Phoenix Suns – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: Fighting stadium ignorance is taking longer than we thought

December 30, 2022January 27, 2023 Neil deMause

And so this brings to an end another programming year, and what a year it was: The Buffalo Bills owners got more than $1 billion in public money by doing an end run around democracy, the Tennessee Titans owners went down the middle of the legislative process but are now in position to score their own billion-dollar-plus taxpayer-funded payday, the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles got over a billion dollars in state money parked in a slush fund that doesn’t have an easy football metaphor to go with it, and the owners of the Cleveland Browns, Kansas City Royals, Philadelphia 76ers, NYC F.C. all launched campaigns for new buildings and the public checks that come with them. Sure, the Los Angeles Angels stadium deal fell apart after the mayor who negotiated it turned out to be under FBI investigation for fraud and bribery, but overall it’s still undeniably a great time to be a billionaire who owns a pro sports franchise, or, you know, owns pretty much anything else.

Oh yeah, and this happened:

Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes, D-Buffalo, just delivered a passionate defense of the Bills stadium deal.

Among many other things, she said it will benefit senior citizens because they will be able to shop in empty supermarkets when the games are on.

— Jon Campbell (@JonCampbellNY) April 9, 2022

As economist J.C. Bradbury said in May in an interview on this site — which I’ve just made free for all readers rather than a subscriber exclusive — “It is quite eye-opening to talk to … policymakers, elected officials, business executives. They absolutely do not want to hear that this is a bad idea. And they cling to it in ways that you cannot imagine: This has to be good because I want it to be good.” And as I said back to him: Even if fighting ignorance is taking longer than we thought, we can at least try to help readers laugh to keep from crying.

Here’s to another year of that ahead, and thanks in advance for your support of this site’s work. And now let’s wrap up the final news of 2022:

The New Orleans Pelicans owners don’t plan to demand a new arena when their initial 25-year lease expires in 2024, but rather will just be asking for state-funded renovations in exchange for a five-year lease extension while considering a “long-term plan.” This is yet another reminder that owning a sports venue is seldom a good thing for the public unless they actually own the rights to the venue revenue — if that all goes to the team owner, you’re just setting yourself up for a subsidy that keeps on subsidizing.
Dallas Cowboys fans are really upset that the team’s new-ish stadium lets the sun shine in the eyes of its players sometimes — and also opposing teams’ players, but nobody wants to mention that — but the most amusing part is how SB Nation reports that “designers essentially banked on AT&T Stadium leading to mass development in Arlington, with the belief that new construction would eventually be built up and block out the sun problem inside the stadium.” You’d think Jerry Jones of all people would have been around long enough to know that stadiums that only host eight or so football games a year aren’t going to do much to spur surrounding development, or at least could come up with a simpler solution.
Somebody noticed that Phoenix city council members who voted for Suns arena renovations are now getting use of free luxury boxes in the arena, but the city says elected officials bringing business friends to NBA games for free is all part of standard “economic development” policy, which isn’t actually all that reassuring.
The owners of the Kane County Cougars minor-league baseball team have been stiffing Kane County on rent and are now being threatened with eviction in 2024 if they don’t pay up; it is exceedingly unlikely that this will end up with a tractor being parked on home plate, but one can always hope.

Happy new year, and don’t forget to write off your ape NFTs as a business loss! Definitely a good time to be rich.

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Friday roundup: Raleigh to pay Hurricanes $81m to stay put, Calgary arena blows budget, plus sports owners’ 70-year-old tax dodge

July 9, 2021 Neil deMause

Hi, all! I’ll be traveling next week to one of the parts of the globe where things happen a bit later in the day (because of time zones, not because everyone sleeps in — but wouldn’t that be a great place?), so anticipate posts to be a bit tardier and possibly more sporadic. I’ll be back in plenty of time for that big Oakland A’s stadium hearing on the 20th, though, so expect a report on that one bright and early. (Unless you live in, say, Europe, in which case you’re already taking an afternoon siesta by the time FoS wakes up, lucky you.)

