St. Louis MLS team – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: Calgary hires wolf to guard its Flames arena chicken coop, and Stan Kroenke’s no good very bad day

October 21, 2022 Neil deMause

Before we get to our weekly cavalcade of doom, some actual good news this week: Tom Scocca, the longtime sports-and-everything-else writer who last got mention here for his excellent newsletter Hmm Daily, which later transmogrified into the excellent newsletter Indignity, announced that he and his longtime running partner Joe MacLeod will be taking the reigns at the online publication Popula, formerly part of the same Civil network of news sites as Hmm Daily. If that was way too many obscure web/email publications for you in one sentence, here’s the tl;dr: Tom Scocca is one of the funniest and most insightful writers out there, and now he’s going to be not only easier to find an link to but he’s going to have a freelance budget to assign more articles by other (hopefully funny and insightful) writers as well. For starters, here’s a column about whether it’s okay to take advantage of the other team not having enough players to run up the score in a flag football game for 9-year-olds. This is the kind of insightful (and funny!) writing that America needs to heal its wounds.

Cavalcade of doom time!

The city of Calgary and the Flames owners have officially restarted talks on a new arena, nine months after team officials walked away from a previous deal because they were mad they would have to pay too much money. (This seems kinda like city officials are engaging in bad parenting to me, but okay.) Negotiating on behalf of the city will be consultants CAA ICON, best remembered around here for their terrible Buffalo Bills economic impact study; it’s tempting to say better to have them working for the city than against it, but you also have to wonder if they could have found a consultant without both feet planted quite so firmly in the “new venues are the bomb” world.
Stan Kroenke is reportedly going to be required to pay the NFL $571 million toward its $790 million settlement with the city of St. Louis for yanking the Rams out of town in violation of its own league bylaws. Add in the $3 billion in cost overruns he had to pay for his new L.A. stadium and it’s tempting to see Kroenke as the big loser in the Rams-return-to-L.A. saga, but it’s also hard to see exactly who the winner is — St. Louis got a pile of cash and doesn’t have to spend money on building another stadium, so I guess that’s a kind of win, at least until somebody decides the city needs the NFL back and they spend even more than that on luring an expansion team.
A giant tranche of public information about the Buffalo Bills stadium project just dropped, though it doesn’t appear to include that Erie County study of the projected cost of renovating the team’s old stadium that the county keeps releasing with all the important bits blacked out. (There is an “alternatives analysis” that rules out renovation on the grounds that “a renovation project of the type that would likely be necessary to encourage a long-term lease renewal would be extensive,” which is studyspeak for “the Bills owners want something real shiny.”) I haven’t dug through it all yet, but feel free to do so yourself, or just enjoy the opportunity to go around saying “tranche” a lot, I sure am.
Tennessee Titans fans who paid for personal seat licenses for the right to buy season tickets at the team’s current stadium are pissed that they’ll have to pay for new personal seat licenses for the right to buy season tickets at a new one. The Titans say they’ll credit current PSL holders with however much they spent for the old ones, but given that the choice is “give us more money now or else see your entire investment go up in smoke,” I’d be pissed, too.
St. Louis S.C.‘s new $461 million stadium may not be ready by the team’s MLS debut next spring because some workers broke an electric line, and then it rained. I would make a “time to tear it down and build a new one” joke, but I’m kind of afraid someone would take it seriously.
Illinois voters are split on whether they want the Chicago Bears to stay in Chicago or move to suburban Arlington Heights, but only 12% are okay with spending tax money on building a new stadium, and only another 28% are okay with devoting public funds to infrastructure for one. None of this should be surprising, given that that’s what polls pretty much always say, though elected officials also pretty much always ignore what the public thinks.
This excellent Kathryn Schulz article about the history of public lotteries has nothing to do with stadium scams per se, but given that it’s about how government have ended up extracting money from people who can least afford it in order to support a giant private industry while pretending it lets them cut taxes, it at least rhymes.

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Friday roundup: The only thing crumbling faster than the Saddledome roof is American journalism

September 16, 2022 Neil deMause

And so we come to the end of another week, one where I’ve been reading a lot about bears and consensual cannibalism. (But not among the bears. Bears are above considering such things, presumably.) But anyway, you want to hear about more pleasant things, like, uhhh, the terrible state of journalism in 2022? Maybe I should consider adding some more bears to these posts.

