Category: Sacramento Republic FC

Friday roundup: Everyone’s building soccer stadiums, no one’s sure how to pay for them

access_time personNeil deMause

This was a rough week for anyone in the U.S. who is an immigrant or looks like they might be, is trans, might ever need an abortion, is Palestinian, is a federal government employee, is a local government employee, is an employee of anything that depends on international trade, lives near sea level or in places that get hot or are at risk of hurricanes, likes democracy, or cares about a relative, friend, or neighbor who does. Not that it would have been an amazing week for most of those people if the presidential election results had gone another way, but a whole lot of folks are somewhere on the spectrum from anxious to terrified right now, so if you need to check in with each other right now before getting back to life as we know it, that’s not only reasonable, it’s a fine tradition.

And now, whenever you’re ready, back to sports stadium and arena life as we know it:

  • The owners of Sacramento Republic F.C., who now include the Wilton Rancheria Native American tribe by are still led by minority owner Kevin Nagle, announced plans for a new stadium, and almost none of the news coverage bothered to provide details of how it would be paid for, even those that reported on how it was announced to the tune of “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Finally, way at the bottom of a KCRA-TV report, we learn that the city of Sacramento is expected to put up $92 million in infrastructure money from property taxes on 220 acres surrounding the stadium, plus provide free police, fire, EMS, traffic, and other services for the next ten years. The city council is set to vote on the plan Tuesday, so that leaves three whole days to gather feedback, two of which are weekend days and the third is a holiday when city offices are closed, this is fine.
  • Bridgeport is considering a minor-league soccer stadium that would cost at least $75 million and which would likely include public funds, and Baltimore is considering a minor-league soccer stadium with no known price tag or details on how to pay for it, and Fort Wayne is considering a minor-league soccer stadium that is promised will be “100% privately financed” but we’ve heard that before.
  • Cleveland and Cuyahogo County are continuing to look for ways to fill their budget gap for paying for future upgrades for the Guardians and Cavaliers, and county executive Chris Ronayne says options are “not yet concrete” because “it’s a conversation that’s probably also going to have to include the public.” Signal Cleveland speculates that this could include going back to voters to approve another tax increase, unless Clevelanders go back to drinking and smoking at their old rates, which might not be as likely as you would think.
  • Nearly 95% of campaign donations by U.S. sports team owners went to Republican candidates or causes, according to a Guardian review of donor filings, which, duh, Charles Barkley could have told you that.
  • How are Inglewood business owners around the Los Angeles Rams‘ new stadium and Los Angeles Clippers‘ new arena loving all the new foot traffic? Not so much! “One of my lowest sales days was on Super Bowl Sunday” because of street closures, said a local bakery owner at a press conference this week. “I literally made under $600 for the day. I had to send employees home, and you’re just looking around like, ‘What in the world?'” Checks out!
  • Did a major news site just run an item reporting wild economic impact projections for a proposed Buffalo soccer stadium without saying who conducted the study, while the byline partly credits a City Hall press release? Sure did! Please give to support your independent nonprofit or collectively owned news media, we might just be needing them the next year or four.
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Friday roundup: Sixers owners offer to swap one tax break for another, Titans got nearly 80,000% return on their lobbyist spending

access_time personNeil deMause

Hope it’s not brutally hot where you are! Admittedly, this is a pretty idle hope assuming you live on this planet. Maybe it’s a good time to revisit my look at which U.S. sports cities are likeliest to become completely uninhabitable first, and to note that several of them are looking at building new stadiums or arenas that could outlast the cities that would be building them, or at least their ability to maintain their population ranking as parts of the world flood and others dry up.

Or, we could just ignore the flames and keep on with business as usual. It’s what sports team owners do every week, and they’re rich, so it must be working out okay for them, right?