But enough about living on a spherical planet, let’s get to this week’s news:

That five-year lease extension that Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon supposedly signed more than a year ago actually just got finalized by the state-run Centennial Authority yesterday, and we now have some more details on the terms: In exchange for agreeing to stay put from 2024-29, Dundon, a billionaire subprime auto loan baron who just completed his purchase of 100% of the hockey team, will pay zero rent starting this year, plus will get paid $9 million a year in City of Raleigh and Wake County food and hotel tax money through 2029 to cover both operating costs and arena upgrades. There’s also an out clause in the lease where the ‘Canes owner can pay a termination fee and leave early anyway, starting at $31 million in 2024, and sinking to $3 million in 2028. Authority board member and resume-padding yacht salesman Randy Ramsey worried aloud that “I can see us getting to about 2029 and the Hurricanes, or whomever our partners are at that point, saying the building is dilapidated” and needs to be replaced — and Ramsey was one of the board members voting for the lease extension. This is hardly the first case of a team getting paid to play games in its home arena — it’s practically an annual tradition in, say, Indiana — but it’s still a pretty egregious one, especially since North Carolina taxpayers will end up sending enough money Dundon’s way to pay any relocation fee for him, which isn’t quite what a lease guarantee is supposed to do.
The Calgary Flames arena project is now $50-60 million over budget, and the CBC reports that “adjustments are now being made to control the costs, which include interior finishings and parts of the building’s exterior.” That seems like an awful lot of money to try to save just by eliminating some sconces, but more power to them if they can do it without value-engineering the place right out of working for hockey. (In case you’re wondering, it would take a two-thirds vote of the Calgary council to approve more money beyond the $250 million-ish already approved.)
ProPublica yesterday ran a long article (the only kind it ever runs) about the special tax dodges that sports team owners use to cut their tax bills, in particular the ability to depreciate the value of your players as if they were machine parts that wear out. (ProPublica, as some of you may know, is currently my day job, but I had no involvement with this story.) This is an old, old dodge in sports circles, having been first invented, as ProPublica notes, by then-Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck in the late 1940s; here’s a good Sports Illustrated article about it from 1978. I first read about it in (checks Field of Schemes endnotes, I knew there was a reason we included those) Andrew Zimbalist’s 1992 book Baseball and Billions, and then later talked with sports economist Rod Fort about how he and fellow economist Roger Noll had exposed how then-Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig had assigned 94% of the value of his team to the player contracts he’d bought along with the rest of the Seattle Pilots franchise in 1970, thus allowing him to take almost the entire $10.8 million purchase price as a double-dip deduction — only to be told by a judge, in Fort’s recollection, that “well, that’s a good piece of work, but I can see no reason that Selig’s choice violates the accepted rules of accounting in Major League Baseball.” (ProPublica also didn’t mention that the depreciation tax break only really works when the capital-gains tax rate is lower than the income tax rate, as it is now, or else you end up paying the same taxes anyway when you sell the team, something that helped keep Veeck from ever taking advantage of the tax dodge he concocted — but I think this bullet point has already exceeded its maximum allowable parentheticals, so you’ll have to look that one up yourself.)
Tokyo has finally given in to reality and barred spectators from the upcoming Olympics, in the face of a virus surge there. (Japan’s vaccination rate is surprisingly crappy, thanks to slow vaccine approvals and something about not allowing pharmacists to give shots but allowing dentists to.) If there’s good news, it’s that once Japan barred foreign fans from attending, spending billions of dollars to host the Olympics looked like an even worse deal once locals wouldn’t even get tourists’ filthy lucre; though I guess now they’re still spending the money and not getting either filthy lucre or the chance to watch Greco-Roman wrestling in person, so maybe there is no good news at all. (For anybody, anywhere.)
Looks like the Reading city council is down with giving $3 million to the Fightin Phils for stadium renovations. Now all they need is $3 million from the county and $7.5 million from the state of Pennsylvania, and they’ll be all set, at least until the next time the Fightin Phils owners — which would be the Philadelphia Phillies owners, who are demanding upgrades as necessary thanks to new MLB rules on minor-league facility minimum standards that they themselves voted to impose — decide their stadium is obsolete because their weight room isn’t roomy enough.
The … the Phoenix … Suns are in the NBA Finals, so of course someone’s going to write an article about how great this is for the Arizona economy. Two Arizona economists say so, arguing that people might see images of Phoenix on TV during the finals and decide to move there. Or, you know, decide that Arizona on the fast track to being an uninhabitable hellscape. Definitely one of those two!

