Category: Sacramento MLS team

MLS still set to announce two new teams in December, unless it needs the stadium leverage

access_time personNeil deMause

MLS has been dead set on announcing two expansion franchises this December, with two more getting the nod next year. But on Thursday, commissioner Don Garber hedged on that timetable just a bit:

A league spokesperson later texted, according to ESPN, that “MLS remains on track to name two teams in December, with an announcement ‘likely around Dec. 19-20.'” But that’s still hedging, in a way that could probably best be taken as We’re planning an announcement the week before Christmas, but we reserve the right to change our minds.

What could be going on here? Soccer Stadium Digest thinks that MLS wants to be sure that David Beckham’s Miami franchise will actually get stadium approval in time to begin play next year — the stadium won’t be done by then, mind you, but MLS will award a team so long as it has a stadium deal in place — or else award a franchise to a fallback city in order to keep an even number of teams. That’s certainly possible, though MLS has operated with an odd number of franchises before, so it could always just push back Miami’s entry another year or three if necessary.

Equally possible is that MLS may want to wait out the legislative process in some potential expansion cities to see what they can shake loose in terms of public stadium funding. Of the four frontrunners declared by Soccer Stadium Digest, Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores and Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s $300 million plus free land and I’ll build Detroit a new jail to replace its already half built one plan still needs both city and county approval, Nashville S.C.‘s $75 million subsidy demand requires approval of the regional Nashville Metro council, F.C. Cincinnati‘s gambit for that city to pay for half of a new $200 million stadium hasn’t seen much action in recent months (other than a new Cincinnati citizens’ group petitioning Garber to let the team move up to MLS while still playing at Nippert Stadium, where it’s setting attendance records), and Sacramento F.C. has already started clearing land for a new stadium, though with actual construction not scheduled to begin until 2018 the team owners can always slam on the brakes if they don’t get awarded an MLS franchise by then.

That’s a whole lot of uncertainty, and could easily be a reason why the league doesn’t want to set an expansion announcement date in stone. When running a bidding war, it’s a fine line between wanting to scare the participants with a countdown clock, and wanting to make sure they always have enough rope to up their bids.

Share this post:

Charlotte won’t get county money for MLS stadium, expansion race now bigger mess than ever

access_time personNeil deMause

The Mecklenburg County commission voted 5-3 on Wednesday to hand over the site of 83-year-old Memorial Stadium to the city of Charlotte for a new soccer stadium for a potential MLS team — but no money for building it, which is what the ownership group had been hoping for. Commissioners said they wanted to see a soccer stadium built, but, you know, by the city, not them:

“They manage stadiums and they have a division in the city that deals with pro sports teams,” [Commissioner Jim] Puckett said. “They have a dedicated tax revenue stream that’s for entertainment and can be used for pro sports. They have the expertise and funding stream to deal with that.”

The team’s original plan was for a $175 million stadium where $101.25 million of the costs would be paid off by the county, with the team repaying the public via $4.25 million a year in rent payments. (Note to readers who can do math: No, $4.25 million a year is not enough to repay $101.25 million in bonds unless you get a 1.5% interest rate, which I know they’re low but get serious.) Now they’ll instead have to try to hit up the city of Charlotte alone, which has already indicated that its maximum contribution is $30 million.

That would leave the team to shoulder $145 million of the cost, plus MLS’s nutso $150 million expansion fee, which is a hefty chunk of change. On the other hand, the team wouldn’t have to make those rent payments, so maybe it could just go to a bank and borrow the cash, and make mortgage payments instead? Or maybe the rich NASCAR track heir who wants to launch the MLS team would rather have somebody else on the hook for loan payments if his team, or MLS as a whole, went belly-up at some point as a result of its pyramid-scam spree of handing out expansion franchises like candy to anyone who wants to pay $150 million for candy? Yeah, probably that.

If you’re keeping score, the MLS expansion candidates are now:

That’s a whole mishmash of stuff indeed, and I don’t envy the job of the MLS officials tasked with having to pick two winners this fall (and two more next fall, because they can’t cash those $150 million expansion-fee checks fast enough). You have to wonder if commissioner Don Garber doesn’t think to himself sometimes, maybe it’d be easier just to stick the expansion franchises on eBay and take the highest bids. It would mean giving up on the pretense that they’re actually selecting the best soccer cities or something, but get real, nobody believes that anyway.

Share this post:

Every concentration of humans on earth now bidding to build MLS stadiums

access_time personNeil deMause

Nashville is looking to build a new MLS stadium, and Indianapolis is looking to build a new MLS stadium, and San Diego is looking to get a new MLS stadium, and Detroit is considering providing free land for an MLS stadium, and St. Louis is still looking to build an MLS stadium after rejecting it once, and a guy in Charlotte is still looking to have an MLS stadium built for him, and Tampa is looking to get an MLS franchise but already has a stadium.

These are mostly terrible ideas, notes the Guardian, at least where they involve public money. And if the newspaper slightly overstates the case that there’s growing pushback on MLS subsidies (truth is, they’ve never been an especially easy sell as sports subsidies go, mostly because MLS isn’t as popular yet as the Big Four sports), it does contain a classic defense of them from Peter Wilt, the Chicago Fire founder who now heads later headed the Indy Eleven NASL team and wannabe expansion franchise:

“It is about image and plays into making a city cool to live in, a good experience for young professionals, and reducing the brain drain on a community. Things like that are sometimes not taken into account. If Oakland loses the A’s and the Raiders, which is a possibility, then no one will hear about Oakland in any positive terms for the foreseeable future.”

