting at the next Zoom meeting on the project’s transit plan, scheduled for September 9.
  • Wannabe Orlando MLB expansion team owner Jim Schnorf says he’s “confident we will be awarded a Major League franchise in the next decade,” citing the fact that Orlando is bigger than other prospective expansion markets (true) and that it has made more progress on stadium funding (not really so much true). Orlando is also very close to Tampa Bay, which already has the Rays (for now, at least), and MLB expansion looks to be on hold for now while the Rays and Athletics stadium situations get resolved so those team owners have lots of cities available to use as move threats, but “confidence” is nice!
  • Boston city councilor Julia Mejia and the Boston NAACP have proposed a scaled-back rebuild of White Stadium just for school sports that would cut the city’s costs to an estimated $64.6 million from the $100 million-$172 million it would cost for the city’s share of a stadium for the NWSL’s Boston Legacy F.C. That would leave Legacy without a stadium, which was originally the whole point of this exercise, but would also create possibly $100 million in savings that Mejia and the NAACP say should be put toward “unmet student needs” in public schools. Mejia tried to introduce this as a bill on Wednesday but the council ruled it out of order since it already voted for the NWSL stadium version; Mejia says she’ll find other ways to raise it.
  • Houston Astros owner Jim Crane is suing Harris County to keep being allowed to not pay property tax even though Harris County officials say they have no intention of trying to charge the Astros property tax. So long as nobody who owns a sports team has to pay property tax, that’s the important thing, no matter what those crazy judges in New Jersey think.
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Friday roundup: Bengals lease a mystery even to officials who voted for it, Congress and lobbyists pressure DC to okay Commanders’ $7B+ stadium deal

access_time personNeil deMause

How’s everyone doing out there? The news has been a lot lately, both the stadium shenanigans and the other non-stadium stuff, I get it, I’m as tempted as anyone to just shut off the outside world and watch Murderbot. Feel no obligation to read this week’s news roundup if you’re out of spoons, but do know that whenever you’re ready for it, it has some classic Rob Manfred garblequotes in it, those are kind of amusing at least:

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Residents threaten to block Sacramento soccer stadium tax district without more affordable housing

access_time personNeil deMause

Every so often I’m asked why some cities are able to avoid huge public subsidies for their sports teams while most others pay through the nose, and I point out an important geographic distinction: Most of the “smart” cities are on the West Coast, where for various historical reasons, it’s way easier to get voter referendums on the ballot to constrain the actions of local legislators. That turns out to be pretty huge, as winning over an entire voting populace, while by no means impossible, is a lot trickier than winning over a handful of elected officials — so you get scenarios where team owners have to put up a lot more of their venue costs themselves, as we’ve seen with the San Francisco Giants and Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Rams and Seattle Kraken.

And now we have one more data point in the “it’s the referendums, stupid” theory, as the $92 million in tax money that the Sacramento city council approved for a new stadium for Sacramento Republic F.C. owners Kevin Nagle and the Wilton Rancheria tribe is now at risk of blowing up thanks to an obscure California law that lets local residents object to special tax districts:

There are currently only two residential buildings in the Railyards: The A.J. Apartments and the Wong Senior Center. Both include affordable housing.

Of the roughly 250 people who live in them, state law requires that if half protest the formation of the railyards’ proposed special tax district, the district can not be created for at least a year.

Residents of the proposed tax-kickback district showed up in force at a city council hearing yesterday, along with representatives of the hotel and food service workers union Unite Here Local 39, to demand more affordable housing as part of any stadium deal. City officials are currently counting and verifying signatures on the objection, a process they say will take up to a week — it doesn’t seem like it should take that long to count to 126, but sure, that’s fine.

Direct democracy laws like these are a bit of a double-edged sword: They give residents a way to override elected officials who aren’t interested in the opinions of their constituents, but they also make it easier for NIMBY types to block things they don’t like, or at least make demands in exchange for not blocking them. (There was a huge battle recently in the Bay Area over the BART transit system wanting to build new housing in its parking lots, which ended with the state legislature giving BART the power to override local zoning on its own property, which was a whole kerfuffle.) How this one plays out remains to be seen, but it’s certainly a stumbling block that doesn’t appear to have been anticipated when the council greenlit the Republic stadium two weeks ago — and one that would be unimaginable in much of the rest of the country.