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Friday roundup: Miami ripped off again by Loria, Rays roof removal proposed, America’s journalists snookered

February 19, 2021February 19, 2021 Neil deMause

I’ll keep this short today, in deference to any Texas readers who may be trying to save battery life thanks to that state’s power outages. Once your bandwidth is back, here’s a good reminder from the New York Times that climate change is expected to cause unseasonable cold snaps and winter storms as well as insane summer heat, so you have lots more of both to look forward to. Or, if you prefer, here’s an article on a similar theme from the Village Voice a few years back that I wrote a much snappier headline for.

Stadiums, right, that’s what you came here to read about! Let’s see what we’ve got:

Miami-Dade County is finally getting $5.5 million from Jeffrey Loria’s sale of the Miami Marlins, which is a lot less than the $50 million or so the public thought they were owed from a revenue-sharing deal in Loria’s stadium-subsidy deal, but that’s what happens when you let an owner calculate his own profit margin. Though at least Loria didn’t deduct the cost of paying himself to negotiate the deal, like New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner once did with a cable contract. (Crap, hope I haven’t given Loria any ideas.)
When I wrote a couple of weeks ago that various developers’ plans for redeveloping the Tropicana Field site to include a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium were “pretty boring,” I hadn’t yet seen this one that involves ripping off the roof and adding a weird semicircular scrim that doesn’t look like it would protect anyone from rain while building oddly tall tower-in-the-park edifices next door. Renovating the Trop to be open-air is an interesting idea, I guess, if it would cost less than building a whole new stadium, not that the proposal says anything about cost. Pretty pictures, ooooh aaaah!
Finally a public sports funding project that is actually being rethought thanks to the pandemic economy: St. Louis County is holding off on $6 million in subsidies for a youth sports complex in Hazelwood what with the county being out of money as a result of Covid and, uh, also having already committed $6 million a year for 40 years to pay off the former Rams stadium. Okay, this seemed like more promising news before I finished writing that sentence, sorry.
Buffalo Bills co-owner Kim Pegula says a new stadium is “our top priority in this off-season,” or rather doing a study of a new stadium is. Maybe that’ll get Gov. Andrew Cuomo off her case, at least for long enough that his governorship crashes and burns first.
Still wondering how Nick Mastroianni, the guy who helped finance Nassau Coliseum’s renovations by selling green cards to wealthy Chinese investors before getting sued by investors for allegedly skimping on interest payments, ended up controlling the arena after former Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov bailed on it? Norman Oder’s Atlantic Yards Report has an explainer, though the explanation pretty much comes down to “some kind of backroom shenanigans,” which you probably could have guessed.
Tennessee Smokies owner Randy Boyd is pointing to the Fort Wayne TinCaps‘ new stadium as a model for his proposed downtown Knoxville stadium and proposed $65 million in subsidies, so that means it’s time for another article by our friends at WBIR about how great the stadium would be! This time it’s an evaluation that the Fort Wayne project, which WBIR doesn’t mention it but it cost local taxpayers there $25 million plus millions more in tax credits for surrounding development, “worked out” — for which the evidence provided is that sometimes it’s used for farmers markets or Boy Scout sleepovers, and also there’s been downtown development since it opened and surely that must be because everyone wanted to be near the baseball stadium that was open for 70 home games a year, right? Make a note to check on that later, maybe, this story is already full with quotes from Fort Wayne’s mayor. (To be fair, WBIR did finally run an article interviewing Boyd’s critics, in which one called the Smokies plan “an absolute boondoggle in every sense of the word,” though it still just comes down to he-said-she-said and not any actual investigation of how the financing would work.)
Speaking of terrible excuses for journalism, here’s Phoenix TV station KNXV reporting that “Downtown restaurants score big thanks to Phoenix Suns fans,” for which the evidence is that restaurants reopened what with the Suns allowing in fans again and … were hoping they’d show up to eat. Yeah, KNXV didn’t even wait around to report on how things actually went, that sounds like work, man.
Finally, New Mexico’s KOB-TV can’t even get me to bother to read their article about Albuquerque’s proposed soccer stadium, except to say that they need to hire a copy editor for their headlines already.

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Friday roundup: More crazy stadium subsidy demands than can fit in one headline, you call this a lull?

February 12, 2021February 12, 2021 Neil deMause

Every couple of weeks, it seems, someone in the comments predicts that we are about to see the end of sports’ 30-year surge in stadium and arena subsidies, either because of Covid-depleted budgets or legislators smartening up or just everybody already having a new place. To which I say: If the stadium scam is slowing, why are my Friday mornings still so #$@&%*! busy?