  • The Philadelphia 76ers owners are reportedly offering to scrap their request to continue a tax increment financing deal at their proposed downtown stadium site that would allow them to get breaks on the standard property tax rate and use them to pay for arena construction, and instead give the land to the city and then make payments in lieu of property taxes (PILOTs) that would enable them to pay less than the standard property tax rate — and if that sounds to you like the exact same thing described differently, you’re not the only one. A Sixers spokesperson said this would “generate significant increases in tax revenues,” but wasn’t clear on whether she meant more tax revenues than under the TIF plan or just “tax revenues will go up because ARENA!!!!“, hopefully there’ll be more on this soon.
  • Meanwhile, a key battle in the 76ers arena fight is shaping up to be around City Councilmember Mark Squilla, who represents both the proposed arena site and neighboring Chinatown, and who last fall said he would oppose the plan unless local residents supported it but now says he’ll make his decision based on three team-funded impact studies in the works. “If you do the wrong thing, we will never forget,” said Asian Americans United founder Debbie Wei last Friday. “It will be remembered that, in spite of your promises and the desires of most of the city, you destroyed Chinatown.”
  • Some rich people are richer than others, and the “cash-poor” Tennessee Titans billionaire owners had to sell some of their assets to get money to put into their new stadium. They also spent $1.6 million on lobbyists to convince the state of Tennessee and city of Nashville to give them $1.26 billion in tax money toward the stadium, which is a good reminder that there’s no ROI like the return on buying elected officials.
  • Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller’s office has confirmed that construction on a New Mexico United stadium will begin this winter, though not when this winter, which isn’t really technically confirmation. Keller indicated the stadium will be getting $13.5 million in public money, with the rest coming from the team — how much that will be is also unconfirmed.
  • The Cincinnati Bengals are still working on a new stadium lease, and the Cleveland Browns are still working on a new stadium lease, and in both those cases “new stadium lease” likely means the government paying for lots of stadium upgrades in exchange for the team not threatening to leave, yes the concept of renting is very different when you’re an NFL owner than for most regular tenants.
  • Oakland A’s president/stadium-grubbing czar Dave Kaval is set to teach a sports business management course at Stanford, and you can bet I will alert you at the first report of him crossing paths in the hallways with Roger Noll.
  • “Sacramento shops hope for business boost amid renewed hopes of soccer stadium” reads the headline on a KCRA-TV story that quotes exactly two people endorsing such hopes, one a local pizzeria owner and the other the CEO of Sacramento’s tourism agency, yep, that’s 2023 journalism.
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Plague of minor-league soccer stadium subsidy demands reaches pandemic proportions

access_time personNeil deMause

Oh hey, USL press release about the ill-fated Pawtucket soccer stadium project, which utterly fails to mention either the metastasizing public costs or the fact that Rhode Island voters now oppose funding it by a 44-35% margin. Anything else in there of actual interest?

Tidewater Landing becomes one of five current stadium projects that are under construction in the USL Championship and USL League One, including one for a future USL Championship club in Des Moines, Iowa. There are another 11 stadium projects approved or in development across USL Championship and League One, following clubs such as Colorado Springs Switchbacks FC, Louisville City FC, Monterey Bay F.C., and Chattanooga Red Wolves SC, whose new homes have opened in recent years.

So, five stadiums under construction (or at least having had a groundbreaking, which lets Pawtucket qualify even though funding hasn’t gotten final approval) and 11 others “in development” — that’s rather a lot, even for a league that currently sports 38 teams across two levels in an attempt to take over the U.S. soccer world by sheer volume. The press release doesn’t specify which cities the USL is currently getting or seeking stadiums in, so with the help of the Field of Schemes archives and Reddit, let’s attempt a rundown in rough order of approvalness:

That’s 19 potential projects, though only maybe ten of them could be considered in progress, and for some of those you’d have to squint really hard. John Mozena of the Center for Economic Accountability, the people behind those excellent stickers, has a Twitter thread about this whole kerfuffle, in which he points out that sports stadiums, thanks to being closed and empty most of the time, have less economic impact than your typical supermarket or chain food store:

If there’s a silver lining to all this, it’s that most of the USL stadium campaigns appear to be spinning their wheels to various degrees. If there’s whatever is the opposite of a silver lining, it’s that none of the potential team owners are giving up, because why stop grabbing for that brass subsidy ring if you can maybe get tens of millions of dollars if you get lucky? Not sure if the USL qualifies as a Ponzi scheme yet, but it’s certainly striving to head in that direction.