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Behold, the future of soccer stadiums, Chicago Fire vaportecture edition

access_time personNeil deMause

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

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

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

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

Anything else? Overblown quotes from team officials, perhaps?

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

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

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

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

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Fisher reportedly puts Earthquakes up for sale to buy A’s a Vegas stadium, O. Henry warned about this

access_time personNeil deMause

Oaklandish A’s owner John Fisher, as has been covered here ad infinitum, has gotten himself between a rock and a hard place: He’s burned his bridges in Oakland, his team’s temporary home in Sacramento is not working out well at all, and while he has about $600 million in public cash and tax breaks waiting for him in Las Vegas, that’s still around $1 billion shy of what he needs to build a stadium there so his team doesn’t have to play in a vacant lot. Most of Fisher’s family wealth is tied up in Gap stock, which is not doing great itself, leaving his only assets the A’s themselves — which Fisher has been trying and mostly failing to sell minority shares in — and the San Jose Earthquakes MLS team.

Even if you haven’t already read social media this morning, you probably see where this is going:

San Jose Earthquakes owner John Fisher has hired an investment bank to sell his MLS club, according to multiple people familiar with the billionaire’s plans. An official announcement is expected sometime on Wednesday.

In January, the Earthquakes ranked 20th in Sportico’s MLS team valuations at $600 million.

It is certainly possible that Fisher could sell the Earthquakes, take the $600 million in proceeds (less capital gains taxes on the profits from the $20 million he paid for the team in 2007) and his $600 million in Nevada subsidies and $100 million in Aramark concessions contract money and a $300 million Goldman Sachs loan and use that to hire contractors to build his vaporarmadillo, then hope like hell it doesn’t go over budget and that he doesn’t have to then sell the A’s to pay for his stadium’s gold watch chain. Or he could just be trying to keep enough funding balls in the air to convince MLB not to issue him an ultimatum to sell the team to someone who has an actual place for it to play. Not that MLB seems eager to do so — his fellow owners just put Fisher on their executive committee, after all, which isn’t the kind of thing you do with someone you’re about to drum out of the club — but half of raising money is pretending you already have a financial plan, so maybe there’s a method to Fisher’s madness. Or just madness all the way down, either remains possible! More updates on this once Fisher makes an official announcement later today, maybe.

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Sacramento mayor who opposed Kings subsidies says spending money on soccer stadium is “no risk,” where have we gone wrong?

access_time personNeil deMause

The Sacramento city council is set to vote today at 2 pm Pacific time on creating a property-tax kickback district to provide $92 million toward a Republic F.C. soccer stadium with boring vaportecture, and — wait, who said what now?

Sactown Sports 1140 host Carmichael Dave: “When Golden 1 Center was approaching, there were two no votes, and you were one of them. … The deal, for whatever reason was not to your liking.”…

Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty: “I’m a Kings guy, I’m a sports guy. But yeah, at that time, I just thought my job as a city councilmember wasn’t as a fan, it was a steward of the public money. And, you know, I’ve always been kind of leery of these subsidies across the country, I’ve read the book Field of Schemes about how cities just get fleeced, and I just want to make sure it’s in the best interest.”

Huh! McCarty was certainly a longtime critic of the deal that gave the Kings owners $334 million in cash and other goodies toward a new arena, and later as a state assemblymember opposed fast-tracking environmental review for a Los Angeles Clippers stadium, decrying it as “billionaire justice.” I’m pretty sure I never spoke to him, though, and didn’t know he’d read our book — glad to know it found its way into the hands of some decision makers, at least, even if they got outvoted.

Anyway, how has now-Mayor McCarty’s depth of literary material affected his feelings about the Republic F.C. proposal?