Ahem. And now, the news:

A lawyer for the South Bend Cubs, saying the team owners were “shocked” to discover that a law allowing them to siphon off up to $650,000 a year in sales and income taxes for their own purposes had expired in 2018, has asked the state legislature to renew it. Oh, and also increase the cap to $2 million a year. You know, while they have the document open on their screens. “South Bend and every other city that has retained their relationship with Major League Baseball have to get to a certain level by 2025,” said attorney Richard Nussbaum. “If they don’t, they risk losing the team.” It’s an epidemic, I tells ya.
Speaking of which, Hudson Valley Renegades owner Jeff Goldklang got his $1.4 million in stadium renovation cash from Dutchess County, after emailing residents and fans warning them that the team could move if it was denied the subsidy.
Fort Wayne F.C., which I had to look up to be sure it actually exists and which turns out to be a “pre-professional” (much in the way that kids are “pre-adults”) USL League Two club, is seeking to move up to League One in 2023 and wants a $150 million soccer-stadium-plus-other-stuff project, to be paid for by mumble mumble hey look over there! It also features an instant classic in the field of fans-throwing-their-hands-skyward-while-fireworks-go-off-over-soccer-players-not-playing-anything-recognizable-as-soccer renderings, which is worth $150 million if it’s worth a dime:
The Oakland A’s owners (not the Oakland A’s, I still remember when I was an intern at The Nation Christopher Hitchens lecturing us on how one should always say “the U.S. government” and not “the U.S.” because just because the government approved something didn’t mean the populace did, but anyway) won their lawsuit to allow their Howard Terminal stadium project to have challenges to environmental impact reviews reviewed on a fast track, which is a big thing in California. “This is a critically important decision,” said A’s president Dave Kaval, who indicated he hopes the Oakland city council will be able to vote on a stadium bill this year, presumably after it’s figured out who the hell would pay for what.
Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin wants to talk about building a new hockey arena to keep the Carolina Hurricanes in town long-term — their “old” one opened just over 21 years ago — and Sougata Mukherjee, the editor-in-chief of the Triangle Business Journal, points out that maybe now is not the best time what with 7% of the state not having enough to eat, small businesses on the brink, and, oh yeah, a pandemic still going on. Cue Hurricanes execs or their political talking about how a new arena will mean “jobs” in three, two…
While we wait, here’s San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist Bryce Miller saying that San Diego should build a new arena to lure a nonexistent NBA expansion franchise because it would be “catalytic.” In the sense of the Oxford dictionary’s sample sentence for meaning 1.1, maybe?
Twenty years ago this week, the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ and Steelers‘ Three Rivers Stadium was blowed up real good, only a little over 30 years after it was first opened. I went to a couple of games at Three Rivers over the years, and I agree with former Pirate Richie Hebner’s review that “the graveyard I work in during the offseason has more life than this place,” and the Pirates’ new stadium is one of my favorites. Still, it and the Steelers’ new stadium deserve the blame for popularizing tax kickbacks in the stadium financing world, after Pittsburgh voters passed a referendum barring any new tax money from going to new stadiums, and the state legislature responded by “loaning” the teams stadium money that would be “repaid” by taxes the state would be collecting anyway — prompting Pittsburgh state rep Thomas Petrone’s timeless comment: “It’s not a grant. It’s not a loan. It’s a groan.”
Phoenix restaurants are hoping that having partial attendance at Suns games will provide more happy hour customers, something that seems not only ambitious given the proven not-so-robust spinoff effects of sports stadiums, but also slightly heedless of whether it’s such a great idea to encourage basketball fans to congregate indoors and take their masks off to drink and then go directly to congregating indoors to watch the Suns. In entirely unrelated news, restaurants around the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium in Inglewood are afraid of being driven out of business by new high-priced options gravitating to serve well-heeled football fans.
Finally a partial explanation of how funding for that new Des Moines Menace soccer stadium would work: In addition to city funds, it would be up for state hotel-tax funds designated for projects that “improve the quality of life for Iowa residents.” Other projects proposed to dip into the hotel-tax pool include a Des Moines Buccaneers junior hockey arena, a private indoor amateur sports facility, and a new mall; is it just me, or does “quality of life” seem to have been interpreted as “ways to put money in the pockets of Iowa business barons”?
Hey, remember the $200 million highway interchange that Las Vegas is building, totally coincidentally, near the Raiders‘ new stadium? It is now a $273 million highway interchange. But the city needed to build it anyway, because traffic was too bad at the old interchange and, shh, don’t tell them.
Okay, here’s one way in which maybe the pandemic has delayed some stadium spending: The Baltimore Orioles owners have signed a two-year lease extension on Camden Yards, while also working with the Maryland Stadium Authority “to establish a new long-term agreement that includes upgrades to the facility,” according to WJZ-TV. So it’s possible some 2021 and 2022 sports subsidies will end up getting pushed back to 2023 or so — yay?
If you wanted a live webcam of construction on the new Knoxville stadium for the Tennessee Smokies that hasn’t even been approved yet, let alone started construction, the team’s new stadium promotion website has got you covered.