Bits of concrete are falling from the Saddledome roof, but that happens to concrete and isn’t a structural issue, so the Calgary Flames arena is “currently safe and structurally sound,” according to city general manager of infrastructure services Michael Thompson. Any concrete-repair costs would be definitely worth factoring into currently ongoing discussions over building a new Flames arena after the previous plan was halted when neither the city nor the team owners wanted to pay for rising cost overruns, but it’s far more likely it’ll just be the subject of lots of tweets saying “The old arena is literally falling apart, build a new one already!” if history is any guide.
St. Louis’s new mostly-but-by-no-means-entirely-privately-funded soccer stadium was supposed to open this upcoming weekend with a minor-league St. Louis SC City2 game, but instead will not because a city work crew outside the stadium accidentally knocked out power. It’s hard to tell what’s going on, really, because the city won’t talk about it, but a member of the St. Louligans supporters’ group declared the whole situation to be “a huge bummer,” which is hard to dispute.
Not saying op-ed sections in newspapers are an inherently bad idea that should be entirely rethought, but when the Philadelphia Inquirer ends up running a long opinion piece by the would-be developers of a new Sixers arena that asserts that the arena “will be privately funded and not require public subsidy” (spoiler: this isn’t true) and links that phrase to an Inquirer profile of the developers that actually says nothing of the sort, maybe op-ed editors should at least be doing as aggressive fact-checking of rich people’s opinion pieces as they do for normal people.
I throw plenty of shade on Axios here for being an attempt to reduce all human communication to a set of over-boiled-down bullet points, but this Axios listicle about Richmond’s new stadium for the Flying Squirrels minor-league baseball team that includes the city’s claims of huge tax windfalls without even mentioning once how much the city would spend on the project provides a lovely case study of journalistic badness. And that’s without even getting into the fact that nobody is asking why Richmond’s stadium renderings include a lower deck that appears to slope down away from the field, though given how the Flying Squirrels are doing this year, maybe the city thinks it’d be easier to sell tickets to watch the backs of other fans’ heads than whatever is passing for baseball.
Though then we have the Indianapolis Star writing an article about a new arena for the Indy Fuel minor-league hockey team that doesn’t mention how much the arena will cost or how much the public will be expected to kick in for it, so maybe it’s just that most journalism has descended to the level of reprinting press releases. (Or maybe Gannett has just laid off anyone with the time or skills to do anything more than that.)
Missing all those posts here from the spring about all the public money being wasted on a new Buffalo Bills stadium? Instead enjoy this report (from the Investigative Post, one of the few news outlets to do real reporting on the Bills stadium funding) on how nearby Niagara County is funneling $124 million in tax breaks to Amazon for a new warehouse with jobs paying barely over minimum wage. (Amazon will also get state tax kickbacks, because that’s how Gov. Kathy Hochul rolls.) But at least they’re stable jobs, what with the boom in online ordering meaning Amazon will continue to need more and more warehouses forever … sorry, say what now? Oh. Well, hopefully at least the Amazon workers will get some state-of-the-art cupholders.

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Missouri told it won’t get World Cup matches unless it exempts tickets from sales tax

December 16, 2021December 16, 2021 Neil deMause

One of the fundamental tools of media analysis — or, if you’re working for the dark side, media spin — is framing: how the exact same information can be presented in different ways to emphasize one aspect or another. This can be done in passing, as with my dismissal of the entire field of public relations in the last sentence as “the dark side,” or in the very structure of an article, where by cherry-picking what to present as the main takeaway one can report the same news in very different ways.

Which brings us to this article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Missouri is in good position to host World Cup soccer, lieutenant governor says

Hey, great! The 2026 World Cup is going to be held in the U.S. and Mexico and Canada, and St. Louis just got a new soccer stadium at a cost of only $60 million in tax breaks, while Kansas City has the Chiefs‘ stadium, and now the two cities have “pretty good” chances of hosting some games, according to Missouri Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe. That seems to be all there is to this feel-good story, down to the 10th paragraph now, the 11th, oh wait—

Missouri lawmakers are being asked to approve legislation that would stop the collection of sales taxes on World Cup ticket sales.

Under legislation filed by Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo, D-Independence, the tax would be left off the tickets during the duration of the event.

Kehoe said the existence of the tax is a red flag to FIFA.

“It is a deal breaker,” Kehoe said.

So, basically, we have at least one answer to how FIFA plans to decide which cities to place 2026 World Cup games in: Start by eliminating any cities that don’t agree to hand over a giant tax break. This is common in other siting decisions like the Olympics and Super Bowl, of course, but it’s the first time I’ve noticed it with regard to which cities within a host country get World Cup matches.