“Several years ago, when Darrell Steinberg was mayor, he asked me if I would consider supporting this one, and I did, in large part because there is minimal risk to the city of Sacramento. There is no risk to the general fund. This is going to pencil out, I’m certain it is, but if for some reason it doesn’t for the team, they’re 100% on the hook. We have nothing in the stadium, they’re paying for the stadium privately. We’re just focusing on building the roads and the intrastructure around there and giving essentially a tax rebate that says ‘Hey, if you build a new stadium and development around the rail yards, as new tax revenue comes in, we will reimburse you for the roads, infrastructure that you build.’ So, zero risk for the general fund, a good deal for the taxpayers, a win-win all around.”

Well, no. This is a common myth about tax breaks: It’s money the city wouldn’t have gotten if the development wasn’t built, so it doesn’t cost anything for the city to kick it back to the developer. But that ignores a bunch of things: that tax expenditures are, fiscally speaking, no different than just cutting checks to developers, even if “rebates” sound better than “spending”; that property taxes are meant to pay for services needed to support new development, so not collecting them absolutely costs the city’s general fund; that once you start offering one developer tax breaks, they’ll all want one, until your city tax base ends up looking like Swiss cheese. It’s taxpayers’ money, Felix, don’t come talking to me about your isosceles triangles!

And, in fact, there’s a bunch of discussion of tax-increment financing, as this kind of kickback scheme is known, in Field of Schemes the book, starting with a mention of how the Minnesota Twins owners tried an early variant on it as early as 1997:

Proponents argued that this was no different from other fees, such as hunting licenses, that were earmarked for specific purposes; critics pointed out that as these funds would otherwise go into the state’s general fund, this was as direct a subsidy as there could be. “The financing of the thing is too screwy,” one Star Tribune reader wrote to the paper’s Web site, noting that if players’ income taxes could be used to pay for a stadium, “I think my income tax should go towards improving the place I work.”

And a bit later on:

First developed in California in the 1950s, TIFs took off in the ’80s as local governments sought ways to find money to entice developers. … Since Proposition 13 curtailed property-tax hikes in California, TIF has become “an industry unto itself,” reports Howard Greenwich of California’s East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, with TIF projects soaking up 8 percent of all property taxes in the state….

But there’s a pitfall to TIFs, and it’s a doozy. It’s what development experts call the ” but-for” problem. … The grassroots Neighborhood Capital Budget Group (NCBG) in Chicago studies thirty-six districts’ property-tax growth rates before and after TIF. Their findings: Of the $1.6 billion in “incremental taxes” redirected to TIF projects, $1.3 billion would have gone into city coffers even without the special tax districts. As a result of this, the NCBG calculated, Chicago public schools had lost more than $600 million. “They sell it as ‘cost-free,'” complained the NCBG’s Patricia Nolan. “But there’s always a tradeoff.”

Compared to the Kings arena deal, the Republic F.C. deal is undeniably less bad: It’s less than a third as much public money, for starters, and doesn’t include nearly as many goodies for the team owner. But selling TIF funding as risk-free for the city treasury (while wearing a Republic F.C. jersey, incidentally) isn’t just wrong, it’s spectacularly wrong, and if McCarty didn’t get that from reading Field of Schemes, I feel bad that we didn’t spell it out more forcefully, maybe put it in boldface or something. Though if he’s just changing his mind about sports subsidies because that’s what city councilmembers tend to do once they become mayor, sure, that tracks.

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

access_time personNeil deMause

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Do the Whitecaps really want a new stadium, or just a cheaper BC Place lease?

access_time personNeil deMause

Add the Vancouver Whitecaps to the list of teams looking to build a new stadium, maybe, possibly, if the price is right:

The Major League Soccer club is in talks with the City of Vancouver about the construction of a stadium at the PNE fairgrounds site, said Whitecaps CEO and sporting director Axel Schuster.

“The club’s ownership has always been clear on their goal of constructing a purpose-built stadium and the importance of a suitable venue to both fan experience and financial performance for any professional sports franchise,” said Schuster in a statement on Friday.

The talks are in the early stages and Schuster did not disclose any other details, but said the club is looking forward to continuing its “constructive engagement” with the city.

The Whitecaps are currently renters at the province-owned B.C. Place, where the CFL’s B.C. Lions are the primary tenant, so surely they wouldn’t mind a stadium of their own. Whether they would welcome the construction debt that would come with it is another story: Schuster didn’t reveal anything about how much a new stadium would cost or whether that “constructive engagement” — interesting choice of that term, by the way — would include seeking public subsidies, something that is significantly less common in Canada than the U.S., though by no means unheard of.

Meanwhile, Schuster added that he’s simultaneously talking with B.C. Place operator PavCo about continuing on under a “different type of lease” after their current one expires later this year. If the Whitecaps owners are just trying to get a better deal by warning they might consider building a stadium on their own, more power to them; if they’re trying to leverage one branch of government against the other, though, the city and the province might want to consider getting together on this to tell the team they’re not going to bid against themselves.

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Friday roundup: Rays, Coyotes, A’s fiascos keep on fiascoing

access_time personNeil deMause

All kinds of news of the week to cover this morning, and I already lost a couple of hours getting up early to yell at my senator’s window about this fiasco. Let’s start with the Tampa Bay Rays‘ own fiasco, and then work backwards:

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Friday roundup: A’s hire ex-Raiders stadium czar, Texans want renovations paid for by somebody

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been another week, and, yeah, it sure has. Feeling this very strongly this morning, you all go on ahead and read this week’s bullet points while I get my second wind.

  • The Athletics have new Las Vegas stadium renderings (pretty similar to the last batch, only with more entourage) and a new president, Marc Badain, who formerly worked in the same role for the Las Vegas Raiders before abruptly quitting. Badain’s role in getting the Raiders’ stadium built (with $750 million in public money) and the fact that the Nevada legislature is coming back into session this year have people speculating that Badain could be on board to go back to the state for more cash to fill owner John Fisher’s budget hole; there’s no actual evidence that’s in the works that I can tell, but this entire project has been little more than tea-leaf reading for close to two years, why stop now?
  • New Houston Texans president Mike Tomon says he doesn’t want a new stadium, just renovations to the old one. The Houston Business Journal reports: “As far as funding potential renovations to NRG Stadium — which, coupled with projects around NRG Park and maintenance, could cost billions of dollars — Tomon said it’s too early in the process to determine what that would look like.” Lobbying strategy still hazy, ask again later.
  • The A’s and Tampa Bay Rays playing in minor-league stadiums this year are “cautionary tales of what happens when big, complicated challenges are met with half-measures and inaction,” writes ESPN’s Jeff Passan, who apparently missed the parts about how the A’s are in Sacramento because they alienated Oakland officials enough to torpedo talks of a lease extension there and the Rays are in Tampa because a hurricane blew their roof off, and neither of those things would be changed even if local officials hadn’t engaged in “inaction,” which they actually didn’t. Friends don’t let friends read Jeff Passan think pieces, is the lesson here.
  • San Antonio’s “Project Marvel” that would include a new Spurs arena, convention center expansion, and other crap has “tepid” 41-36% support, according to a new poll. The plan could be up for a public referendum as soon as this November, so that undecided 23% should start reading up on the details ASAP.
  • The San Jose Giants have agreed to extend their lease from 2027 through 2050 in exchange for $5 million in public stadium upgrades, and I’m going to go out on a limb and call this not that bad — the Single-A team has even agreed to double its rent payments from $20,000 a year to $40,000, which is next to nothing but not completely nothing. It’ll probably come out next week that San Jose has to turn over development rights to 10,000 acres of land or something in addition, but until then I’m filing this under “could have been so much worse.”
  • Someone wrote in to Cincinnati Enquirer sports columnist Jason Williams to ask if Hamilton County residents could have a re-vote on the tax hike that is paying off the Bengals stadium, and Williams replied, not a bad idea, it could be expanded to help fund a new arena, too. Pretty sure that’s not what the letter writer meant, Jason.
  • There’s actual video of actual cranes doing actual work to build Inter Miami‘s new stadium, maybe this thing will actually open eventually, even if the 2026 target date still seems ambitious. Or it could be the latest fake video, for all we know, hard to trust anything coming out of south Florida these days.
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