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Friday roundup: Jaguars’ billionaire owner wants $232m in tax money, plus guess-the-Angels-rationalization contest!

October 9, 2020 Neil deMause

We made it another week further into the future! Sure, it’s a future that looks too much like the recent past — bad pandemic planning and stadium deals with increasingly more well-disguised subsidies — and we’re all still here discussing the same scams that I really thought were going to be a momentary fad 25 years ago. But the zombie apocalypse hasn’t arrived yet, so that’s something! Also the Star Trek: Lower Decks season finale was really excellent. Gotta stop and smell the flowers before refocusing on the underlying horror of society!

And with that, back to laughing to keep from crying:

Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan has put a price tag on the development subsidies he’s asking for on building a bunch of buildings in his stadium’s parking lot: $167.8 million in construction costs, infrastructure, and tax breaks on a hotel, plus a $65 million loan that will be paid back at ?? time and at ??? interest. Or, as the Florida Times-Union helpfully headlines it, “$152 million in incentives.” The Times-Union also reports that “the city would own the entertainment district, which would keep the property off the city’s tax rolls” and that Khan’s “estimated $7.8 billion net worth earned him the 66th spot on Forbes’ list of richest Americans”; it doesn’t say when the city council is expected to vote on this plan, or whether there will be public hearings or just lots of private discussions, as councils like to do these days whenever possible.
Some development is finally being built around the Hartford Yard Goats stadium, only several years later than it was promised, but mostly this article is entertaining for the bit where the developer thinks that people will be relocating out of New York and Boston because of the pandemic but also relocating to Hartford because the pandemic will be over soon.
F.C. Barcelona‘s vice-president claims that the club’s $957 million stadium renovation project will more than pay for itself, by adding 6,000 seats and 70 corporate boxes and enabling the sale of $50 million a year (!) in naming rights, totaling $150 million a year in new revenue against only $50 million a year in debt payments. This seems dubious to me, even if there wasn’t reason to think pretty much everything coming out of the current team management is pretty dubious; but Goldman Sachs, which is lending the money for the project, seems sold, so if Barça really has figured out how to make a billion dollars in stadium costs pencil out, that would be big news. Any Barcelona fan-owners reading this who can share details from the team’s prospectus or whatever they’re sending out?
The Los Angeles Times’ Bill Shaikin wrote a whole article called “Did Anaheim get a fair price for the Angel Stadium property?” that relies on a single source to answer the question, and that source is former Oakland A’s owner Lew Wolff, who has been acting as a consultant to Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno on this deal. Don’t bother reading it, as you can almost certainly guess what he says — in fact, let’s see who in the comments can come closest to guessing Wolff’s exact words without reading them! Winner gets the people’s ovation and fame forever, and maybe an extra magnet.
Virginia is approving multiple sports betting permits, maybe with an eye to helping lure the Washington Football Team to the state; meanwhile, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said yesterday, “We don’t want to lose the team out of the state and we’re going to fight hard to make sure that we keep them here.” It really is so much easier to get a good bidding war going when you have multiple jurisdictions in your metro area; James Madison really should have thought of that before pursuing that whole “not in any state” thing.
The Phoenix Suns‘ $168 million in publicly funded arena renovations won’t just include new furniture and a big-ass kitchen, but also 15,000 new seats, each with their own cupholders, because if there’s one thing Americans want from their tax dollars, it’s cupholders.
Three of six mayoral candidates in Saskatoon say their city needs a new arena, and one mayoral candidate in Regina says his city needs a new arena, because blah blah economic impact something something.
Sure, I savaged the NFL’s coronavirus response this week, but it’s worth noting that European soccer is doing a pretty lousy job lately as well.
A guy with a podcast claims that “a source” told him that the city of Tampa will soon announce “a massive state of the art stadium that will have a retractable roof” for the Tampa Bay Rays and the New York Yankees‘ spring training, and wants you to tune in to his podcast for details. You should neither do that nor even click the above links, needless to say, but if there’s anything to this rumor once his podcast drops, I promise you’ll be the first to know.