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Friday roundup: Bills owners get their $1B in public stadium cash, triggering other NFL owners’ salivary glands

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the news roundup, the big story today: The New York state legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul came to a “conceptual agreement” on a state budget last night, and it will include $1 billion in state and county money for a new Buffalo Bills stadium.

There aren’t a whole lot of details yet on whether anything was tweaked from Hochul’s original proposal, who was involved in hashing out the agreement, or who will or won’t vote for it. The New York Times — which somehow managed to describe the Bills stadium as one of the budget items with “populist overtones,” despite it providing a record subsidy to billionaires for a project that state residents overwhelmingly oppose — printed state Sen. Julia Salazar’s tweet calling the budget “unacceptable”; Bloomberg News reported that senate finance committee chair Liz Krueger called the Bills money the latest example of “New York state using its economic development money very badly.” Now that leadership has okayed it, though, it presumably doesn’t matter much how anyone in particular actually votes: They can either vote for the overall budget while grousing about some of the items in it, or cast protest votes that they know won’t affect the budget’s passage, but as the deal was struck by the traditional “three men in a room,” there won’t be any messy debating or having to take positions or any of the other things that normally go along with democracy or accountability.

This is very good news for Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula, obviously, who just scored a brand-new stadium at virtually no cost to themselves (their share should be mostly covered by NFL grants, naming-rights fees, and seat license sales) by doing little more than mumbling vaguely about how they might move the team somewhere and then waiting for the governor to show up with a $1 billion check. It’s arguably good news for Hochul, too, assuming she doesn’t face voter backlash in this June’s primary for giving away public cash to wealthy NFL owners; and also arguably good news for Bills fans afraid the team would leave otherwise, though less good news if they’re Bills fans who are also New York state and Erie County taxpayers. And it’s very bad news for residents of NFL cities nationwide, as the bar has now been raised for expectations of what states will do to keep their football team owners happy, something that the owners of the Tennessee Titans and Washington Commanders and Chicago Bears and Baltimore Ravens and Jacksonville Jaguars and eventually every other team in the league will no doubt be pressing in their own state legislatures in months and years to come.

More on this Monday, no doubt, once the final details of the budget vote become clear. Meanwhile, there’s other news that’s been piling up amid all this Bills stuff, so let’s get to it:

  • Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman, asked about prospects for a new stadium in downtown Kansas City, said it “would really round out our central business district” and cited as an example the Atlanta Braves‘ new stadium, which is nowhere near Atlanta’s central business district and has been shown to be a massive money-loser for the county that paid for it. Remember, kids: It’s not important to make sense when you’re a sports team owner or other major public figure, as the media will just print whatever you say regardless! Grow up to use your family’s wealth to found a fossil-fuels company and get rich off it, it’s great!
  • Would-be Nashville MLB team owner John Loar says he’s still looking at building a stadium there — not next door to the Titans’ stadium anymore, that didn’t work out, but somewhere else — by creating “a sports and entertainment district” with “a ballpark that would be limited or would require no public financing,” which sure sounds like he’s talking tax increment financing or some other kind of tax kickback scheme, but no time for questions about that, just make a “Loar is confident Nashville will hit a home run” play on words and end the article already.
  • The Tempe city council held a closed-doors session yesterday on the Arizona Coyotes owners’ plans for a new arena aided by $200 million in city infrastructure spending plus possibly additional land and tax breaks, and don’t expect there to be any word of how it went, what don’t you understand about “closed-doors session”?
  • Despite not landing an MLS expansion franchise, the owners of the USL’s Sacramento Republic FC are still moving ahead with plans for a $100-150 million stadium on the city’s downtown railyards. The team owners already got a pile of city money approved for the stadium (reported as $27 million at the time, $33 million now), so may as well use it so as not to lose it.
  • Business promotion leaders in Saskatoon say that Saskatoon needs a new arena to be “competitive in the Canadian landscape”; no more details on how much a new Blades junior-hockey venue would cost or how it would be paid for, but there’s a three-minute video that includes a chartered professional accountant saying there’s “lots of creative ways” that an arena could be financed, including “sales ticket surcharges, bonds, government grants, even rental-car sales taxes” — okay, “bonds” isn’t actually a way of paying for something, just a way of borrowing money to be paid back later, just what are they teaching at Canadian CPA schools these days?
  • Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk’s dream of a new arena is “very much alive,” according to SportsNet, despite Melnyk being very much not alive. That’s because “Melnyk’s death last week only enhances the probability of a new arena downtown because of the new range of possibilities regarding ownership and future business partnerships.” No, no explanation of what that means, but SportsNet also cites Ottawa Citizen columnist Kelly Egan as saying it’s appropriate that a new Ottawa arena is being discussed just before Easter, “when thoughts turn to resurrecting the dead,” so uh, guys, I think the NHL may be dabbling in the dark arts, or at least some really suspect theology.
  • Tampa Bay Rays president Brian Auld says the team is no longer considering building a stadium on waterfront sites that will soon be underwater thanks to sea-level rise. Noted.
  • Oh, right, I promised in my post about the new Cab-Hailing Purse Woman art prints available to FoS subscribers (click here to get dibs on yours!) that I would report back on lawsuits against the Oakland A’s stadium environmental impact report: There are, uh, a bunch of lawsuits against the Oakland A’s stadium environmental impact report, read about one of them here, but seriously there are always EIR lawsuits in California and they almost never go anywhere, can this post be over already? I think it should be, have a good weekend of coming to terms with living in a world where a billion dollars in public spending on a private sports stadium can be approved in ten days with no public debate, and see you back here on Monday.
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Friday roundup: Newspapers love stadium propaganda, like really love it, like would marry it if they could

access_time personNeil deMause

One thing that both cheers and puzzles me is all the comments that surely elected officials are about to start saying no to stadium and arena shakedowns, even as they keep on saying yes. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s a dedication to optimism or a commitment to burn down the system and start anew, but I’ll just say what I’ve been saying in this situation for 20-odd years now: I hope you’re right and I’m wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.

And now that I’ve put the Neil back in nihilism, on with the news:

  • Two guys in Oregon want to build a Major League Baseball stadium in the Portland suburb or Gresham, and build it entirely out of wood, and I’m sorry, I kind of stopped reading after “iconic all-wood stadium,” but I did see there’s a rendering of people petting dogs and roller blading outside a stadium, because who doesn’t like dogs and roller blading?
  • Sports columnist Mike DiMauro of The Day, which I know is a newspaper in Connecticut but which always just makes me think of this, has written one of those “What’s taking so long to throw public money at a sports project, dagnabit?” columns, complaining of the “tediousness” of inaction on renovating Hartford’s arena, which is “creaky” and “squeaky,” and that the problem is the “fundamental moral outrage” of the “Chorus Of Aggrieved Taxpayers” that is leaving renovations “moving forward with the acceleration of an arthritic snail.” (Snails, of course, are invertebrates, so wouldn’t be affected by arthritis. Lucky snails!) Asks DiMauro, “What other Hartford-area project is of more benefit to a wider range of people than a bustling downtown arena?” Try not to answer all at once.
  • Construction of F.C. Cincinnati‘s new stadium is complete, and the team’s press release includes a photo of it empty that is a bit drab with no lens flare or people pointing at the sky, but makes up for that with some impressively purple prose about such things as how “the back shelving of the club’s bar was inspired by the jaw-dropping five-story stacks of the Old Cincinnati Library. If that’s not worth $97 million in taxpayer money, what is? (Try not to answer all at once.)
  • Still not random enough stadium cheerleading for you? How about a local TV news exclusive video of St. Louis stadium construction workers doing stretches in unison?
  • The Palm Springs Desert Sun reports that Oak View Group wants its proposed $250 million arena in Palm Desert to be powered by solar energy and entirely carbon neutral, but complains it’s being stymied by the local power company, which is … sorry, no room for a comment from the power company, need to leave space for the note about the Desert Sun’s upcoming “informational webinar series” in partnership with Oak View Group about its new arena, something that is no doubt entirely unrelated to the four different OVG execs and architects quoted in the story.
  • The Calgary Flames arena project may require chopping down a 125-year-old elm tree, but it’s okay because someone took a 3D photo of it first.
  • Two Arlington Heights–area state lawmakers say they wouldn’t want to use public funds for a new Chicago Bears stadium in the suburban city, while one says he “probably” would. Given that “no public funds” can be defined pretty much however elected officials like these days, not to mention that no one is actually proposing to build a stadium in Arlington Heights, this maybe seems like a waste of a reporter’s time, but … oh, never mind, they just let the intern whose Twitter bio brags about their “bad sports opinions” write it, it’s all good.
  • And finally, we have the Sacramento Bee’s report that Sacramento Republic FC is showing it’s serious about moving up to MLS by … changing the name of its stadium from one corporation to another? That’s what it says in the team’s press release, anyway, gotta get that right into print, that’s what journalism is all about!
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Friday roundup: Terrible economic impact studies, terrible renderings, but one smart mayor, at least