As for how much the tax break would cost Missouri, let’s do some math. There will be 80 games spread across 16 cities, so that’s five games per city. The Chiefs’ stadium holds 76,000 people, so if they sell out all the matches, at let’s say an average of $200 a ticket, which seems reasonable based on past World Cup pricing, that’s $76 million in ticket sales. Missouri’s state sales tax is 4.225%, so that’s around $3 million that the state would be kicking back to FIFA. Which isn’t a ton — state officials say that World Cup visitors could spend $600 million, which like all such estimates is a gross exaggeration, but even if you move the decimal place over one it would likely create a couple million dollars in new non-ticket sales taxes. Still, it would be $3 million that the state of Missouri would normally collect from a big event, except that the multibillion-dollar international crime syndicate (not my words, a U.S. Senator called FIFA this, and John Oliver would likely agree) in charge of deciding where to put the games demanded that it instead be given to them in small bills.

Anyway, where was I? Oh right, framing! Don’t read the daily newspaper’s headlines, read my headlines instead, that’s what I’m saying. (Our next lesson will be in aggregation.)

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Friday roundup: Sports team owners saying stuff, and the journalists who love to reprint it, Episode #736

October 15, 2021 Neil deMause

That wasn’t a swing, was it? It sure didn’t look like a swing to me.

Sorry, right, enough about actual sports, back to the business of sports business:

The owners of the new St. Louis City SC MLS team want a new parking garage built next to their new stadium, arguing that the stadium “will have a magnetic quality that draws people to the district 365 days a year,” according to the garage’s lead architect. Team officials already demolished several century-old mixed-use buildings to make way for the garage, which would seem to be a lost opportunity for things like stores and restaurants that might more likely be in use year-round, but far be it from me to argue with an expert in economagnetism.
Albuquerque city officials say they won’t decide where to build a New Mexico United USL soccer stadium until voters approve the money for it — which makes total sense, because the cost of a project doesn’t depend at all on what land needs to be acquired, and also no landowner would ever jack up the price of property knowing that the city needs it for an already-approved project. Today is Opposite Day, right?
Arash Markazi no longer works for the L.A. Times after being exposed for promoting friends’ projects in his columns and reprinting press releases almost verbatim, but Substack and Twitter don’t care if you’re ethical so long as you get eyeballs, so we have Markazi announcing, unsourced, that “The Oakland Athletics are expected to announce a handful of finalists for a potential $1 billion stadium in Las Vegas after the World Series,” and that getting turned into entire news articles elsewhere. Never mind that A’s exec Dave Kaval already said as much last month, or that “narrows down sites for stadium that nobody has proposed to pay for” isn’t really breaking news anyway, a famous reporter guy said a thing about famous business guys maybe saying a thing, everybody quick post updates at once!
Tennessee Smokies owner Randy Boyd says he’ll pay stadium construction workers at least $15.50 an hour but won’t sign anything making that promise enforceable, and won’t promise to pay concessions and other stadium workers anything above the cheapest the labor market will let him get away with. The Knoxville News Sentinel reports that Boyd says since he’s “a longtime community member, a community benefits agreement won’t be necessary,” a sentence that it’s amazing the News Sentinel production staff could type without busting out in visible lolsobs.
Pawtucket’s McCoy Stadium is in bad shape after the Pawtucket Red Sox left for Worcester and took all the kitchen equipment and office chairs with them. The city is considering whether to rehab the stadium for an indie-league team, but the two that kicked the tires said that at 10,000 seats it’s too big for them; or to redevelop the site for something else, but there are worries it will sink into the swamp.
Charlotte officials have noticed that they’re paying city police officers to provide security at Carolina Panthers games instead of having the team hire off-duty officers, because no off-duty officers want to work for the $42-an-hour rate that the team offers. I spent a bunch of time reading local articles to try to figure out if it’s the Panthers or the city or someone else chintzing on security wages, and felt bad that I couldn’t figure it out until I saw a quote from Charlotte’s police chief saying, “Listen Panthers or whoever, enough is enough?” and decided that if he doesn’t know, I shouldn’t be expected to either.
Do you really want to read NFL uber-insider Mike Florio speculating about whether the NFL will settle the city of St. Louis’s lawsuit against the league for moving the Rams by offering the city an expansion team? Even though Rams owner Stan Kroenke has promised to cover any losses the league is stuck with, and Florio doesn’t provide any sources at all other than “an acknowledgment in league circles of the possibility”? Probably not, but you’re a grownup, make your own decisions.
The Tampa Bay Rays may have been eliminated from the postseason, but that’s not going to stop the Tampa Bay Times editorial board from taking the opportunity to stump for a new stadium on the grounds that, um, let’s see, “far too few people will buy tickets to watch them play at their current stadium” and “the hard work needs to be done now to ensure the team stays in the Tampa Bay area, even if it’s part time.” One could point out that there’s no solid evidence that significantly more people would buy tickets at a new stadium, especially for a team that would disappear to Canada all summer, but the Times also says that “this is not the time to clam up or for grandstanding or unhelpful posturing,” so I guess they wouldn’t want lots of people writing them about this, huh?
Did you know that the USL is creating a new women’s soccer league, to be an adjunct to/compete with the NWSL, currently reeling under a sexual harassment scandal that has already brought down its commissioner and forced the relocation of its championship game? I had not, but more women’s pro teams can only be a good thing both in terms of growing the women’s game and providing more teams so that cities don’t have to outbid each other for them, though also more opportunities for teams to demand that cities outbid each other for them, because city officials are pretty much morons when it comes to this stuff.
Lots of times sports team owners argue that there’s no way to fund venue construction and repairs without public subsidies, but did they ever consider growing and selling soybeans? On free public land, oh, Canada, you just had to ruin this feel-good story, didn’t you?
Tokyo’s Olympic white-elephant stadiums are facing increased maintenance costs because they’re under attack by oysters. That is all.