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Friday roundup: Utah may build stadium for rugby (and the children!), Suns build big-ass kitchen, plus more robots than you can shake a stick at

October 2, 2020 Neil deMause

Happy October! We seem to have now reached the uncanny valley of the epidemic, where some things are returning to almost normal — or even hyper-normal, as in the case of the baseball postseason having expanded to include so many teams I keep expecting the Sugar Land Skeeters to show up — while other things remain sadly unchanged. I guess if there’s a silver lining it’s that the resumption of some normal things hasn’t caused the pandemic to worsen perceptibly (yet), but that’s what people were saying about the Netherlands back in June and that didn’t work out well at all. Just wear your masks, people, and don’t take them off to eat or talk on the phone or talk to the president, and let’s hope for the best.

The owners of the Utah Warriors pro rugby team want to built a 10,000-seat stadium for (duh) rugby and also maybe another pro sports team and also provide “not only the high school kids but also community leaders, citizens within this community a venue where they can do something unique and fun and interesting but not have to look at a three-quarters empty stadium and not really be able to have that experience because of it.” (Typical attendance at Warriors games: about 3,000, which, true enough, would only be a seven-tenths empty stadium!) No word yet about specific financing plans other than “investors” will help pay for it, because what savvy money manager can resist the lure of pro rugby?
More on what the Phoenix Suns are building with their $168 million in public renovation money in addition to new furniture: a two-story kitchen! If that doesn’t foster downtown development and economic growth, I don’t know what will.
If you were wondering whether MLB is still moving ahead with plans to kill 40 minor-league teams, hell yeah they are. Some teams will be replaced by teams of college players who won’t have to be paid, though, so fans can now enjoy crappier baseball and witnessing the growth of the exposure economy all at once! It’s educational!
The New York Islanders have announced they’re definitely playing next season at the Nassau Coliseum despite the Coliseum not actually having an operator at present, that won’t be a problem, surely.
San Diego’s ballot proposal to lift height limits on waterfront development to allow for a new sports arena: necessary to revitalize a community or power grab by developers, you make the call!
There have been so many articles about NFL teams buying virus-fighting robots to disinfect their stadiums, even though you’re extremely less likely to get sick from touching a stadium than by sitting near a live breathing person. But people love robots, and journalists especially love writing articles about robots, and sports teams love journalists writing articles about them doing good things for fans (with robots!), so robot stories it is!
The University of Florida is having trouble selling out even a reduced-capacity stadium for its home football opener tomorrow, and its coach has been pleading with fans to turn out, which maybe is not the best public health policy? Or the best fan relations policy, if fans are staying home because they don’t want to risk getting themselves and their families sick?
This is not a good headline, given that the Los Angeles Angels weren’t moving anywhere and the city of Anaheim isn’t actually getting $320 million.
This is a good headline. And a good article.

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Suns owner denies bribing councilmembers to vote for arena deal after ex-GM gripes that one took money then voted no

August 31, 2020September 14, 2020 Neil deMause

Oh man, this story:

Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver on Friday adamantly denied any bribe was paid to Councilman Sal DiCiccio following an allegation by the team’s former general manager that DiCiccio took “money to vote a certain way.”

Sarver told The Arizona Republic that he had no idea what ex-GM Ryan McDonough was referring to when he called out DiCiccio on Twitter for calling basketball players who refused to play in the playoff games to protest social justice issues “whiny bitches.”

Let’s unpack this, slowly. In December of 2018, the Phoenix city council agreed to rush through a vote on Sarver’s request for $168 million in Suns arena renovation subsidies in just five days, until it turned out that Phoenix residents hated the idea so much that the vote was delayed while the council ran a month-long series of dog-and-pony shows to explain why residents should support the deal, then voted to approve the deal. One councilmember said she voted for the deal because Sarver offered to give $10 million to local schools and nonprofits, and another because the city (not Sarver) agreed to spend more on homelessness prevention and police, and then Sarver expressed his gratitude by giving $150,000 in campaign donations to two of the councilmembers who voted yes, saying he was “proud to support candidates who have the best interests of the city at heart” and “I gave openly, not behind a veil.”