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a long year of waiting, but the moment we’ve been looking ahead to is finally within sight, and only one thing seems to be on everyone’s minds: What songs are we going to request that Yo La Tengo perform for pledges tomorrow afternoon on the WFMU fundraising marathon? I already requested “Better Things” the year after Hurricane Sandy, but I’m hoping I can find something equally appropriate for 2021.

Here’s some stadium and arena news to tide you over while you wait:

  • Economic impact studies of sports venues are usually pretty terrible, given that they generally start out by measuring “impact” (i.e., all money spent in or around a stadium or arena whether it benefits anyone but the team owner) and ignore spending that’s just shifted from one part of town to another, and so on. But the projection that a new $228 million arena in Augusta will generate more than $600 million in economic impact by adding up “$436 million in new spending” plus “$208 million in new sales taxes” breaks new ground in bonkers: Doesn’t the Augusta Downtown Development Authority know that sales taxes are already part of “spending”? Plus, is the sales tax rate in Augusta really 48%? The full “market analysis” is here, but it doesn’t provide details on its methodology and the $208 million sales-tax figure doesn’t seem to appear anywhere in it, so we’ll just have to trust that the Augusta Chronicle’s fact-checking department was on the job and, oh dear. Maybe the “applause editor” does some fact-checking in her spare time?
  • Also in economic-impact-study news, various studies have projected anywhere from $200 million to $600 million in impact from a new arena in Palm Desert, but Mayor Kathleen Kelly says, “Sports arenas are pretty notorious for over-promising and under-delivering positive economic impacts for the surrounding community. So, I do have to look at the proposal with some skepticism.” She adds an arena could draw off spending from area restaurants to arena concessions, and take up hotel rooms that otherwise could be occupied by longer-term visitors — hey, somebody’s been reading this site, or maybe just the mountains of data showing that arenas haven’t had a large measurable impact in the past! Warms my heart, it does.
  • The Florida House Ways & Means Committee voted 16-1 yesterday to repeal the state’s program that allows sports team owners to request up to $2 million a year apiece in sales-tax money to repay their private stadium and arena construction or renovation costs, and, yes, this was just proposed a couple of years ago, but maybe one of these days it’ll actually pass. Especially given that it’s a program that has allowed team owners to demand public money for venues they’ve already built, making the economic impact of the subsidies an easy-to-calculate zero.
  • Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena is gone, but you can still park in its parking garage, which is about to become “much more than just a place to park in the morning” as it is converted to a “mobility hub” that is … a place to park in the morning and buy coffee.  It’s all privately funded, at least, so far.
  • If you want to read an article about sad Sacramento soccer boosters appealing for a billionaire to come and bring $500 million for an expansion fee and a new stadium after the old billionaire backed out, here you go! Features Sacramento mayor and former Kings water-carrier Darrell Steinberg saying of the plan that ended up leaving the city cutting services to pay down arena debt, “We didn’t give up on the Kings and we’re not giving up on Major League Soccer.” Adds Steinberg: “What we need is a plug-and-a-play from an investor to then help us finish the last piece of this.” In related news, I only need $6 billion as the last piece of the puzzle for building my space elevator, please apply within.
  • Not to be topped, News 4 Nashville has a “first look inside Nashville’s new soccer stadium,” which is actually someone clicking around on computer renderings of the place, complete with a visible cursor. We had that already back in November, and with creepy shambling Sims!
  • And if you want to read an article about Cleveland Cavaliers owner and Quicken Loans magnate Dan Gilbert and his gajillions of dollars in public subsidies that starts out describing how he “was raised by a pair of Century 21 real estate agents” and “went to Michigan State University—where he was arrested for running a sports gambling operation,” Defector has gotcha.
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Friday roundup: A’s stadium goes lopsided, another Cali soccer stadium stalls, plus how to skip rent payments and use them to fix up your own home