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Friday roundup: Bears owner bids to buy Arlington Park, plus do you really need anything else?

June 18, 2021 Neil deMause

Happy Friday, everyone! Unless you’re in the American West and currently melting from the heat, in which case, umm, try to stay indoors and hydrated, and don’t think about how in coming years it’s only likely to get worse. (This is maybe another reason why the Oakland A’s aren’t likely to move to Las Vegas, though building a new stadium right on San Francisco Bay is an equally bad idea in climate-proofing terms.)

Lots of news this week, so let’s get down to business:

Until now talk of the Chicago Bears moving to a new stadium on the site of the closing Arlington Park racetrack in suburban Arlington Heights has been mostly limited to idle suburban-newspaper-columnist speculation, but that speculation got kicked up a notch yesterday when Bears CEO Ted Phillips tweeted that the team had put in a bid to purchase the racetrack as part of its due diligence to “explore every possible option to ensure we’re doing what’s best for our organization and its future.” Now, putting in a bid doesn’t mean Bears execs are necessarily planning on moving — they would still need someone to pay for a stadium, for starters, and also have a lease on Soldier Field that runs through 2033, and even if they won the bid they could always choose to develop the site some other way or re-sell it to another developer who would — but it clearly does mean that they want “Bears could move to Arlington Heights” to remain a part of any discussion about their demands for improvements to their current stadium.
The snagged plan to rebuild San Diego’s arena is now completely dead, after the state of California ruled that the state’s Surplus Land Act requiring that all government-owned land be made available for affordable housing requires that, you know, that. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria says he’ll now move to restart the bidding process, in hopes of finding a developer who’ll build affordable housing as well as an arena, because to do otherwise would meaning giving up on his dream of a hellscape of people frozen in time.
Remember when former A’s pitcher Dave Stewart said he wanted to buy the city’s half of the Oakland Coliseum site and build “nice restaurants and shops” and “employment opportunities”? The Oakland city council doesn’t seem to, even though Stewart claims to be the high bidder, and that makes Dave Stewart sad.
The Dutchess County legislature voted in favor of spending $12.5 million on upgrades to the Hudson Valley Renegades stadium using federal recovery act money that was supposed to be used to fill in pandemic-related budget gaps. Dissenting county legislator Brennan Kearney decried “the tone-deafness of proposing that our first batch of funding be used at the stadium” while there are residents “who are unable to pay their rent, who are still hungry, who are unvaccinated,” but really, doesn’t everyone in a community benefit from a new clubhouse and batting cages?
Ron Burkle may have cut his losses by deciding that buying an MLS team for Sacramento for $200 million and at the same time building a $250 million stadium was a lousy investment, but it’s also getting him sued by his would-be stadium construction contractor for fraud and breach of contract over $2.3 million unpaid invoices. That’d still be cheaper than actually building the damn stadium, and Burkle can certainly afford to pay it — maybe with all the money he undoubtedly saves by avoiding income tax like his fellow richies.
Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis’s owner’s suite at his new stadium is already getting a $688,000 renovation even though he’s never used it. Davis claims that this is because it was never actually finished, which makes it harder to point and laugh, but also that one new amenity will be a glass wall between the suite and the stadium interior so Davis doesn’t ever have to hear the game or those awful fans, so by all means point and laugh at that.
There were at least three separate articles this week about the color pattern of seats at the new St. Louis S.C. stadium, which can best be described as “red and blue, kind of speckled.” Remember journalism? Those were some good times.