Maybe all that pride in making payoffs to elected officials who voted your way inspired Ryan McDonough, who was fired as Suns GM a couple of months before the arena votes, to call out Sal DiCiccio, one of the two council no votes on the deal, for taking the team’s money but not following through by doing its bidding:

https://twitter.com/McDNBA/status/1299412123563495425

The “racist” bit seems pretty justified, though it’s always possible DiCiccio just hates NBA players who staged a wildcat strike before last Wednesday’s playoff games because he doesn’t think any workers should speak up about systemic injustices, not just majority-African-American ones. “Crooked,” though, is a funny way of describing someone who can’t be swayed by bribes, especially when your (former) organization was the one doing the bribing.

McDonough later walked back his tweet by declaring that donations by “Suns-related parties” to councilmembers were entirely legal, notwithstanding that he had just declared that they were made to get them to “vote a certain way.” Sarver followed that up by declaring that “there was no bribe” but rather “there was a [campaign] donation made by me in October 2014, and others who worked for the Phoenix Suns,” and why would anybody assume that he was giving campaign cash to local politicians just because he was gearing up to ask them for public money?

DiCiccio is now calling for a city investigation into whether he took a bribe, which seems unlikely to shed much more light on this situation given that we already know that Sarver was throwing campaign cash around both before and after the arena vote — I suppose DiCiccio is hoping for a we find no evidence that Councilman DiCiccio outright promised a quid pro quo without winking and nodding or something. Stirring up mud can never be a bad thing, though, and if it happens because a fired GM staged a Twitter flamewar against a Black Lives Matter–hating elected official for not being easily enough bought with campaign donations, that would be some sweet, sweet schadenfreude.

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Phoenix Suns unveil frenzy of public health theater to pretend they can keep fans safe from viruses

May 27, 2020 Neil deMause

“Suns incorporating changes to arena renovations with COVID-19 in mind,” that sounds like a promising headline! Perhaps we will learn more about what our post-pandemic sports future could be like — personal plexiglass booths around each seat? — and how the Phoenix Suns owners are spending that $168 million in taxpayer money the city council gifted them last year. What’s the deets, Arizona Sports 98.7 FM?

“What we’re looking at is technology and how we can utilize technology to improve that sanitation level,” Suns president and CEO Jason Rowley said Tuesday. “Make people more comfortable with maybe going cashless … making sure your escalators have UV lighting that kills viruses and bacteria and all those things … hiring outside professionals who can come in and do audits of the building to make sure that any high touchpoints (can be safer).”

I don’t think Rowley actually means “going cashless,” since things like debit-card touchpads are stews of microbes. Presumably he means going contactless, which lots of people seem to be doing already for their purchases, but I guess if this encourages the Suns to install lots of Venmo routers or whatnot, that’s probably a smart move regardless.

As for UV lighting on escalators, that’s not a terrible idea either, though the Centers for Disease Control continue to note that you’re way more at risk from other people than from surfaces they touched, so riding an escalator alongside thousands of other fans is way more of a concern than touching the same escalator railing as them. But if UV lights make fans feel safer, then bring on the public health theater!

So, what else we got?

That even goes as far as putting down antimicrobial paint, which makes it more difficult for things to stick and bacteria to linger.

Apparently antimicrobial paint can be very effective against bacteria, which is somewhat less helpful in our current situation given that viruses aren’t bacteria. (Both are considered “microbes,” which literally just means “really small living things,” even though viruses aren’t really living things. Maybe.) Some companies are experimenting with antiviral paints, it looks like, but it looks to be too soon whether you can stop Covid with a paint sprayer. And, of course, there’s still that pesky problem of fans not wanting to have their mouths painted shut.

So, no, it looks like this was just an article about a bored sports reporter getting an interview with the local team exec, and the exec mumbled some stuff about miracle paint, and hey look, there’s something to file today to keep your editor happy! (Ha ha ha, like anyone still has editors.) It does seem like an indication that team execs are moving swiftly ahead into the public health theater phase of things, where they’re going to have to convince fans that they’re using high tech to keep them safe from germs just like they convinced fans they were using high tech to keep them safe from terrorists, either because they’re afraid of fans staying home otherwise or because they want to cover their butts in case of lawsuits should something bad happen. This really should be considered part of the team’s marketing budget rather than its construction budget, but it’s harder to charge marketing costs to the city council, so UV-lighted escalators it is!

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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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Friday roundup: Zombie apocalypse in full effect, go and get a late pass

March 13, 2020 Neil deMause

So as you all undoubtedly know by now, everything is shut down. The NBA is shut down for at least 30 days, the NHL is shut down indefinitely, MLB has canceled the first two weeks of the season, MLS is on hold for a month, this summer’s Euro 2020 tournament may be moved to 2021 so maybe the Champions League and Europa League can finish up in June and July, the XFL is shut down maybe for good, and even the Little League is on hold until April 6. And all those dates are just minimum wild-ass guesses: New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a calming voice of reassurance as ever, said yesterday that this “could easily be a six-month crisis” — and even if you dismiss him as just a guy who gets his every stray thought printed in the newspaper because he’s an elected official, as I wrote yesterday for FAIR, it’s still very much true that nobody really knows how long this will last, or how to decide (or who will decide) that the curve has been effectively flattened and life can go back to normal(ish) now.

So instead of dwelling on that, let’s dwell instead on another aspect of plagueworld that overlaps somewhat with the mission of this site: the economic impacts of shutting stuff down. I’m sure somebody out there is thinking, “But Neil, you always say that economists say it doesn’t matter much to the economy whether one sporting event or another is played, because people will just spend their money on something else like going out to eat or to a bowling alley instead. So why won’t the substitution effect save us now?”

I am, as I have to take pains to remind journalist quoting me from time to time, not an economist, but I think I can explain this one well enough: There’s a huge difference between one sports team or league shutting down and everything shutting down. Once everyone has completed their panic-shopping therapy and stocked up on a lifetime supply of toilet paper, they’re mostly not going to be looking for other things to spend money on — they’re going to sit at home and watch the Netflix subscriptions that they already paid for. And meanwhile a bunch of them are going to be out of work, and still more will be out of work once restaurants and barber shops and the like have to close for lack of business, and that will mean even less business, and soon enough the entire economy has shut down in a cycle of fear.

I was lucky to get a first-hand example of this in high school, when my U.S. History teacher had each of her classes play a game where each student was one player in late-19th-century frontier society, either a farmer or a railroad company owner or a banker or I forget what else. This made for lots of fun experience with the consequences of unregulated capitalism — I remember one friend of mine contracted to make a loan to another friend, and set the interest rate but not the term of the loan, and our teacher refused to step in and rule on when it had to be paid back because a contract is a contract — but in another class some friends of mine were in, it got even more severe: There was only one banker, and he refused to loan anyone any money at less than usurious rates, and the entire class plunged into an economic depression.

Anyway, there are lots of reasons this is going to be really bad in many, many ways, even if all these closures aren’t too late to avoid the old people being left to die in ERs that has reportedly been taking place in Lombardy. (I do not make a very good voice of calm, either, sorry.) But eventually this crisis will be over, and it’s still worth thinking about what the world will look like when we come out the other side. After all, with no sports to watch we’ve got plenty of time on our hands.

Not that everything being shut down has brought sports subsidy demands to a halt, because some things are just too big to fail:

The Florida state senate is moving ahead with a package of tax breaks for local corporations, including Formula 1 auto racing, despite the current crisis, which even the Tampa Bay Times could see was maybe not the best timing.
The 2026 World Cup hasn’t been canceled yet, so naturally the Tennessee Titans owners are demanding $1 million a year in state sales-tax kickbacks so they can upgrade their stadium to be a host for some of that year’s games.
South Carolina is still giving the Carolina Panthers $115 million just to move their team headquarters (but not stadium) to the state, in case you thought maybe you dreamed that.
Nobody knows when or if the 2020-21 NBA season will start what with the current season (maybe?) having to be finished first, but whenever it does, Phoenix Suns fans will be paying higher ticket prices to help fund the team’s portion of arena renovations, even while already paying higher taxes to help fund the public portion of arena renovations.
Marc Normandin points out at Baseball Prospectus that minor-league baseball players don’t have a union, and so they don’t know if they’re going to be paid for the time they now have to hang around Florida and Arizona not playing games. (Minor-leaguers already aren’t paid for spring training and have to resort to stealing food from the ballpark to feed themselves.) Marc also points out that most sports teams haven’t yet committed to paying their other staff during a shutdown, though that’s in his subscription newsletter so you’ll need to kick in $5 a month if you want to read it — go ahead, it’s not like you’re going to have any sports tickets to spend it on! Prove me wrong about my substitution effect pessimism!

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