access_time personNeil deMause

I’m very busy this morning, busy enough that one entire news item will have to wait till Monday when I can give it its due, but that means an extra post on Monday, so what are you complaining about, really? Anyway, there’s still plenty of stadium and arena news from this week, let’s have at it:

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Friday roundup: MLB billionaire owners cry poor, Rangers stadium reviews get worse and worse

access_time personNeil deMause

What a week! I know I say that every week, but: What. A. Week. In addition to the World Series insanity, I spent some time this week writing an article about other ways that giant monopolistic cartels screw over regular folks, but it’s not up yet* so you’ll just have to find out about it next week (or keep refreshing my personal website, or follow me on Twitter or something).

In the meantime, there’s lots of sports stadium and arena news to keep you occupied:

  • NYC F.C. may have announced progress on its new soccer stadium this week while providing no indication of actual progress, but the Washington Football Team one-upped them when team president Jason Wright earned an entire NBC Sports article about their stadium plans by saying he didn’t even have a timeline for the process. Meanwhile, the Sacramento Republic likewise issued a statement on their new stadium construction plans that amounted to nothing (“I do have a hard hat in my trunk!” said team president Ben Gumpert, by way of news). At this rate, team owners will be able to get reporting on their stadium campaigns after denying they even want one — oh wait, we’ve gone there already.
  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred says the league now has $8.3 billion in debt, $3 billion of it accrued during 2020’s pandemic season, which doesn’t actually tell you how well baseball is doing — presumably some of it was borrowed against future revenues from TV contracts and naming-rights deals and the like — but sounds impressive when you’re about to go into union contract talks. Also, notes Marc Normandin, that’s really only a $100 million loss per team, which isn’t an unfathomably huge sum for the billionaires who own most teams; plus we have to take Manfred’s word on that debt figure, and it already doesn’t include things like teams’ ownership of regional sports networks. MLB owners, he writes, are “hoping, as they so often do, that you have no idea how anything works, and will just take them at their word. So that they can do things like, oh, I don’t know, decline the 2021 option on basically everyone with one in order to flood the free agent market with additional players they can then underbid on and underpay, claiming that this is all financially necessary because of all the debt, you see.” Or as we may start calling it soon, getting Brad Handed.
  • Philadelphia public schools lost $112 million in property tax revenues in 2019 that were siphoned off to tax breaks for developers, according to a new Good Jobs First study, nearly double their losses from just two years earlier. Good thing the 76ers‘ plan for an arena funded by siphoned-off property taxes was rejected, though there are more plans where that came from, so Philly schools should probably still hold onto their wallets.
  • One more review of the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium that team owners Ray Davis and Bob Simpson got $500 million to help build because the old one lacked air-conditioning, this one from a fan who’s visited every stadium and arena in North America: “This would probably end up probably down near the bottom.” He added that the upper decks are too far from the field, the place is too dark, the scale is “ridiculous,” and on top of that fans were taking off their masks as soon as security is out of sight, which, yup.
  • Las Vegas has extended its negotiating window again for a new soccer stadium to lure an MLS team, which makes you wonder why they even bothered to set a window in the first place instead of just hanging out a shingle saying, “Have Stadium $$$, Inquire Within.”
  • Sports team owners make tons of “dark money” to political campaigns to try to get elected officials to support their interests, according to ESPN, though disappointingly their only real source is an unnamed NBA owner. But that source did say, “There’s no question,” in italics and everything, so you know they’re serious.
  • Maybe the NHL should just play games outdoors so they can allow in fans? There are dumber ideas, but they might want to figure out how to get fans to keep their damn masks on first.
  • There are some new renderings of the New York Islanders‘ luxury suites at their new arena, and I can’t stop puzzling over what that weird counter-like thing is in this one, or why the women are all wearing stiletto heels to an NHL game. I’ll never understand hockey!

*UPDATE: Now it’s up.

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Every city in U.S. now building a soccer stadium, or at least it seems like it

access_time personNeil deMause

Some days it seems like this site is turning into Soccer Pitch of Schemes. I mean, seriously, check this out:

The reason for this flood of soccer stadium building has less to do with soccer being the sport of millennials or whatever, and more to do with there being umpteen gazillion soccer teams in the U.S. now, and more on the way, and lots of them not having brand-new stadiums of their own because sometimes there just isn’t time to do that before you have to collect some more expansion fees, you know? Which should cut both ways — if MLS and the USL alike are going to expand to every city with its own post office, you’d think that cities wouldn’t need to spend big bucks on stadium funding in order to have a shot at a franchise — but here we have Switchbacks president Nick Ragain saying of the Colorado Springs vote that “what it means is we have a long-term professional soccer team in Colorado Springs,” and nobody in the media rolling their eyes, so I guess these are questions that are not asked in polite society.

And speaking of soccer and the media not rolling their eyes, yes, an Argentine football team celebrated the reopening of its stadium with a giant holographic flaming lion as many of you have emailed and tweeted at me, but also it’s not really a hologram and fans in the stadium couldn’t even see it except on TV screens. Number of news articles pointing this out: one; number of news articles going “Oooooh, fiery lion!”: more than I can count.

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Sacramento council to vote on turning Burkle’s stadium subsidy into a “loan,” which isn’t better, but also probably isn’t worse

access_time personNeil deMause

The Sacramento city council is set to vote tomorrow on a plan to loan $27 million to Ron Burkle, owner of the new Sacramento Republic F.C. MLS franchise, for roads and other traffic and transit upgrades around his new stadium, and “repay” it using Burkle’s own property taxes on development surrounding the stadium. Said Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, who is proposing the loan:

“For me as mayor, there is one overriding question: Is an infrastructure loan that clinched the deal to get Major League Soccer and help reverse decades of little progress in the railyards good for the city? I have no doubt the answer is yes.”

That seems to imply that any size public loan to a private entity would be good enough for Steinberg — who can put a price on reversing decades of little progress? — but whatever, it’s best not to think to hard about what politicians say when politicianing.

This is, of course, tax increment financing, which we’ve covered to death here previously. (Tl;dr version: No, it’s not “new money.”) On the bright side, sort of, the tax increment cash was already set to go to Burkle under his previous agreement to get $33 million in city funding for his stadium; now instead of having to wait to get it year by year, the city would loan him the money up front and he’d pay it back by letting the city have the taxes they would normally collect anyway. The only added risk, really, is that Burkle defaults on the loan, which seems unlikely, since presumably he’ll put up as collateral—

The investor group will be required to put up a yet-to-be determined collateral.

Sigh. Well, it’s not too much worse than the original deal. Probably. Feel free to read the amendment being voted on tomorrow yourself and see if you can find any more potential pitfalls.

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