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Friday roundup: Titans seek overhaul of 21-year-old stadium, FC Cincy subsidy nears $100m, plus: bored sportswriters go rogue!

December 18, 2020December 18, 2020 Neil deMause

A quick programming note: The next two Friday roundups will be on Thursdays, since the next two Fridays are Christmas and New Year’s. Not that I’ll be doing much special those days — I’ve done pretty much nothing since March other than sit and stare at my laptop screen — but I’m doing this anyway as a courtesy to readers who may feel the need to go out and infect extended family members with a deadly disease or something.

And on to this week’s news remainders:

Tennessee Titans owner Amy Adams Strunk has opened talks with Nashville Mayor John Cooper over upgrades to the Titans’ stadium, which was built way back in 1999, and so is made entirely of wattle and daub. Strunk had previously called the Miami Dolphins‘ $350 million stadium renovation “a very interesting model,” though it doesn’t sound like she’s committing to pay for the upgrades as Dolphins owner Stephen Ross did: Rather, the rumblings are of some kind of tradeoff where the city gets the Titans to re-up for a longer lease and the team gets some cut of the revenues from developing its stadium parking lots. The Los Angeles Angels‘ deal with Anaheim would be the financing model, then, which given that that deal was very, very good to Angels owner Arte Moreno, you can see why Strunk would be interested in replicating it.
F.C. Cincinnati is getting another $16 million in state money for its stadium project, because … actually, none of the reporting gives any indication what it’s for. Probably Christmas presents for the construction workers? Anyway, added to the roughly $81 million worth of goodies the team was getting at public expense prior to this, we now have a total taxpayer price tag of $97 million, which is starting to turn into some real money.
Knoxville’s city council has approved the creation of a sports authority, the first step toward building a $52 million to $65 million stadium to lure the Tennessee Smokies back to town from their stadium in the suburbs. The Knox County Commission will vote as well on Monday, after which people can start talking about who’ll pay for this thing. There’s already been preliminary talk about “public-private partnerships” and “mixed-use developments,” so you just know that whatever finance plan is arrived at, it will be as confusing as possible, the better to make voters’ eyes glaze over come election time.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune sportswriters got so bored this week that they interviewed a Minnesota Vikings fan who went to a road game in Tampa to ask what it was like. Answers: “It felt like a normal gameday weekend. We tailgated with Tampa super fans a couple blocks from the stadium — maybe a few hundred people, minimum.” (Eeeagh!) Inside the stadium, “honestly, not a lot of people were wearing masks.” (Also eeeagh, though at least fans were distanced when in their seats.) He wouldn’t go to a road game in New Orleans, because of the “party atmosphere” there. (Harm reduction!) More on this breaking story as it develops.
The “stadium construction is proceeding” story has a long history, but “St. Louis S.C. stadium has its foundation 60% done” is still a journalistic low point. The extended video footage of nothing much in particular is impressive — maybe they should have interviewed some of the rebar to see how it felt about its safety?
If you haven’t had enough of me this week already, here’s a long Q&A with me about the San Jose Sharks hinting they’d leave San Jose if construction nearby messes too much with their parking. Features the line, “If you look at the number of teams that threaten to move in sports versus the number of teams that actually move, at least nine out of 10 move threats are nothing but hot air,” which really should be on my Wikiquote page, not that I have one — though a text-adventure superhero game I once wrote somehow does. The internet is weird, man.

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Friday roundup: More Jaguars move threats, more bad convention center spending, time is an endless loop of human folly

December 4, 2020 Neil deMause

It’s Friday again! And December, how did that happen? “Passage of time,” what manner of witchcraft are you speaking of? Time is an eternal, unchanging present of toil and suffering under the grip of unending plagues! Thus has it ever been!

This notwithstanding, there was some news this week, though in keeping with the theme, it looks an awful lot like the news every week:

The Jacksonville city council ignored Mayor Lenny Curry’s pleas to stop thinking about Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s multi-hundred-million-dollar subsidy demand and just vote on it, and instead held another hearing last night on the team’s request for $200 million in public cash toward building a development in one of the stadium parking lots. Jaguars president Mark Lamping picked up the baton, though, and issued an impressive string of non-threat threats that the team would leave town without approval of the subsidy, saying, “We’re doing what we believe is necessary to ensure NFL football is here in Northeast Florida for decades to come,” that the Lot J development and renovations to the team’s stadium are needed to “ensure we stay in Jacksonville,” and “We are doing everything to stay here.” Council president Tommy Hazouri would like to wait to vote on the Lot J subsidy until January, but Jaguars lobbyist Paul Harden warned of “deal fatigue” and called for a vote on Tuesday, and apparently Florida law gives lobbyists equal power to council presidents — who knew? — so that might actually happen. At which point Khan can come back in a couple more years to demand additional stadium renovation money in exchange for a lease extension. It’s good to be king.
Good article in the New York Times this week about how multiple cities (Indianapolis, Savannah, Cleveland, Terre Haute) are pouring money into convention center expansions even as convention centers remain closed and in any case have been facing years of declining attendance nationwide. In fact, convention center operators say this is even more of a reason to throw good money after bad, because with fewer conventions, they have no choice but to spend more to compete for the few that are available, right? “This is a perverse world, where market realities do not affect city decision-making,” University of Texas at San Antonio economist and FoS convention center correspondent Heywood Sanders tells the Times.
When Hamilton County, Ohio passed a 0.5% sales tax hike in 1996 to fund new stadiums for the Cincinnati Bengals and Reds, lawmakers promised county residents that if there was any money left over after paying off the stadiums, it would go to lower their property taxes. That’s only happened in the amount promised back then twice in the last decade, and it’s not going to happen this year either, with the pandemic taking a bite out of sales tax revenues that will leave only enough surplus for 21% of what homeowners were expecting. This has squat-all to do with the stadium deal — it’s more about the county overpromising by making rose-colored projections of how much money the tax hike would bring in — but as I noted when this same thing happened two years ago, at least this time the county didn’t have to sell any hospitals.
The Anaheim Ducks, Boston Bruins, Los Angeles Kings, and Pittsburgh Penguins are all reportedly considering playing their NHL seasons outdoors in order to be allowed to sell tickets, which is a great plan except that California is about to be under new stay-at-home restrictions that almost certainly won’t allow outdoor sports attendance either, and in Boston and Pittsburgh it snows a lot in the winter. Add in the costs of building and operating a temporary hockey rink at, say, Fenway Park, and this doesn’t seem all that likely to happen, but it’s certainly a better idea than hoping to allow attendance at indoor arenas before enough people are vaccinated, which isn’t likely to happen until the 2021-22 season.
Santa Clara’s stadium authority met this week to discuss an audit report of the San Francisco 49ers‘ stadium, and the 49ers responded by telling Santa Clara to fire its auditor. Then the audit showed a couple of million dollars of “discrepancies” in the 49ers’ books, at which point 49ers officials said they wouldn’t cooperate with audits anymore. Is this how rich people behave with the IRS, too? Yeah, pretty much.
I went on Orlando’s Beat of Sports radio show this week to discuss MLB’s self-declared mission to reorganize much of the minors into intern leagues so it can stop paying players while also leveraging cities for more stadium money, and you can listen to it here.
There are new renderings of the under-construction St. Louis S.C. stadium, and frankly they’re kind of boring, though they do have a Ferris wheel in them. They also supposedly show how fans will have a “perfect view” of the Gateway Arch, which I can’t actually spot in any of the images, but then I’m not sure why anyone would buy tickets to a soccer match to see a structure that they can see every day for free.
The Pawtucket Red Sox are no more, and if you want to remember the team’s history by buying some Keith Foulke bobbleheads, knock yourself out.

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Friday roundup: Coyotes late with arena rent, Winnipeg move non-threats, and good old gondolas, nothing beats gondolas!

September 25, 2020October 5, 2020 Neil deMause

If you missed me — and a whole lot of other people you’ve likely read about here, including economist Victor Matheson and former Anaheim mayor Tom Tait — breaking down the Los Angeles Angels stadium deal in an enormous Zoom panel last night, you can still check it out on the Voice of OC’s Facebook page. I didn’t bother to carefully curate the books on the shelves behind me, as one does, so have fun checking out which novels I read 20 years ago!

And on to the news, which remains unrelentingly newsy:

The Arizona Coyotes are late on their rent payments to the city of Glendale, or maybe not late according to their lease which gives them until the end of October, but still later than usual. The rent payment is $500,000; the Arizona Republic notes that the city is currently spending $13 million a year paying down arena debt plus $6.1 million a year in arena management fees and maintenance costs. Man, this whole thing was a bad idea.
Former Winnipeg mayor and current Winnipeg Goldeyes owner Sam Katz has signed a ten-year lease on Ottawa’s minor-league baseball stadium, and swears this is totally unrelated to his displeasure with his successors in Winnipeg city government trying to renew his stadium lease there to raise his rent from $1 a year and eliminate $700,000 a year in tax breaks and parking subsidies. “I don’t threaten, never threaten,” said Katz. “What I am saying to you is we have a lease for a ballpark in Ottawa.” That is surely not a thing that anyone would ever say as a threat!
The great Alissa Walker of Curbed weighed in on former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt’s proposal to build a gondola to take people to and from Dodger Stadium, and reached three important conclusions: “A stadium built at the height of car culture on a mountaintop with 16,000 parking spaces is working exactly as designed”; there’s no way you’re going to fit 12,000 fans onto a means of transport that even if packed to the gills would require people to start loading on two hours before game time and then continue doing so in even numbers until the first pitch; and there’s already a fast, efficient public transit technology to get people to Dodger games that doesn’t require massive spending on infrastructure, and it’s called shuttle buses. (Walker also calls gondolas “a kind of combination transit-slash-sightseeing ride,” which is both pretty damning and entirely accurate.) Add in that Los Angeles, unlike Oakland, already has plenty of existing bus routes leading to the stadium, and it’s really a no-brainer, unless you’re a rich dude looking to get city approval for a private gondola concession, in which case gondolas are the future, man, get with it already.
There’s a petition afoot in St. Louis to oppose the city’s plan to tear down a block of vacant buildings to make way for parking lots for St. Louis City S.C.‘s new stadium, presumably on the grounds that St. Louis already has too many vacant lots. A City S.C. spokesperson says the team is “exploring the opportunity” for a parking garage with stores on the first floor; hands up if you think it’s likely that they’re actually going to build this on their own dime.
The owners of the Tennessee Titans have come out against building a major league baseball stadium next door, which would seem to put a fork in the plan, even more than that the entire idea of an MLB team in Nashville is kind of dumb. So let’s take one last (?) opportunity to enjoy one of the more bonkers stadium renderings of our time.
If I had had to put my money on the next sports franchise to be displaced by the effects of climate change, I wouldn’t have wagered on a <strike>minor-league</strike> junior hockey team in Iowa having to shut down for a season because their arena was damaged by a derecho, but here we are.
The Super Bowl may or may not have live fans in attendance and, uh, yeah, that’s really the whole story.
This story has nothing to do with stadium shakedowns, except that it ends with the line “If it’s too expensive for the literal state of Florida to make some improperly obtained evidence go away, the defendant in the case will foot the bill himself,” so yeah, it really kinda does.

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Friday roundup: If you’re watching TV sports in empty stadiums by summer, count yourself lucky

March 27, 2020March 27, 2020 Neil deMause

Michael Sorkin, who died yesterday of COVID-19, was a prolific architecture critic (and architect) and observer of the politics of public space, and so not a little influential in the development of my own writing. I’m sure I read some of Sorkin’s architecture criticism in the Village Voice, but he first came on my radar with his 1992 anthology “Variations on a Theme Park,” a terrific collection of essays discussing the ways that architects, urban planners, and major corporations were redesigning the world we live in to become a simulacrum of what people think they want from their environment, but packaged in a way to better make them safely saleable commodities. (I wish I’d gotten a chance to ask him what he thought of the Atlanta Braves‘ new stadium, with its prefab walkable urban neighborhood with no real city attached to it.) In his “Variations on a Theme Park” essay on Disneyland and Disney World, he laid out the history of imagineered cities starting with the earliest World’s Fairs, up to the present day with Disney’s pioneering of “copyrighted urban environments” where photos cannot even be taken and published without prior approval of the Mouse — a restriction he got around by running as an illustration a photo of some clouds, and labeling it, “The sky above Disney World.”

I really hope this isn’t the beginning of a weekly feature on great people we’ve lost to this pandemic, though it seems pretty inevitable at this point. For now, on with the other stadium and arena news, though if you’re looking for a break from incessant coronavirus coverage, you won’t find it here:

In addition to the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium getting to continue construction during a coronavirus shutdown of all “nonessential” businesses, construction will also continue on the Worcester Red Sox stadium, and the St. Louis MLS team stadium (though the club says it will “take the necessary steps to protect every member of the team”), and the Las Vegas Raiders stadium (despite a construction worker testing positive for COVID-19), and the Phoenix Suns arena renovation, and the Los Angeles Dodgers stadium renovation. Though some more cities are at least talking about shutting down construction sites like Boston has (mostly), so we’ll see how long this lasts.
As for existing sports venues and convention centers left empty by the cessation of pretty much all sports not played on a computer (or featuring marbles as athletes), they’re being pressed into service as emergency shelters and open-air hospitals and makeshift legislative meeting rooms and coronavirus testing sites and parking lots for rental vehicles that nobody wants to rent because who leaves the house anymore?
The Tokyo Olympics has been pushed back to 2021, which is expected to add $2.7 billion to the games’ price tag, though that could come down if hotels and security companies and the like agree to take a pay cut rather than forcing the Olympic committee to re-book everything a second time. NBC, meanwhile, is hosed on its plans to launch its streaming service with Olympic coverage, if you can find time to shed a tear for a massive media conglomerate’s streaming video business model amid all this.
MLB and its players union have reportedly agreed to a deal on salaries and service time and other issues surrounding playing an abbreviated season, including the shortened amateur draft that owners originally proposed in their plan last winter to eliminate 42 minor-league franchises, back before it looked like the Coronavirus Recession would kill them on their behalf. Meanwhile, the NBA is getting ready to finish its season in the summer without fans, which is probably a best-case scenario for all sports, especially given that a Champions League match is now thought to have been the spark that set off Italy’s coronavirus epidemic, and the Chinese Basketball Association has extended its 10-week hiatus for fear of the virus flaring up again like it has in Hong Kong, and even the more rose-colored projections involve a summer where “Americans might get restaurants but no music festivals, offices but no crowded beaches, bars with spaced-out seating.” There are still a lots of ways the curves can bend here, and while a few of them involve sports in 2020, hardly any involve letting people watch live sports in large numbers — unless maybe things have been brought under control to where massive testing and contact tracing and quarantine of those infected and their contacts can be enough to let us gather en masse again, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Actual non-coronavirus stadium news! Opponents of the Oakland A’s stadium project, including shipping companies that are worried about the impact on their businesses at Howard Terminal, are suing to block the fast-tracking of its environmental impact report, which is becoming a common move in stadium battles in California. (The fast-tracking is, I mean, not the suing. Well, both, really.) The A’s ownership decried this as reeking of “cynicism and desperation” coming “at a time when our community is coming together in the midst of a global public health crisis,” something that Pacific Merchant Shipping Association Vice President Michael Jacob called “pretty cynical and desperate.” Damn, I promised no coronavirus content in this item, sorry about that.
Real actual non-coronavirus stadium news, except for it actually being news: The desiccated husk of Sports Illustrated is speculating that the Carolina Panthers could move to South Carolina, because stadiums can host the Final Four or something? If you can make sense of this word salad, please post your interpretation in comments.
Won’t anyone think of the giant flags?

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State board gathers in small, enclosed space to approve St. Louis MLS subsidies

March 18, 2020March 18, 2020 Neil deMause

Hey, it’s actual stadium subsidy news! The world may be padlocking its doors as we speak, but the Missouri Development Finance Board did find time to approve $5.7 million worth of tax credits for the expansion St. Louis MLS team‘s new stadium.

The vote was unanimous, with board chair Marie Carmichael saying afterwards, “I feel a lot better about this project. It is certainly more doable.” (The team’s initial request, for $30 million in tax credits, was rejected last December after it was determined that the state was plumb out of tax credits after its next $5.7 million.) Though at least one board member noted the, uh, problematic timing of all this:

Although he voted in favor of the project, board treasurer John Mehner raised concerns about approving the project at a time when the world is focused on battling the coronavirus.

“I’m worried about the optics … and whether this is the exact right time to take action,” said Mehner, who suggested waiting for up to two months to take up action on the tax credits.

There’s also the question of whether the sports world will ever be the same as it was just a couple of weeks ago: Leagues are already looking at returning to play games in empty venues, possibly much smaller ones that could effectively be used as TV studios; this could be the new normal for a long while if predictions are accurate that we’re likely to be on a “roller coaster” of reopenings and reclosings as the virus waxes and wanes over the next year or two.

And then there’s the question of how sports leagues survive the economic hit of canceling most of all of their seasons — while some leagues are sitting on deep reserves of cash, that’s not true for smaller leagues like MLS (and certainly not for minor-league sports). Will the league’s strategy of continued growth underwritten by continued expansion still be viable in a world battered by a months- or years-long economic crash? We’ve seen leagues before that have gone on hiatus because of what seemed like a momentary crisis and then never returned; I’m not especially expecting that for MLS, but there could still be major repercussions for its business model.

In the meantime, I guess take comfort in the fact that at least some business as usual is still going on, even if you can’t go to work or school or the weed store. Sure, it’s the business as usual of tax money being handed over to private enterprise to underwrite their profits, but we’ve gotta cling to whatever normalcy we have now, right?

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