Things like that actually are taken into account in economic studies of teams and stadiums, which overwhelmingly find that if sports teams make cities “cool,” it doesn’t show up in things like per-capita income or jobs or economic activity or tax receipts. Plus you’d then have to explain how a city like Portland, for example, which until recently had only basketball as a major-league sport and famously turned down a domed stadium in the 1960s that would have brought an NFL team, nonetheless became one of the hippest cities in America. (It has MLS now, but the hipness predated that.)

Anyway, with MLS set to announce four more expansion franchises in the next year or so, the league can probably count on some cities stepping up to throw money at new stadiums, so long as they’re not too picky about which ones. (Cincinnati, Raleigh/Durham, Sacramento, and San Antonio are also in the mix.) Bulk-mailing extortion notes is kind of a strange business model, but hey, whatever works.

Share this post:

MLS to double expansion fee to $200m, hopes world doesn’t run out of rich guys

access_time personNeil deMause

Major League Soccer is preparing to announce another round of expansion — this time to a whopping 28 teams — and is clearly determined to grab all the money it can in the process, as deputy commissioner Mark Abbott says the league is preparing to double its expansion fee to $200 million.

That’s a whole bunch of money for membership in a league whose own commissioner says it’s losing money, and which Soccernomics author Stefan Szymanski has called a “pyramid scheme” that’s eventually going to collapse. Given that the leading counterargument appears to be that “no, no, even if teams always lose money owners will count on making money when the sale value of the franchise appreciates,” it’s exactly a pyramid scheme — the only question is whether it’s the kind of bubble that eventually collapses, or one that can continue indefinitely.

The argument for the latter — and, presumably, the MLS business plan — goes back to the billionaire glut, which posits that there are so many rich people wanting to own a pro sports franchise these days, and such a limited number of opportunities, it’s going to be a seller’s market for the foreseeable future. With that the case, it’s understandable that MLS would want to get everything it can for new franchises while the getting’s good, even if it means becoming by far the largest soccer league in the world. (Most other leagues cap membership at 20 and relegate the teams that do the worst to a second division, something that MLS has resisted because it might limit the number of people lining up to sign expansion checks.) And with a list of prospective expansion cities that includes way more than they can possibly fill in this round — Sacramento, Detroit, Cincinnati, San Diego, St. Louis, San Antonio, Charlotte and Oklahoma City are all reportedly on the list — it makes total sense to weed out the winners from the losers by seeing who’ll balk at a higher price tag.

Clearly this isn’t sustainable in the long run, but MLS isn’t thinking about the long run right now, which is its prerogative. If you’re a city thinking about building a stadium for a new MLS franchise, though, you might want to at least keep in the back of your mind that there’s a decent chance the league could, years down the road, eventually contract again — or at least split into upper and lower divisions — and that your shiny new team could end up without a chair when the music stops.

Share this post:

Kevin Johnson wants to build a Sacramento soccer stadium for nonexistent team at unknown price

access_time personNeil deMause

His city may have been rejected for now for an MLS expansion franchise, but Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson isn’t going to let that stop him from building a new soccer stadium regardless. KJ announced yesterday that he was launching “Operation Turkey,” a plan to — sorry, what? Oh, “Operation Turnkey.” Well, that does sound better, but you decide for yourself which one is more apropos:

One of the toughest tasks on the mayor’s list might be obtaining control of the proposed stadium site, located on the eastern end of the long-vacant downtown railyards…

City officials said the sticking point involves determining who will be responsible if additional toxic pollution is discovered in the ground…

Johnson appeared Wednesday to have softened his opposition and said he imagined the stadium as a public-private partnership. He pointed out the state has already invested million for roads and bridges in the railyards, but declined to say if would support a subsidy for the project.

Cost of said stadium? Unknown! Who’ll pay for it and how? Also unknown! When Sacramento might actually get an MLS team to play in it? You guessed it! Johnson says he hopes to have all this worked out by the end of this year, which bwahahahahaha, damn, he’s a funny guy.

Share this post:

Business prof says Kings arena could bring MLS team, TV station gets all excited

access_time personNeil deMause

What the what, CBS Sacramento?

Economists: Downtown Sacramento Kings Arena Could Pave Way For MLS Franchise

That … doesn’t even make any sense? Certainly Sacramento is vying for an MLS expansion franchise, along with everyone else on the planet, and maybe having successfully thrown a whole lot of money at the Kings would help convince the soccer league that they could have money thrown their way, too. But from an economic perspective, what does one have to do with the other? What kind of economists are these, anyway?

Sacramento State economics professor and Wells Fargo wealth adviser Sanjay Varshney says if that arena wasn’t under construction, there’s no way anyone would be talking about the possibility of an MLS stadium coming to the railyards.

“The fact that Sacramento succeeded in keeping the Kings here and are putting in a new arena will be a factor in whether or not we actually get soccer now,” he said.

So, first of all, that’s not economists, plural, it’s one economist. (No one else is cited by name in the CBS Sacramento story.) And second, it’s arguably not even one economist, because while Varshney does have a master’s in economics, he’s actually he’s a finance professor at Sacramento State’s business school, who recently stepped down as dean to work as an investment advisor for Wells Fargo’s wealthy clients.

Not that this makes Varshney unqualified to speculate wildly about how MLS will pick which cities to expand to, any more than any of the rest of us are. But hanging an entire story on this, and spinning it as something “economists” predict, is a low point even for TV news.

Back in the real world, meanwhile, MLS officials heard pitches from would-be owners in Sacramento, Minneapolis and Las Vegas for the last expansion team of the passel being handed out by the league this decade. A decision could be made by the league Board of Governors meeting on December 6, or not.

Share this post: